> It assumes that if a kid gets a fever first and then an adult in the house 1 to 7 days later, then the kid got covid and passed it to the adult.
This is a bad way to infer the direction of transmission. It's possible that parents had a fever, but didn't bother to check themselves until after their kid developed a fever and they checked them.
The paper does not even test a single participant for covid, so the fever might not represent covid at all. Nor does it check for other contacts the adult or kid may have had outside the house
Additionally, the sample is self-selected: it consists of people who opt into a fever reporting app -- not representative of the population as a whole.
The result is at odds with more careful contact tracing studies, like the Icelandic study from early 2020, which concludes the opposite. The paper is not a reliable guide to the relative risk that kids pose for disease spreading.
More broadly, the paper has no policy import. Would closing schools have protected anyone from getting covid? The evidence from studies comparing places that closed them vs. places that opened them suggests no. I
That closing schools is bad for the health of children is out of the scope of the ideas considered by this study.
This critique is by one of the authors of the Great Barrington declaration who argued to just let COVID rip through the entire population before there were vaccines, so take that with a grain of salt too.
> Plus, wouldn’t a reasonable critique not matter who wrote it?
Of course, but one problem with scientific critiques like this is that they are written towards laymen (this is on Twitter) who probably don’t have the understanding of whether a critique is reasonable or not. So the identity of the person who is performing the critique does have value in that context. In a true peer review scenario it shouldn’t be that way, scientific critiques should be evaluated on their merits alone.
This is also an excellent argument for why we should not unthinkingly trust statements from governments, given the tools of social manipulation they have available.
The declaration is only a few paragraphs long and most of it is filler. The meat of the plan is let covid rip through the population, anything else misrepresents the goal of herd immunity. You can't build up natural immunity without transmission.
The biggest flaw with this plan was that you can get infected with the now large family of viruses grouped into "covid" more than once. People don't actually build up as much immunity as the declaration presumes. The second biggest flaw was that there is zero chance you could protect only the high-risk populations.
In the US the plan ended up being basically this but s/virus/vaccine/ because the vaccine gave stronger guarantees on avoiding transmission to high-risk groups but then that got weirdly political for some reason. If it was smallpox I bet those same people would have been breaking down the door for an "experimental" vaccine.
That is medical misinformation. While reinfections do occur, symptoms are typically less severe. Recovered patients retain a substantial level of immunity, even against newer variants.
The mRNA vaccines used in the USA are very effective at preventing severe symptoms. However they have only limited and temporary benefit in reducing transmission.
Ignoring your gross misrepresentation of the Great Barrington declaration, one might ask why you aren’t commenting on the scientific merit of his critique, but rather shouting “wrong team!”
Another way of reading this other than “wrong team” (which is itself a culture-war-centric comment to make)… is “this person has stupid ideas, so this idea might be stupid too.”
(Whether or not the idea is, in fact, stupid is not my point - rather, you choose to read a culture war into it but there are other ways to read it.)
The GBD was right though. Society did the absolute opposite of what every single pandemic plan called for. It takes an insane amount of privilege to look at what took place and think it was a good idea.
Well, that and an appeal to authority. The entire narrative depended on appeals to “the experts”. Where “the experts” were the doomiest of doomsday “experts”. Anything other that “covid is literally the only problem we need to solve for” was all that was allowed.
If you dared to question “the experts” and their idiotic plans you were immediately tossed into the alt-right wacko bucket. Didn’t matter what your credentials were or anything. Only doomsday “experts” were allowed a voice.
To this day I still can’t believe how many people went along with that crap for almost three years.
No, many people had concrete suggestions (no lockdowns, open schools) substantiated with concrete arguments & facts (e.g. children are least vulnerable, the virus isn't that severe except in elderly) and pointed out concrete failures in leadership (e.g. Fauci lying about funding GOF research, big tech censorship).
"ad hominem" is an attack on a person instead of the positions they take. The post you're replying to quite literally is discussing the person's position on COVID which would naturally influence their COVID-related work.
If anyone is going to have the incentive to poke at this claim, it's going to be someone like him. I don't have any hope that there are unbiased players here, so I'm glad someone's trying to poke holes in arguments coming from the other side.
>The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
From the actual Great Barrington Declaration. Much different than "let it rip through the entire population."
Yeah so a guy who took a completely correct position even though it was extremely unpopular to do so at the time? Also this characterization of the barrington declaration is quite inaccurate.
Completely correct? GBD advocated letting SARS-CoV-2 rip through the general pop BEFORE vaccines while "targeting" protection of the elderly, which of course no country managed to do, particularly their poster-child Sweden. Now GBD fans pretend Sweden was a success story when any observation of the COVID impact on Sweden vs their neighbors through the vaccine rollout shows a completely different story. (Sweden had ~10x death rate of bordering Norway for first year of pandemic.)
