So your answer is to go sophist ad-hominem, by putting me in a group you find unfavorable rather than addressing the content of what I said. Am I letting the terrorist win or am I killing grandmas ? therefore you can justify x.
> Except y'know most of these measures actually drastically reduce transmission
This is very un-specific, but aside from vaccinations & living in a country with island like borders, very little has been definitely shown to reduce spread.
> maybe this should be considered a national defense emergency and the US should invest a few more billions
I'm not especially against that, even though I do think that unfortunately in practice these things risk end up just being vehicles for cronyism rather than tackling the core issue.
Try nearly zero. Much lower than other common pathogens like flu and RSV. Which is why the UK is not recommending mass vaccination of teenagers aged 12-15, or any children younger.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58438669
This is why many argue that the focus on covid in children is largely about the irrational fears of parents and educators who have not seriously looked at the data.
Stop spreading lies like the lower COVID mortality compared to flu. It’s disgusting.
Stop lying about what the article says, it’s not about the national recommendation of a country (that famously botched their response).
“Nearly zero” means nothing for societal outcome, certainly for mortality. What is the number of people infected, “nearly zero” of which die? Then these numbers become meaningful.
More children have been shot in Chicago in the past year than have died from covid in the entire country.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9979619/More-childr...
I'm finished communicating with you. You're not participating in this discussion in good faith.
I assume you're embarrassed that you're so confused about the data.
For your second point, after you torture what the article actually says into a alleged national policy of the UK, I suggest you read up on exponential growth. It reminds me of the discussions in this country in March 2020, when everything was written on the wall, but people looked at absolute numbers and proclaimed that it’s not going to be a problem.
See, if you were simply lying about how expensive your car is, I couldn’t care less. But it’s propaganda pieces like yours that kill people, currently at a rate of half a 9/11 per day, all of it completely avoidable.
Go ahead. I'll wait.
https://freopp.org/comparing-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19...
"Based on that analysis, what is striking is that those under the age of 15 are at significantly lower risk of death from COVID-19 than of the flu. Under our assumptions, for example, children under the age of 15 have a 1 in 155,535 chance of dying of influenza, but a 1 in 1.2 million chance of dying of COVID-19."
"For toddlers, the relative risk is even more pronounced. We estimate that Americans between ages 1–4 are 3.4 times more likely to die of influenza than of COVID-19."
In an attempt to head off your inevitable criticism that I'm citing "conservative propaganda", here's an article from New York Magazine making similar arguments:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-kids-were-safe-f...
"according to the CDC, among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu. The risk of severe disease or hospitalization is about the same."
"the infection fatality rate for those aged 5 to 9 is less than 0.001 percent"
Note that these same sources also espouse that children are safe because of their lower infection risk but then go and compare the mortality rate to the entire population to come up with grandiose claims. When looking at the actual official UK numbers (i.e. comparing deaths after a confirmed infection to confirmed infections) child mortality is indeed significantly lower but only by a factor of 10 compared to adults. This paints a far grimmer picture than all this talk about there being a multiple orders of magnitude difference.
It's also worth pointing out that the vaccine supply is limited, so the question of whether children should be vaccinated is one of prioritization. If children already have a low likelihood of infection and have better outcomes than the average adult, it makes more sense to use that vaccine on an adult than a child.
German media also suggests the decision for the German vaccination authority to not recommend a third round of vaccinations at the moment is similarly driven by the idea that it's more important to make sure everyone has some level of immunization than that some people have a very high level of immunization: the goal is to control spread, not to protect individuals. Note that the German authority has greenlit vaccinations for 12+ year olds, so their risk evaluation seems to consider the likelihood of children spreading the virus or potentially developing chronic conditions in the future to be significant enough. Of course you can't compare these risks directly due to differences e.g. in the school systems and pandemic-related accommodations.
Good thing the US doesn't have socialized healthcare and private insurers generally exclude preexisting conditions.
> Classic Safety-ism. Even today, 20 years after 9/11 and we are still paying a ludicrous price for this logic.
Funny how the "safety-ism" after 9/11 was pushed by the Republicans and now the Republicans are complaining about Democrats pushing safety measures against Covid.
Except y'know most of these measures actually drastically reduce transmission (tho I agree some are ill-conceived, like I'm not sure curfews do anything but encourage people to meet indoors where transmission risk is significantly higher). Banning shampoo bottles was mostly theatrics.
Bonus:
> no one knows what the effect will be of kids wearing masks all day
I'm going to avoid the bait to reference mask wearing in Asian countries, but sure: that sounds like an important reason to crack down on Covid hard and fast rather than go back an forth on half-assed policies and artificially expand the duration of the crisis and risk a perpetual cycle of masks and vaccinations as poorer communities keep generating resistant mutations.
So I take it you support the mass production of vaccinations and free distribution to developing countries to bring down infection numbers world-wide and protect the US from foreign mutants? If perpetuating this pandemic could traumatize an entire generation of children, maybe this should be considered a national defense emergency and the US should invest a few more billions and rally its allies to do the same. Open up the patents to also get the countries on board that are distrustful of US-supplied vaccines.
Or are you trying to argue that Covid isn't that bad or that it's better if we let children catch it because they have a lower mortality?