Realistically, covid is here for the forseeable future.
It's a fast-mutating pathogen (which I understand is typical of respiratory infections) and since about half of humans worldwide are vaccinated and half aren't, in a perfect environment to evolve resistance to vaccines (and the immune systems defences generally).
If covid were a worse infection, this would be really serious. But it isn't. It rarely kills people without pre-existing conditions (the biggest of which is old age). It's also getting less virulent: e.g. in the UK omicron has led to a big increase in infections, but not in deaths[1].
Scott Alexander calculated that it takes 52 person-months of lockdown to save one person-month of life[2]. This suggests to me that if lockdowns reduce quality of life by at least 2%, they are QALY-negative.
My conclusion from all this is that I don't think lockdowns should be compulsory. If people think the threat to themselves or family members is severe, by all means they can lockdown; but expecting everyone else to is wrong as lockdowns reduce overall utility.
Regarding schools, in this as in a lot of things vouchers would be a good system, then people who don't like how their state schools are run can walk away and take their kid's education money with them.
1: see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
2: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...
But.. things have evolved since then. We have entire WFH movement ( and I am saying this as its proponent ) banking on its staying power ( and most of the old school management hates it ) and we have political people eyeing the power and money that could be tapped just by scaring people.
It is weird. It feels like a lifetime ago that I typed on this very forum something along the lines of:
'we're in this together thing lasted whole two weeks'
We are way past that and it shows.
Agreed. A really aggressive lockdown right at the start would have made sense.
Before people die they have to be in the hospital. Hospitalization rates are extremely low considering the infection rate. Death rates are also very low.
This is essentially a flu at this point, even for the unvaccinated. People with 2 shots are as susceptible to omicron infection as the unvaccinated, and once the booster wanes, so will the triple boosted.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-warning-sym...
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/childrens-national-...
Hospitalization rates are down. Number of hospitalizations may be up but the spread is larger than it’s ever been. Omicron is 5x more contagious than the original Covid at levels we’ve never seen before as a society.
And that number is trending up. It has actually being trending up since Delta: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7036e2.htm
The problem is there's a handful of parents that don't give a fuck and constantly gets the classroom sick. So if you want to abide by that rule your kid misses a ton of school.
Just before the winter break someone sent their kid to school coughing and sneezing. Apparently they were sick enough that the teacher noticed and sent them home within 30 minutes.
I hate people.
Not everybody is so lucky.
Lots of people have jobs where they can't just skip out for a few days. Do our bus-drivers, cooks, and teachers have that luxury? Do their jobs allow them to have it? What about surgeons or doctors?
How many days can somebody take off in a row if their kid is sick? 2? 3? A week?
Sometimes, parents have to make a hard choice about whether to send their kids to school with a cough. It's just another harsh reality of the society we live in.
When my kid comes home from daycare and gets us all sick, you can bet that I'm mad at the other parents. But it's also not my place to judge them, because I don't know what they have to juggle.
It reminds me of something from The Office;
>Dwight K. Schrute: The worst thing you can do for your immune system is to coddle it. They need to fight their own battles. If Sabre really cared about our well-being, they would set up hand de-sanitizing stations. A simple bowl at every juncture filled with dirt, vomit, fecal matter...
But yeah, that quote from The Office is pretty hilarious, thanks for sharing!
That's all you can do with Omicron. And it's not clear how much you can even do that. We're currently in the "vertical" section of the exponential curve and accelerating.
Omicron appears to be as contagious as chicken pox and that basically infected every child before the vaccine. Omicron is sufficiently infectious that it will solve the anti-vax problem and bring us as close to herd immunity as possible whether we like it or not.
In 30 days, everything will be moot as basically everybody will be vaccinated, have had Covid, or both. All we can do now is cross our fingers and hope that the case fatality rate for Omicron really is significantly less than Delta.
This is true for children ages 5 and above. From that perspective school closures now offer less benefit than school closures in 2020.
Children under the age of 5 still have to manage without vaccine.
Basically: this is something that already happens for other diseases, as they spread like wildfire in schools. Kids are disgusting (and honestly, some of the teachers are too. I mean, I've seen several not wash hands after taking a dump...)
The shitty part is there seems to be 0 compromise in most school districts. A friend's district is staying in person as of now with no accomodations planned for those out sick or not comfortable going in. The whole situation has become bizarrely political so I fear they will not make accomodations even if half the school ends up staying home.
It's especially ridiculous at the high school level where these kids are more than capable of continuing academic progress virtually for a few weeks. Hell even with the teachers out for a week high schoolers could easily be assigned self directed work. Would all of them do it? No, but it sucks for the kids that would be willing to and are instead now forced to sit in person with a substitute teacher doing whatever to kill time.
Meanwhile I recognize some lower income districts where a week or two pause of in person schooling could be a lot more impactful are shutting down. Not much they can do when it comes to sick teachers, but in an ideal world I would get as many teachers/subs as I still could to come in and at least "babysit" for the parents that need it.
I think COVID-19 vs. flu has gotten way too much press though and it’s worth noting that IFR in kids is low for both relative to IFR in adults. What I would really want to learn more about are the long-term effects of disease and how that varies by age. We know a bit about that for flu or polio or RSV but not so much for COVID-19 because it’s still so new.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
Vaccines are widely available for children and adults. I think pondering transitions to virtual class, where students are virtually attending school in the more flippant sense of the word “virtual”, is overweighting risks of the ‘rona and sorely underweighting risks to childrens’ development, to say nothing of the economic toll for parents pulled aside (if they can be, as in this article).