Also GBD pretends mortality is the only worthy metric. There's such a thing as morbidity as the millions of people with Long COVID would like to discuss.
But Bhattacharya and friends with strong connection to Hoover Inst have a particularly nice revisionist view of their early work:
* Go on Fox and other media to downplay SARS-CoV-2 before we even know what's going on.
* Write seroprevalence papers with suspect specificity (changed between v1 and v2 of pre-print due to outrage from stat experts) that don't describe how the visual tests were interpreted, why they differ from the CZI BioHub paper's measurement of the Premiere test, or why a pathologist running ELISA tests to verify wanted off the paper.
* Stand by while friends like Scott Atlas make a media tour saying the seroprevalence paper suggests as many as 10,000 dead from COVID. Thus a fair portion of our population decides COVID is just the flu, and some of the GBD supporters still think it's "just a cold" despite the incredible evidence we have that it's much much worse (for example, see Iwasaki's work) and there's the little matter of over 1 million Americans dead.
* Then write the GBD before we have the vaccine or have any real public effort to try to protect the elderly.
On the bright side, Bhattacharya has been a proponent of the vax and many people (including me) agreed that targeted protection of elderly was very important. It's just that the revisionist commentary from his supporters is they were the only ones saying it. Completely false.
> * Go on Fox and other media to downplay SARS-CoV-2 before we even know what's going on.
They only were able to go on "FOX" because the left media's mind was already made up. Going against the narrative was absolutely forbidden.
I can't believe people still honestly believe anything "the experts" told them at this point. It takes massive privilege and echo-chamerism to look back over the last three years and still believe what "the experts" told them.
At least for America, the 3 Covid vaccines all failed to show any actual evidence of protection or immunity, even though the FDA grant an emergency use and later approval.
I have come to the conclusion the vaccines saved virtually no one and has put a similar number into an early death (e g. The clot shot). It would've probably been better if they never existed since people were fired to take useless experimental medical drugs with no proven positive effects.
The real thing that causes Covid to go away was Omricon, and other viruses re-spreading, political attention spans, and an upcoming election where the incumbent can't continue to use Covid as a reason for election.
"the 3 Covid vaccines all failed to show any actual evidence of protection or immunity"
You must be explicitly ignoring a ton of papers and data showing the opposite. The death rate of unvaxxed vs vaxxed is incredibly higher and CDC has data for it.
"I have come to the conclusion the vaccines saved virtually no one and has put a similar number into an early death (e g. The clot shot)."
In early 2021, the US had the largest vaccination campaign ever peaking at about 3.5 million shots per day in mid-April. Do you know what happened to the death rate (excess mortality) in 2021 through June? It dropped substantially. Isn't it odd to you that mass vaccination using a "clot shot" somehow drops the death rate substantially? It's rhetorical because to form the opinions you have, you must go out of your way to cherry pick papers and ignore data (or have conspiracy theories that data contradicting your opinion is fake).
> I have come to the conclusion the vaccines saved virtually no one and has put a similar number into an early death (e g. The clot shot)
Would you mind sharing at a high level what research led you to this conclusion?
> The real thing that causes Covid to go away was Omricon, and other viruses re-spreading, political attention spans, and an upcoming election where the incumbent can't continue to use Covid as a reason for election.
Compare Sweden vs "their neighbors" as I said above. They had much worse COVID death rate from their Nordic neighbors (Norway, Denmark, Finland) through initial COVID and the vaccine rollout to summer 2021.
Feel free to construct a competing comparison showing how the 10x death rate of Sweden is just an artifact and not a failure of public health. Or are you going to claim they're just old people so no big deal?
I shouldn't have to do that, if someone wants to compare two nations' handling and come to a conclusion using statistics then they should be compelled to do the statistics correctly.
If you honestly think sweden has a “10x death rate” I think you are badly misinformed. That sounds not believable at all. Just like the “1 out of 4 (no wait, 10) people suffer from long covid”
10x the death rate is a huge difference. You’d be seeing mass death, far more than anywhere else. It would be extremely visible.
Every ounce of data generated for covid was highly politically motivated and extremely biased. It should all be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Sweden had a 10x death rate for the first year of the pandemic vs its direct neighbors. That's the data published by Sweden, Norway, and Finland. You can ignore it if you want or just claim it's "highly politically motivated and extremely biased" because it's against what you want to believe. All Nordic countries did relatively well on death rate, that's why GBD have seized upon Sweden as a success story, but it was obviously worse than Norway and Finland.
When I talk with GBD proponents it always boils down to this: they won't believe the data and make up a variety of reasons why not to trust it, then they turn around and trust far worse analyses like the article comparing Sweden and non-Nordic countries with much worse obesity and far different systems (like the article comparing Sweden vs other EU).
