> For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults.
At first we didn't know how much harm the virus would cause to children. But now that we see it is much less dangerous for them we shouldn't be preventing them from learning because we are afraid of getting sick. The children are the future, and in order to secure a positive growth in society it is our obligation to give them their very important education.
Counterpoint: at first it was extremely obvious that this virus was affecting you harder the older you are, with 60+ populations starting to be at risk. Nobody thought it was harming children.
The reasoning here is flawed: we had early positive evidence that COVID-19 was particularly dangerous for the elderly and those with a variety of medical preconditions. We didn't have positive or negative evidence that children weren't an at-risk group (for any number of reasons: lack of case evidence, the fact that children can't be modeled medically as adults, etc.).
Instead, we applied the lessons of the common flu[1]: children do get more sick from the common flu than young and middle-aged adults and so, in light of a novel severe respiratory disease, it doesn't make sense to take chances.
No. As the article explains, this uncertainty might explain at most a couple months of the initial response. It was very obvious, very early, that the risk to children was low and did not fit the age profile of the flu. Nearly all the debate around closing schools was in regards to their role as general transmission hubs (many argued that kids didn't even transmit COVID enough to worry about) and the risk to teachers. Nobody who was paying attention thought going to school was going to kill lots of kids relative to historically normal levels of child mortality.
If you're having a hard time remembering how things actually played out in 2020, just ask yourself: did you hear about pediatric wards filling up with COVID patients? No, you did not. You heard about an extremely rare multisystem inflammatory disorder and that's about it.
You've performed a very subtle conversational pivot here: I didn't assert that COVID is more deadly to children, or that public policy was structured around that hypothesis. I said that we didn't know how dangerous it was and that, among other things, treating COVID as potentially flu-like in young children was a reasonable policy.
When it became clear that children weren't dying in large numbers from COVID, keeping them out of school throughout 2020 because of the transmission theory was (and may still be, depending on other circumstances) sufficient justification.
I did not pivot. And to anyone reading my post, it should be so obvious that I did not pivot that your claim that I did verges on flatly dishonest.
We knew COVID was not dangerous to children by early summer 2020. The article says this and the article is correct. I simply and plainly repeated this.
It was never the case that anyone who was paying attention believed school closures might be the only thing standing between COVID and mass death of children. That did not happen. It did not happen. It never happened.
Please dispense with any further nonsense about subtlety. Speak plainly and without subtlety, as I am doing.
> It was never the case that anyone who was paying attention believed school closures might be the only thing standing between COVID and mass death of children. That did not happen. It did not happen. It never happened.
This is the aforementioned pivot. Nobody made this claim.
The claim is that, early in the pandemic, unknowns about the dangers of COVID to children were one among many sufficient conditions for closing schools. Once we learned what we currently know, that condition lost its sufficiency. But that didn't change the sufficiency of the other conditions (read: community transmission, teacher health, &c.), which remain.
Putting away the continued nonsense about subtle pivots - it's not even the same claimed pivot, and I explained from my very first sentence that the early uncertainty could make closing schools understandable, if only for a couple months - it is extremely untrue that the other conditions were widely considered sufficient.
That's why TFA was written. Tons of people still deeply disagree with this risk calculus.
Because, again, children's health is not accurately reflected in adult models. "Kills adults" can be correspond to almost anything in children, and telling people to bet their children's health on an unknown respiratory disease isn't good politics or good public health policy.
It's a blood/brain pathogen that is infectious via respiratory means.
A lot of the "varied issues" that long-COVID sufferers deal with are more easily explained by the disruption of the circulatory system (esp. as it affects the brain - when the body's defenses kill COVID-infected brain cells en-masse that results in the "brain fog").
Actually, a recent meta-analysis found that when you actually add a control group, most of the "long COVID" symptoms disappear. Higher quality studies were was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms. "Long COVID" appears to be almost entirely an artifact of bad science (and bad science reporting)
From the very start children were considered essentially immune to COVID. I remember in 2020, well into the pandemic, that there was huge news coverage the first time a kid ended up hospitalized.
Counterpoint: It was extremely obvious that this virus was hitting old folks hard because nursing homes were concentrating them in recirculated air. It wasn't completely obvious that the same thing wouldn't happen in schools.
Before vaccines the major concern was children as a vector for spreading it (especially because they were more often asymptomatic), anyone with school age kids know how quickly they spread illness.
There was some secondary concern of long-term side-effects ("long covid") cases in children as well, and I recall some talk of MIS-C and Kawasaki disease... but even early on those seemed fairly rare.
This cannot be mentioned enough. It's such a weird bias. Just repeated again with the bizarre delay of the critical Pfizer medication that statement was unethical to not give to the control group but ok to delay approval for months.
We've all heard about the children numbers, no one is ignoring anything.
I find it offensive to use "the media" when describing other's positions in a debate. You're basically saying your opponents are brainwashed by evil media while you are completely objective. And ignoring all the media that you consume that backs up your position.
The problem isn’t the kids getting sick, it’s the adults teaching them getting sick and dying. We’ve treated teachers like shit for so long that many are just saying “nope, not dying for a job” because they can go make more money doing literally anything else. We were scraping the bottom of the barrel even before Covid.
If kids education were really a priority, the right time to invest was 20 years ago. The system has been broken for a long time already.
I see where you're coming from, but, as a first grade teacher, I can say that remote learning doesn't prioritize teachers' needs either. Rather, it reflects the minimal investment a school or district could possibly make. For these past two years, we could have invested in PPE, filtration, and reducing class sizes. We could have prioritized approving vaccines for children. Instead, we're now expecting adults and children to sacrifice their safety in order to go to schools that are roughly the same as they were in 2019.
