Wildfires are a problem in part because people, left to their own devices, build in places they probably shouldn't have. (Or plant eucalyptus in California. Whoops.)
Healthcare, unregulated, is where we get the term "snake oil salesman" and cocaine-based panaceas from; most of the places with more regulation of healthcare than the US like Europe have both cheaper healthcare and similar health outcomes. An entirely unregulated economy gets you something more like Somalia and Afghanistan's. etc. etc. etc.
What story is that? Are you sure you aren't misparaphrasing the fact that kids are not susceptible to severe outcomes?
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22kids+don%27t+catch+covid%...
I remember when the CDC quietly subtracted more than 72k alleged covid deaths, including some alleged pediatric covid deaths, from the tally and blamed a "coding error": https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/24/cdc-coding-err...
What do your fact checkers say about the leading cause of death in Canada?
The big shift happened when they lifted the mask mandate for schools here in early 2022: Our kids came back with a cold every 2 weeks, for approximately 2.5 months. That was not fun.
All of which is to say that it's not clear at all that we've been "storing up" a problem -- and if we have, much of it has already been let out of storage, so to speak.
> Our kids came back with a cold every 2 weeks, for approximately 2.5 months. That was not fun.
Noting also that frequent colds can lead to lifelong asthma conditions
Noting further that we really don't know the long-term effects of Covid on young people (both in the more frequent case of a speedy recovery and in the less frequent "long Covid").
Masks in school, and basic good hygiene (washing hands, having the school disinfect contact surfaces such as doorknobs multiple times per day, ...) go a long way to keeping everyone safe and healthy.
One of the things that doctors did was compare asthma rates between people who were already working from home to asthma rates of people who suddenly got thrown home due to Covid.
Asmtha went down more than expected in the people who suddenly got thrown home than in the folks who were already working from home. Since both groups faced roughly the same kind of environmental conditions (ie. pollution going down due to less driving), the excess decrease is posited to be purely due to pathogens.
Apparently, a not insignifcant chunk of asthma attacks are due to basically swimming around in continuous, low levels of pathogenic exposure.
Even if they did work, there is a cost / benefit that needed to be calculated that never was. All these “experts” myopically focused on one exact thing to the literal exclusion of everything else. And if you did raise objections or concerns you were (and still are) subject to a bunch of horrible retaliation.
But covid measures became irrational.
Lockdowns continued over a year after the vaccine was available
Then when those field hospitals closed virtually unused, instead of lifting restrictions and celebrating Covid wasn’t as bad as predicted, society decided to double down on the mitigations and continue them for two years.
"Two weeks to slow the spread [while we build hospital capacity]" is what we were sold on, then it just sort of kept going and people forgot what lockdowns were meant for.
In an ideal world, we'd vaccinate children against RSV. Acquiring immunity by suffering through an actual infection is always, always worse than acquiring it by a vaccine. About 100k children die from RSV each year!
Thankfully, there are vaccines in the pipeline [1], and I seriously hope that mRNA technology will increase both the development speed and the availability of vaccines in general.
[1] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
say that to the whoever ends up coming down with narcolepsy, thrombocytopenia, acute peri/myo-carditis, shingles reactivation, etc.
For example, see: "The Incidence of Myocarditis and Pericarditis in Post COVID-19 Unvaccinated Patients-A Large Population-Based Study"
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/
Above-normal levels of myocarditis and pericarditis were associated with vaccination (Pfizer has been used in Israel where the study originates) but not with covid-19 infection.
Studies in the UK [1] and US [2] have shown that while, yes, there is an increased risk for myocarditis in vaccinated people, the risk of myocarditis in infected people is way higher.
[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciab941
... What? Here in Germany, that's like one of the basic things that people who deal with needles on anything alive learn.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/acip-recs/general-recs/admi...
In practice there is a wide variance between US healthcare providers depending on where they work and how they were trained. Some aspirate, some don't, some try but use the wrong technique.
From the first one, it actually says for men younger than 40, myocarditis is actually higher in vaccinated, whereas for women it's similar to infection:
"In men younger than 40 years old, the number of excess myocarditis events per million people was higher after a second dose of mRNA-1273 than after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test (97 [95% CI, 91–99] versus 16 [95% CI, 12–18]). In women younger than 40 years, the number of excess events per million was similar after a second dose of mRNA-1273 and a positive test (7 [95% CI, 1–9] versus 8 [95% CI, 6–8])."
That supports my belief that vaccination should be voluntary for everyone but especially young people.
I haven't read it beyond the abstract.
We estimated an extra two (95% confidence interval (CI) 0, 3), one (95% CI 0, 2) and six (95% CI 2, 8) myocarditis events per 1 million people vaccinated with ChAdOx1, BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273, respectively, in the 28 days following a first dose and an extra ten (95% CI 7, 11) myocarditis events per 1 million vaccinated in the 28 days after a second dose of mRNA-1273. This compares with an extra 40 (95% CI 38, 41) myocarditis events per 1 million patients in the 28 days following a SARS-CoV-2 positive test.
Putting strain on the already overwhelmed healthcare system is a voluntary choice? Especially antisocial: the person who made the voluntary choice to attend the hospital now chooses to infect the healthcare personnel. If that's not evil it's hard to say what would be.
We are seeing the fallout in the labour participation rate - it's partly due to people retiring instead of risking catching a potentially disabling disease and partly due to people unable to work because of Covid sequelae. One hopes that the government catches on.
In other words, all of the participants received covid vaccines.