The “death rate” of covid wasn’t the only problem to solve for you know. The myopic fixation on covid to the exclusion of literally everything else was a huge mistake. There is more to track than just “covid death rates” or “covid spread”… covid didn’t exist in a vacuum and asking society to do what it did was so absurd I still can’t believe people bought into it.
It takes immense privilege and a very sheltered life to think covid was the only thing worthy of focus. There is a balance to be had when treating a disease.
People needed to take off their blinders and see what damage their mitigations causes.
Andy point still stands. 10x the “death rate” is massive and would be very visible. It wasn’t. It was only visible if you looked at it with a microscope.
What society did to attempt to mitigate covid was a disaster no matter how well it worked. And the kicker is it didn’t work at all… which is probably why every pandemic plan said explicitly not to do masks and lockdowns and school closures.
Glad to hear we've moved from me being "badly misinformed" (now that you took a second to look at the actual data) to now having a "myopic fixation on covid".
Speaking of myopic, please do talk to the families of the ~1200 additional deaths per million people in Sweden and tell them their tragedy was "only visible if you looked at it with a microscope."
> During the live broadcast, Bhattacharya said it was “an absolute honor” to work with Desantis and praised what he described as DeSantis’ abilities to make decisions on COVID-19-related issues despite criticism. He expressed support for DeSantis’ rolling back certain pandemic-induced restrictions, including school closures, saying, “Governor, you did the right thing when you opened the schools.”
> From March 2020, when the pandemic began, through March 22, 2023, Florida recorded 7,542,869 COVID-19 cases and 87,141 deaths, the 12th highest rate in cases and deaths per 100,000 people among the 50 states and Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.
I'll be honest, if Jay Battacharya thinks Florida did a great job handling covid, i'm not sure i trust his judgement!
They weren’t a particular outlier, which is notable considering how old their population is. And compatible with New York which through the kitchen sink at Covid.
Timing matters. Take a look at this, which is cumulative deaths per capita from the start of the pandemic in the US to now for New York, Florida, California, and Washington [1].
New York got hit early and hard, having a large number of deaths in the first 2-3 months before anyone knew how to deal with COVID. After that New York did better than average.
Florida got through the first 2-3 months fine, with about the same low number of deaths that California and Washington had. Handled well they could have stayed like that, but instead they started having a higher than average death rate and closing the gap with New York in total deaths.
Florida's highest death rates were during the delta wave, which was after vaccines were widely available. The vaccine was very effective at preventing death from delta, which is why California and Washington had slight upturns in the death rate at that time as opposed to the steep rise in Florida.
I dunno, 404 where the worst was 455 doesn't seem great either. I'd be curious what the "age-adjusted death rates" look like (whatever the unit of such a metric might be?)
I don't have the age-adjusted death rates, but FL is 5th in the nation in terms of median age (42.2). This is over a decade older than the youngest state (UT: 31.1). [1]
Oh that's surprising, I expected the median age to be much higher for FL. It sounds like FL's population, while older than most, isn't really that old in absolute terms?
Why did this get downvoted? If you're just looking at death rate, it's absolutely true. Over 3/4 of all COVID deaths in the US were aged 65+. [1]
Lots of other people got COVID, and some of them became seriously ill or died (mostly over 50). But the supermajority of Americans who died were over 65.
If your argument is proven with statistics you're on weak ground.
- my statistics professor
What did she mean? That if the impact of a treatment is so difficult to discern that you're looking at some statistic to judge it the treatment probably is not effective.
The fact that Sweden doesn't stand out as a horror show relative to everyone else is indicative, as well as places with strict enforcement of lockdown rules. Nobody stands out
Sweden does stand out compared to their Nordic neighbors. They had ~1200 more deaths per million than Norway & Finland in the first year of pandemic. We're so inured to COVID death once we hit a million that some multiple of 9/11 doesn't stand out, eh?
See here's one of my problems with the pro-hard response side: they often seem to be a solution seeking a problem.
If you only look at the first year of the `sweden-vs-nordic-covid` link it looks pretty bad for Sweden, but if you extend it out, Finland and Norway traded early reduced mortality for later increased mortality.
This suggests Covid is highly transmissible, and restrictive policies just shift mortality out a little bit, not reduce it. Sure it's great to save lives, but at what cost to society? You need to balance mental health, the needs of children for social and educational development, and the economy.
You can't stop the world because people who are old or very sick are dying, that's nature, we're all subject to the same rules. You always need to balance the societal harm potential against the benefit, and with Covid our leaders seem to have forgotten that in many places.
Translation: I was wrong but I'll pretend I'm right.
Extend the timeline out as much as you want. Sweden still has a lot more cumulative dead per capita. And you are simply lying that Norway had increased fatalities and so just shifted it in time. The gap between Sweden and Norway slightly increased by May 2023.
