According to the CDC the COVID-19 infection fatality rate for children is 0.002%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Children can spread the virus to adults, but adults who want to be vaccinated have been for months now. And since everyone will be exposed anyway it hardly matters who does the exposing.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

How many children are there in the US? I'll let you pick the number you'd like to multiply by 0.00002, to get the number of children you're okay with killing.

It's easy to act morally superior and make cheap emotional arguments for when you're not the one who has to make hard decisions. All lives have value, but no life has infinite value. You can't seriously expect the majority to endure perpetual mandates and restrictions just to provide some limited, temporary protection to a small minority who are vulnerable due to risk factors like obesity.

https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospital...

And in the long run it won't make any difference anyway. Everyone will be exposed regardless of whether or not schoolchildren are subjected to mask mandates. So what's the point of continuing the charade?

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

I absolutely can expect the majority to endure a minor inconvenience, if that minority they're protecting is a thousand innocent children in a given year (you didn't pick a number, so I will, 78 million children).

And the point is to lower the curve, not avoid exposure.

But, again, you know all of this, you just don't care. Shameful.

Children actually have around a ten times higher chance of drowning than dying of COVID, so should we close all the pools and lakes? No we don't do that because we realize as humans that life is not without risk, in fact risk is what makes life worth living. I have children and worry every day something bad might happen to them but I let them take risk and live life because I know that's the only way that they will grow and be happy.

We do close all the pools and lakes to children who can't swim, or who swim unsupervised. We literally do not let children swim freely in random bodies of water. It's a huge deal; we hire lifeguards, teach them methods of operating safely in bodies of water, there's all kinds of equipment a child can wear while in the water to prevent drowning...

This isn't a great analogy for you, because it pretty thoroughly proves my point that masking is a very reasonable thing to do, compared to the litany of structure we put around children swimming in pools.

I was a lifeguard at a summer camp for christsake, what a terrible analogy. I literally worked to implement the many systems we use to keep kids safe in bodies of water.

This is false. I can confirm there are thousands of “not-closed” lakes in America.

I literally live on a lake and kids swim in it unsupervised all the time. I can't but feel you are just trolling at this point.

> minor inconvenience

The impacts on their development shown in the article and rest of the comments are much more than a minor inconvenience

The impacts are a price worth paying.

That is not for you to decide. Maybe you can decide that for your own children but not mine.

I absolutely can decide that for your own children, and I can decide that for you, given enough votes.

You have no special control over your children that transcends society, especially if you mean them harm.

I'm sure if a politician spouted such things they would just get tons of votes from parents. Honestly its kinda interesting to hear you say such a thing out loud because some of the more extreme voices on the anti-mask side have claimed that control is exactly whats going on which makes me wonder if you are not just trolling at this point (or maybe they were right all along).

Delaying inevitable infections doesn't seem worth saddling an entire generation with developmental delays and potential ear deformities requiring surgery.

It is, however, and it is the advice of every reputable institution in the US.

> You can't seriously expect the majority to endure perpetual mandates and restrictions just to provide some limited, temporary protection to a small minority who are vulnerable due to risk factors like obesity.

Who is saying the mandates and restrictions are perpetual?

> Because the Covid mortality risk for children is already with masks, compared to without masks for the flu

This is false, which we know because we can measure the fatality rates for children in unmasked locales, and they do not differ from those in masked locales.

Too many confounding variables, those measurements are useless.

okay, then please by all means, cite a source showing definitively that mask themselves reduce the likelihood of a children dying from covid.

I already have, all over this thread.

The mortality of a virus is not affected by whether you were wearing a mask when you caught it.