The second paper you've linked studied unvaccinated persons (mRNA-vax recipients were specifically excluded) and its claim of higher rates of myocarditis for covid infection is based other researchers' values of myocarditis incidence post-vax and, as alluded to in the Discussion section, skewed by relatively low 2nd-shot uptake among the American participants (myocarditis risk associated with mRNA shots goes up with each successive dose).
The Israeli paper looks at myocarditis in persons before the vaccines became available (March 2020) and then afterwards. In Israel, 2nd shot and further shot uptake was much higher than in many other places.
You have my sincere sympathy with regards to your mother-in-law's condition.
I have heard similar and worse anecdotes in which covid vaccines (especially boosters i.e. nth shots) have been the culprits and seen some severe adverse reactions in close acquaintances.
It's no different than parents blaming their child's autism on the vaccines they got, it's not exactly a rigorous examination of the evidence. It's wishful and directed thinking.
I do not deny that vaccines can cause adverse effects - but outside of vaccine trials and Army experimental vaccines, the rate of adverse effects is vastly lower than the rate of the same adverse effect that people experience who get infected.
There's enough discussion about this happening after vaccination: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34579250/
"Conclusion: This study indicates that the occurrence of VZV reactivation is clinically relevant. However, our findings suggest that COVID-19 vaccination is safe, and remains strongly recommended." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35931613/
Of course there's the obligatory, robotic, throat-clearing that vaccines should still be taken even when they find evidence of a side-effect.
Covid has only been around for a couple of years.
I mean, yes, but only because that's one of our criteria for approving a new vaccine.
Humanity's betrayal by Science™ is complete.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2022.8266...
Immunology is really tricky because the human immune system is quite complex. These kinds of findings sadly need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Evidence with a sample size of 1: I have a pandemic toddler and a baby. Toddler was not sick once in first 18 months. Both just got RSV. Toddler was fine after a couple days. Infant was in ER and is still having effects weeks later.
None of that is to downplay the potentially fatal seriousness of RSV. The immune system is imperfect after all. The NICU is maybe the most depressing place I’ve ever been in my life and my heart goes out for every parent who has or has had a child there or in any pediatric ICU.
For example, if your toddler has a stuffy nose, you can help them to blow it. For an infant, you need a tool to suction their nose which can be difficult to do. That same stuffy nose might cause poor feeding and dehydration which on top of the general breathing issues caused by RSV can lead to a rapid deterioration in the infant's health.
Even with all the supportive care (oxygen, regular suctioning, a feeding tube), it took a full 5 days in the hospital for our infant to recover.
My first-hand experience with this seems to be consistent with larger trends as well. A recent CDC presentation shows that children age 0-5 months are hospitalized by RSV at far higher rates than any other age group. [1]
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...
lets lock kids in solitary confinement until it's safe to leave, good plan /s
I'd love to see schools take a serious look at air movement and filtration.
Deeming it "irrecoverable" requires a time machine; one of the most frustrating parts about dealing with child development is the impacts take decades to sort out, in sometimes surprising fashion.
Europe apparently operated a lot less draconian wrt schools, never really closed down & things worked out pretty well. The science was pretty clear even from early on but democrats in US said georgia reopening schools was "an exercise in human sacrifice." You don't need a middle ground for the least vulnerable age-range for covid.
> Deeming it "irrecoverable" requires a time machine
what? it's irrecoverable because you never get back lost time, the past is settled and kids lost out on crucial brain development windows
I certainly would've preferred this; here we kept the bars open, but closed the schools. Both are middle grounds, I preferred Europe's prioritization. At the time these decisions were being made, some folks talked about R0 being like a budget - you want it under one, and each mitigation gets you part of the way there. I was disappointed to see the US prioritize economy over kids; much of the world made the opposite choice, and provided more income supports to keep kids in school.
> You don't need a middle ground for the least vulnerable age-range for covid.
This would be a great point if kids lived alone, with no vulnerable folks at home.
> it's irrecoverable because you never get back lost time
People recover from lost time frequently. If your teacher is sick and you have a substitute teacher for a couple days, that time gets made up. There's summer school, enrichment programs, etc. Very little of what kids learn in school has to be learned in one specific set of months; there's a pretty large range in exact ages within a single grade, even.
It'll be years, maybe decades before we know how plastic child development is in this regard. Right now, there are massive unknowns in evaluating all of this.
Nope. They fall behind and don't catch up. https://www.edweek.org/education/students-who-struggle-early...
Kinda hard to do if you are trapped at home with an abusive family. For many kids school is not just education but a sanctuary from a broken home.
It takes a lot of privilege to support closing schools for any duration of time—especially two years.
yea the young kids who are forming hobbies, instead of say learning to read or talk
To start, kids don't learn how to talk in the school. Not normally and if they are so young as to not being able to talk still, school is basically a convenience parking for toddlers.
We shouldn't adjust the laws to the saddest history that we can find. Treating everybody in a population as if all of them were outliers does not give the desired results.
Children are able to learn in lots of places apart of the school. Yes, is a fact. They can learn a lot for example from their grandpas and grandma. Of course, as long as their grandparents are alive because they were smarter than the fake news and the 'magufo' crew.
The effects are especially clear for the disadvantaged who struggled before.
...it reminds me of the phenomenon that, the longer you go between busts/economic recessions, the worse they tend to be, because you will tend to have more zombie companies ready to go under. Sometimes what seems like preventing a problem, is actually just storing up problems to experience all at once at a later date.