Spare me your opinions and standard talking points after seeing data contradicting Sweden was some shining star of stellar policies due to GBD principles. A lot of our "leaders" like DeSantis forgot that pretending your expert in things you know nothing about and finding the most partisan hack doc you can for Surgeon General doesn't mean you're making correct decisions.
We could also talk about morbidity but that would make your weak argument even worse. After all, quality of life is SO important during the limited lockdown times but let's not measure significant decreased qualify of life for millions of Americans from Long COVID. And lets all hope there isn't significant subclinical issues like increased thromboembolic activity (frequently seen post-COVID) that will rear its head later.
I agree. Even though I disagree with the restrictions and coercion and don’t think any of it really worked, even I would expect to see a significant difference between say a Sweden or Florida in a California. Instead, we are arguing about minutiae.
My understanding is that Florida did about average if you adjust by age (lots of elderly people there). Couple that with keeping the economy much more open and schools shutting down a lot less (if at all?), it makes it a lot better than average. That's the argument.
With that in mind, I can't find a link to back up the claim about age-adjusted death rate ranking. I thought I saw one before. I found this one that goes by year:
Looks like they did badly in 2021 and well in 2020. Ideally I'd want to look across all years, since that's the "when it's all said and done" question.
Most people seem to criticize the Great Barrington authors because of whom they chose to associate with, rather than their actual position on medicine and science.
Even as somebody who frequently shakes his head at Florida, they really didn't do significantly worse in a way you could pin on the governer's policies. The entire covid cycle was a learning process and people frequently made useless comparisons, such as rank-ordering states that have very different demographics.
Let's all be intellectually honest here and push back on some of the common post-COVID tropes.
Dr. Vinay Prasad, a self-professed Bernie supporter, recently did a video [1] on DeSantis' COVID policy. His conclusion was that DeSantis was among one of the top governors in the country, and "near the top" of all the political leaders in the world.
The video discusses vaccination policy, mask mandates, school reopenings, and death rates. The TLDR is that policies that different governments enacted did not seem to have much impact on death rates, and that therefore what was given up (in terms of closed schools/businesses/etc.) was somewhat in vain. I think he should have spent a little time on non-death impacts, such as long COVID, which seem to be more prevalent in people who got COVID pre-vaccine.
It's worth noting that Bhattacharya was one of the originators of the "Great Barrington Declaration," which advocated dropping almost all measures to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, with the aim of quickly achieving herd immunity through widespread infection. This was in mid-2020, before any vaccine was available. This strategy would likely have doubled the death rate in the United States, had it been implemented. That is to say, this study goes strongly against Bhattacharya's oft-expressed views on how the pandemic should have been handled, and one should approach Bhattacharya's criticisms with a good dose of skepticism.
This is a misrepresentation of ‘focused protection’ and Bhattacharya supported - and still supports - a vaccine strategy, which you insinuate he did not.
The comment you're replying to clearly specified this was a strategy that was advocated before vaccines were available. If you believe, as the signatories of the declaration did, that natural immunity to the virus is possible, then it's not a vaccine focused strategy, it's a strategy that's independent to any vaccine. It's not as if anyone thought that such a strategy wouldn't lead to the infection of essentially all of humanity, and it doesn't say anywhere in it that they expect there not to be durable natural immunity (in which case the policy is self-defeating and absurd), so while it's not an antivax proposal, it's clearly not vaccine focused.
It's plainly true that "focused protection" is a euphemism for letting the virus tear through the vast, the vast majority of the population.
Indeed, the idea that "focused protection" could keep the elderly (and all the other at-risk people, who are nearly half of the US population) safe while the virus ripped through the rest of the population was absurd. Of course, we now know that herd immunity would never have been achieved, so the entire premise of the "focused protection" strategy was incorrect.
Allowing virtually the entire population to become infected before the advent of vaccines would have been devastating. Things were bad enough as it was, with 1 million deaths in the US alone. At least most people in the US were vaccinated before their first infection - things would have been that much worse if the US had fully followed Bhattacharya's advice and actively sought herd immunity in mid-2020.
The plan specifically is to (somehow) isolate vulnerable people and only "let er rip" for the rest of us. I'm skeptical on how this could have actually worked (or how well it actually did work in Florida), but that's the actual proposal.
There's the GBD proposal, and then there's the actual media tours by the GBD proponents, particularly on Fox, where COVID-19 was downplayed. Some of them famously wrote columns how there'd be maybe 10,000 fatalities and it was like the flu. Is it surprising that downplaying the virus also worked against spending huge amounts of money to protect the elderly? Like govt renting hotels to isolate elderly living with families? Or providing deliveries so they could stay at home?
I think Dr. Jay B seemed reasonable and honest enough. For instance you can find him saying that he's not comfortable comparing it to the flu, since he suspects flu deaths may be greatly overcounted. He talks now (not sure about before) about deliveries and hotels as you say. Etc.