"The problem isn’t the kids getting sick, it’s the adults teaching them getting sick and dying"
Isn't this exactly what the article is talking about? I think recognizing that we are doing this trade is a step in the right direction. Only then can we proceed to discuss how we should make that trade, instead of throwing kids whom have no say, and their future, right under the bus.
We can have this discussion until we’re blue in the face, but unless the state is willing to send police to round up teachers and force them to work, teachers will look out for their own health and not go to work when Covid numbers are this high. Most major city school districts had planned to reopen on schedule, but the decision to close was made for them by their staff.
It’s probably too late, this country is about to fracture. All the indicators point to a coup coming in the next few years which will launch us into an unknown realm of violence. We’re way deep into “the cool zone” now.
> Vaccines for teachers have been widely available for almost a year now.
You appear to have missed the news around the Omicron variant being much better at vaccine evasion than Delta. You can't compare the situation a year ago with the one now, which is unique and unprecedented, just like the pandemic was initially.
I have Omicron right now. I’m vaccinated and had my booster in November. I’m young, healthy, I work remotely and I’m struggling to make it through half a day. My symptoms aren’t even that bad, I’m just exhausted all the time. There is no way I could do a job where I had to be on my feet all day. I can barely carry on a conversation.
The problem right now where I live is that everyone is sick. Grocery stores, restaurants, delivery services and even fucking Walmart are closed because they don’t have enough employees to operate. The schools tried to open but it was a disaster with half the teachers out sick so they just postponed opening them a week in hopes it will go away.
This wave will be over, but without lasting immunity in the population the next mutation could be worse. We could very well be dealing with this the rest of our lives and there is no return to “normal”. We’re in the new normal.
> My symptoms aren’t even that bad, I’m just exhausted all the time.
There are 30-40M symptomatic cases of the flu each year in the US, with the same or worse symptoms as what you just described. There is no "new" normal, cold & flu season just got more complex.
We’re already in the new normal; nobody is going back into the office if they don’t have to and that alone will force a realignment of American life. We were slowly headed that way before Covid anyway, the pandemic just made it happen. Companies requiring knowledge workers to be onsite are having huge levels of attrition because the employees have options.
One of my clients who was very eager to get back into the office and tried forcing the issue in Q3 last year has seen 40% of their engineering staff quit over the last 6 months, and are having a hard time finding replacements. They made the decision just before the holidays to switch to a remote-first model and downsize their offices. This is happening, and it’s going to crush commercial real estate.
I've had both. In 2009 my wife and I both got Swine Flu while in University. That was far and above the worst illness I've ever had. Covid was like a bad cold.
I completely agree with you on the new normal regarding in office, but that wasn't what we were talking about. We were discussing a new normal regarding seasonal infectious disease and the social and economic burden it causes. As COVID becomes endemic, there won't be anything "new" about that normal, it'll look almost identical to the burden caused by the cold and flu prior to 2020.
I thought it was pretty much understood the vaccines weren't doing much for contraction of Delta already. We've moved on to "prevents serious illness and death" which is still true for Omicron and ought to be enough for teachers to return to work.
Top companies in the S&P 500 are delaying return to work because many tried it and were met with absolute mutiny. The vast majority of people got a taste of the remote life and don't want to return.
> The vast majority of people got a taste of the remote life and don't want to return.
Certainly this couldn't be the case for teachers teaching remotely – they probably enjoy their 10 hour workdays where they are standing most of the time and wearing a mask.
Very true, teachers unions are fighting the return to schools hard. I was referring more to your typical white collar office job, i.e. those employed by the S&P 500.
> The children are the future, and in order to secure a positive growth in society it is our obligation to give them their very important education.
Great, so just set up a fund to compensate teachers and daycare workers who get long covid in order to pay their salary and medical expenses for the rest of their lives if they're unable to work.
Our taxation system is already set up for these kinds of transactions, and we definitely should be putting more money into teacher salaries and education.
No we should not. They all get a pension. Do you know how much pensions cost? There are people on waiting lists to fill teacher positions. The benefits make up for the low bank deposit.
People don't get this. In Illinois, multiple thousands of my annual property tax dollars directly fund the pensions of local teachers. And then I have to self-fund my 401K to have a chance at retirement - one that could fail to grow or evaporate in the market at exactly the wrong time. Theirs is guaranteed. They will get their salary for life.
> They all get a pension. Do you know how much pensions cost? There are people on waiting lists to fill teacher positions.
This might be the case in some specific jurisdiction you are in, but is patently not true across the United States. The state I'm in stopped pensions for teachers in the nineties.
My district is short on teachers. Here, it takes 10 years of service to vest into a pension, and most teachers burn out way before then. I’d love to see an example of the waiting list you’re talking about. Maybe my district can advertise there to find help.
Maybe it is time we start to rethink the benefits then? If it is not financially viable then its time for something new. Maybe the government could take after how the private sector pays
How are we so sure that the declines these years won't be easily made back up after they return to normal schooling in the coming years? Also, are these test results really indicative of important value that the kids aren't getting?
"Children are our future and you should be prepared to accept arbitrary Covid consequences for them" might be a compelling argument on an orange web site, but it is not going to be one when you present it to over-worked, under-appreciated teachers who have families of their own and their futures to worry about.
Bringing back pensions and providing free post-retirement healthcare for teachers and their families will back up grandiose statements like yours with actions. With the current right-wing thinking in vogue in the US, I suspect there is vanishingly little chance of that happening.
At first we didn't know how much harm the virus would cause to children. But now that we see it is much less dangerous for them we shouldn't be preventing them from learning because we are afraid of getting sick. The children are the future, and in order to secure a positive growth in society it is our obligation to give them their very important education.