But yes, the loudest dissenters seemed to be contrarians, rather than people with a specific plan. They take a big mash of GBD, "lol it's not that bad, not everybody's going to get it", "lol everybody's going to get it so there's nothing we can do anyway", "we're not obligated to look out for other people anyway", etc etc with all the inherent contradictions. Any signal that went against "THE COVID NARRATIVE" they signal boosted.
Something like insecurity must have been driving this stuff. I think some of the counter-maintstream points were right, particularly about being sober about tradeoffs, but overall it was a total embarrassment. Granted the other side wasn't much better.
I think Jay B was better than most of the GBD supporters because he seemed to focus more on the targeted prevention. The problem was he didn't counter the downplaying of SARS-CoV-2 by people using his own seroprevalence paper (which had problems), or at least I never saw him push back on Atlas and others. So his criticism about public health issues is completely devoid of his own part in the story. They went heavy with part 1 (COVID isn't that bad for non-elderly) and were surprised that downplaying the impact didn't shift resources to the elderly. If people using his data were saying the overall IFR was like the flu, why should the govt go way into debt protecting the elderly?
> I'm skeptical on how this could have actually worked (or how well it actually did work in Florida), but that's the actual proposal.
I don't see piles of dead people in florida, do you? Guess what went down in florida worked just as well as the most hardcore lockdown regions around. Almost like masks and lockdowns didn't do a damn thing at all. Who would have guessed?
Very few places in the world actually tried “focused protection” or seriously tried anything at all, so we probably won’t know until the next pandemic hits and we hopefully try something then.
The only thing we really learned, at least in the USA, is what happens when you basically do nothing society-wide in the face of a pandemic. Outside of a few major metro areas, the country was just like Florida. Business closures on paper but not enforced, weak stay-at-home suggestions that were largely ignored, voluntary travel restrictions that were similarly ignored and unenforced.
The school closures were the one major exception, where at least briefly, actual collective, coordinated action happened.
Several countries were highly effective at controlling it, and had far lower death tolls as a consequence.
These countries are very diverse in many respects, so one can't claim that they only succeeded due to some particular quirk they share in common: China, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, and others.
Great to be sceptical about it, because that’s how we end up with robust plans that stand a chance of actually working.
But, for all the protesting about how GBD would have failed the old and vulnerable, it missed the point that we actually already did fail the old and vulnerable.
It’s argued as if we succeeded.
But for all our efforts, we failed those that really did need protection. They were stuck. (And some still are.) Community transmission rates were really high. And that matters when you’re in a vulnerable group, because anything >0 is basically “high”.
All our efforts were general protection, which helped groups that didn’t really need help, but didn’t help the groups that really needed it.
Isolation of vulnerable people is problematic because ~5% of the population was highly vulnerable, and actually isolating them would require extreme resources that we simply don't have. Rather, what was meant from the statements of signatories and drafters, was to let it rip for 99.5% of the population and offer less actual protection to the rest than we gave to the least protected in our scenario.
>> It assumes that if a kid gets a fever first ... then the kid got covid and passed it to the adult.
> This is a bad way to infer the direction of transmission.
do you think that skews statistics worse than declaring a person died of covid when they only died with covid, and launching a disciplinary investigation of the license of a senior physician who pointed out that there is a checkbox on the death certificate for exactly this declaration? When coupled with a 5 figure dollar bonus to the hospital for the number of "of covids" they came up with?
but anyway, you think that so many more children caught it from their parents than from their peers AND the timing of the temperature measurements was always skewed in the wrong direction, that the errors don't wash, and that the researchers aren't as good at considering this as you are?
- Kids are younger than average so they have less exposure-based immunity
- Kids have higher-degree more-connected physical proximity graphs than adults, they're usually in classes with a group of 20-30-ish other kids. Multiply that by a factor of 5 or more if they switch classes over 6-10 periods. Then they get on a school bus with yet another group of kids.
- Kids (especially young ones) don't always keep the same social boundaries as adults, more likely to sneeze / cough on each other, share food / plates, etc.
> - Kids are younger than average so they have less exposure-based immunity
Did adults do better than children against SARS-Cov-2 immunity-wise? I would agree in general but I was under the impression that SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus nobody / few people were immune to.
Or did some people have for some reason an immune system prepared against SARS-Cov-2? How? Were there viruses similar enough before?
IIRC exposure to the common cold helped with COVID immunity. Something like 15% of colds are caused by various forms of Coronavirus (forms of Rhinovirus cause the majority) so this makes some level of sense.
Kids have much better innate immune systems than adults, so when no one has immunity through the adaptive immune system (what antibodies are a part of), kids do better than adults.
Perhaps, but somehow our kids (toddler and primary school) haven't gotten COVID at school or anywhere else. They eat unmasked with other kids every weekday, and the toddler brings home all sorts of other illnesses. We tested whenever someone got sick in our family, but the kids still haven't gotten it.
I realize tests can have false negatives, but I would have expected that we parents would have also gotten sick, and that our symptoms would be notable enough for us to know if we'd had COVID. On the "anecdote" versus "data" spectrum, this is somewhere in the middle; on the one hand, it's just one family, but on the other hand, this has held up for multiple years.
You know how many times I've heard "not surprised at the least" during this whole covid fiasco? Especially, from the people who slurped down whatever "science" reporting the media pushed and was taken as the gospel after just months of studying a complex virus.
it's baffling how cocksure you are. We don't know and if anyone claims they do with a good accuracy theyre full of it.
You should be surprised, it was and still is a novel virus. We didnt know and still don't know the long term effects since we don't have enough data to make a long term analysis. Get your head out your ass this kind of thinking led to bad government decisions by afraid citizens that enabled their governments to make poor decisions
WFH parents with kids can confirm that ~100% diseases come in via kids. The scientific community was focused on the danger to kids from COVID, which is not zero, but not that high. But the real danger was that the parents/caregivers would not be able to take care of them.
I can't speak for "the scientific community", but most of what I heard was that kids are largely unaffected by Covid 19, except for some cold symptoms, and it was the adults that were in any real danger.
Why this is even controversial is a mystery to me. Anyone who has had young kids in daycare knows this. If the study had been about the common cold instead of Covid, I doubt so many people would be triggered.
And money and propaganda. Had to keep the schools open so the parents could go to work. And there was a ton of economic force applied into trying to make everyone believe that.
Lol. What an extremely privileged take. Covid isn’t the only problem to solve for. For the vast majority if people, there are way bigger problems than covid. This was true even in march if 20202.
Who gives a shit about covid when you need to work for a living. Who gives a shit about covid when your kids literally depend on schools for healthy meals, safety and learning.
The myopic focus that work from home tech workers have on covid is so utterly detached from reality. The idea that all we should have optimized for is the spread of some respiratory virus. It’s insane. I still cannot believe the amount of privilege it takes to dismiss kids going to school.
> For the vast majority if people, there are way bigger problems than covid.
So the people living paycheck-to-paycheck should just continue business as usual and their families will be the ones dying during the pandemic, because they've got way bigger problems, got it.
1. Given that the vast majority of Covid deaths happened above retirement age, and this was pretty obvious very early on, there's very little weight to this argument.
2. What we did do in response to Covid will instead financially, educationally, and socially cripple those who already were living paycheck-to-paycheck, and make sure they stay that way for a long time.
3. So I assume you are mad at all of the upper-class families, especially those in political power who enacted the school closures, who continued to send their kids to private schools throughout the pandemic, thus furthering the spread of Covid?
> 1. Given that the vast majority of Covid deaths happened above retirement age, and this was pretty obvious very early on, there's very little weight to this argument.
COVID killed 19k people 30-39 which is 6% excess deaths, killed 46k people 40-49 which is 10% excess deaths and 201k people 50-64 which is 11% excess deaths.
The Vietnam war killed 58,000 Americans.
> 3. So I assume you are mad at all of the upper-class families, especially those in political power who enacted the school closures, who continued to send their kids to private schools throughout the pandemic, thus furthering the spread of Covid?
If they were doing that, yes. (And I can't understand how you'd think this would be some kind of 'gotcha' or that I wouldn't consider that actually worse).
The problem is that your account is coming across as a single-purpose flamewar account on a divisive topic. That kind of thing isn't in the intended spirit of the site.
It's fine to express a minority viewpoint but if that's the main thing you're doing, on a single divisive topic, then you aren't using HN as intended.
Can you please stop creating accounts to do this kind of thing? We end up having to ban them because they're not what this site is for. I don't have any problem with your views (I don't even know what they are, actually) but we need users here to use HN in the intended spirit, which is above all curiosity. Hardened battle from fixed positions is the opposite of that.
> So I assume you are mad at all of the upper-class families, especially those in political power who enacted the school closures, who continued to send their kids to private schools throughout the pandemic, thus furthering the spread of Covid?
Once you realize most of the people in favor of those mitigations fall into this bucket… it kinda starts to make sense. There is a reason so many in the laptop class supported this crap. They directly benifited from it.
> The scientific community was focused on the danger to kids from COVID,
The scientific community wasn't focused on that, political pundits were focused on that. Specifically, by shouting loudly and repeatedly that because children aren't dying from COVID, we should keep schools open.
Those pundits never had a good answer for 'But while the children aren't dying/getting seriously sick from COVID, what about their parents/grandparents/etc?'
The lieutenant governor of my state, Dan Patrick, said fairly early on that grandparents should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the economy. I asked my grandmother and she did not agree.
This was a major reason governments decided to close schools. People seemed to think it was to protect kids (and it was, in part, especially in the beginning while the impact wasn't clear yet) but kids excellent carriers and superspreaders for all kinds of viruses and bacteria. Not just for COVID, but also for many other outbreaks such as the flu.
Weird that seemingly only the US decided to close their schools for so long though. And the states that did stay closed don't have much better results (if at all) than all those countries who re opened schools by the end of the 2020 school year if they closed them at all. The results basically don't agree with you
I don't think there is a good way to study this, but one confounding variable I could see is that while kids in schools are fairly obviously great disease spreading vectors in general, the fact that COVID is relatively contagious might have made school spread less of a factor. In other words, for diseases that don't spread as readily, school spread may be a more significant factor since less hospitable environments might not allow them to spread at all or only very slowly.
Since COVID spreads well in all sorts of environments, whether or not school spread was controlled or not would matter less since it would still spread. And while parts of the US did have some pretty strict school closures for quite a while, other things being much less restricted might have meant the spread (or lack thereof) in schools didn't matter much since it was still spreading everywhere else. Whatever one might think of school closing as a policy, arguably the weirdest thing was that even in parts of the US that had more COVID restrictions in general, school closings were a uniquely restrictive outlier while everything else was relaxed. As was pointed out at the time, adults could go to packed bars far earlier than students could go to school. Even if school closings were worth it to control the spread, only closing schools seems like a questionable strategy.
That’s a stark misrepresentation of what happened here - the district refused to provide adequate (and, at times previously agreed-upon) safety measures.
Every teacher I know wants to educate their kids. They wanted to do so without putting their lives at risk, which is a reasonable thing to ask.
Schools stayed closed because they were waiting for the funding that didn’t come until 2021.
Schools closed because of a shelter-in-place order from the CDC. Fed was out of options after calling it a hoax during 2019 instead of preparing. There should have been a plan to reopen schools before the CDC’s “14 days”.
Schools were closed even more aggressively in parts of Canada. 20 weeks total in Ontario, which was the most in the country and one of the highest in the western world.
IMO, society needs to have a long conversation on what function school should provide. The reactions to closing during COVID (which was the right response, IMO) proved no one agrees on this, and I think a lot of our education problems stem from the disconnect between what people think school's role is (parents, kids, educators, administrators, lawmakers...).
My dad, a teacher now nearing retirement, expressed during the early days of covid that schools were primarily government-provided daycare services. His concern was that the economy would crumble if schools were kept closed. Then the American Federation for Teachers expressed a strong desire to keep schools closed for longer and he quickly reversed course. Even within the system it's abundantly clear that no one is sure of the role their profession plays, but it unfortunately often comes down to politics rather than the needs of students and society. I agree that such a conversation is needed, but I suspect that it would quickly devolve to the same vapid talking points.
No, that's incorrect. There was never any valid reason for closing schools. Some countries such as Sweden kept primary schools open throughout the pandemic (without mask mandates) and they did fine. Extended school closures in the USA collective punishment of children for the benefit of teacher's unions.
I can't speak for the American statistics. However, schools were called out as important spreaders in many Dutch news publications and by the so-called "red team" which advised the cabinet on how to deal with the pandemic. I think this was one of the first: https://www.bnr.nl/nieuws/gezondheid/10424031/redteam-sluit-...
You must use studies about pandemic spreading before corona because in the pandemic with a new virus you can only make decisions because of knowledge you already have.
Hindsight is 20/20.
Imagine studies later would have revealed that children are super spreaders and they were responsible for the death of their parents or grandparents.
"The science" has nothing to do with closing schools. A myopic fixation on exactly one cause of harm (covid) caused school closures. We absolutely fucked our kids. For a disease, they weren't affected by at all. It takes an insane amount of privilege to think that all that mattered was covid. Even in March of 2020 there was far more important things to worry about than some respiratory virus whose median age of death was higher than the average life expectancy of a human.
I find it incredible people still buy into the narrative that any of the lockdowns, school closures, or masks was worth it.
Where I live (Wales, UK), the official government statistics on post-Covid school absences makes for troubling reading. It goes from "slight increase in absence" for middle-class kids, to "the upcoming generation will be uneducated" for certain socioeconomic groups.
These articles are from May 2020, Nov 2020, and Jun 2021. That's pre-vax, pre-delta, pre-omicron, etc. I wouldn't expect the science to be anywhere near definitive by those times. Personally I discount just about anything covid-related that was published in the first 12-18mos because the situation has changed so drastically and the science was rolling in really fast and loose early on.
Alternatively, rational discussions assessing events and consequences from COVID-19 policy are finally starting to happen, and people who were against the authoritative advice (at the time) are saying comments like "it's hopeless to talk about COVID because you get downvoted for stating my pet theories which were clearly right."
Unfortunately, that thought process was the same one as the Texas government officials opening up way too early, sacrificing both economy and health instead of just economy. In my opinion, what you're calling "challenges the covid status quo" is just reheated retreads, and downvotes come because folks are just tired of contrarians muddling any feasible approach to assessment and evaluation.
If you want raw research, let me know your billing information and we'll make the research happen for your specific question. Otherwise, here are news stories and articles for your review.
Texas opened too early, leading to more community spread and excess deaths:
The first article is literally just saying that Texas is reopening.
Are you trying to source your claim that Texas in fact opened much earlier than the other states? Yes, yes they did. Good investigative work there.
The funny part is for how dangerous you think Texas was, everyone went to Texas for vacation to escape their own states draconian lockdowns.
I think Texas did just fine. Record number of population influx from other states. Low crime, prices of common goods and housing are affordable. Let me know if San Francisco New York and Chicago could say the same.
Goods and housing prices in Chicago are just fine. One of the great things about Chicago is that it's that it's the one truly great American city that isn't locked in an affordability crisis. Obviously, there are other reasons people move south from Chicago (taxes and the weather being the two high order bits).
I'm not making a case that you're wrong about Texas doing well over the last few years, only that your basis for comparing is a bit off.
Also one of the reasons it was important to vaccinate kids. People seem to have a really hard time reasoning about graphs. Typical white Americans also had trouble understanding outside their demographic multigenerational households are common. Kids killing their grandparents is a heavy burden in life.
The article you’re replying to is that 70% of household infections started with a child. That’s selective application of externalities, that’s a causal statement. So, you could without a huge stretch of conditional probability say that ~70% of fat people dying in a household were due to their kids infecting them, assuming the paper is right. I am not blaming kids for anything, or fat people. I’m saying the focus on preventing kids from being infected had important knock on implications - which is a restatement of the paper linked itself, with the extension that all mitigants were helpful in saving household lives.
This is absurd. Your ilk was willing to risk well being and health of youth for some hypochondriac fear because the very old and co-morbid had some risk. There's nothing honorable or good about this.
While it's obvious that people send their sick kids to daycare--because what are you gonna do, gotta go to work--there is probably at least some small part at play that people with young chicken are also sleep deprived and stressed the fuck out.
Written from my back porch as the two children scream at each other inside.
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma. I don’t want to send sick kid to child care but if the other parents do then I have no choice because I’ll run out of sick leave
Yep, it's a constant onslaught until they to about 9 or 10 we found. It gets better once they creep up on teenage years. Not sure if it's just their immune systems improving or if it's a product of better hygiene once they get older.
Do not miss those years. And in fact I wonder how much of a toll the constant virus fighting had on me (combined with poor sleep and generally getting older, etc.)
No one in my family is overweight or has any sort of health issues
As you are aware, it is kind of a rude question, but also a weird one
Not sure why you’d ask that given my anecdote
Pretty much all parents I know describe the same situation of not getting sick very often before kids, and that completely changing once their kids start going to daycare/school
> No one in my family is overweight or has any sort of health issues
> As you are aware, it is kind of a rude question, but also a weird one
The (US) media drilled into us for years that being overweight/obese may as well be a covid death sentence, doing things like stating how many covid hospitalizations/deaths were overweight/obese without context. So it's become very easy for people to jump on that.
The missing context was that if you actually compared like-for-like, using the real rates in the general US population... overweight/obesity has (almost) no effect. They just left that part out so the number sounded high, or compared "obese" in the population to "overweight or obese" in hospitalizations.
> 78% of COVID-19 patients hospitalized in the US overweight or obese, CDC finds
> Among 71,491 U.S. adults who were hospitalized with COVID-19, 27.8 percent were overweight and 50.2 were obese, according to the CDC's latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published March 8.
> Percent of adults aged 20 and over with obesity: 41.9% (2017-March 2020)
> Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6% (2017-2018)
It's not no effect at all, but the effect is pretty small. It definitely doesn't deserve as much attention as it's gotten, especially relative to other risks like age. I think I vaguely remember diabetes was another risk factor barely talked about that has a higher effect than weight.
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> but wasn't sure what ' like -for-like' means in this context
Some of the reporting would include the population context, but would say "78% of hospitalized patients were overweight or obese" and compare it directly to "41% of the US population is obese". It's technically correct but extremely misleading, since the reader will compare those two numbers directly even though they're not the same thing.
Sorry didn't mean to offend. I have prediabtes and dr told me that it could lower my immunity. That was his response when i asked him if there is anything i could do to stop getting sick.
> No one in my family is overweight or has any sort of health issues
same here. I am not obese or have any visible health issues but have high fasting glucose and prediabetes a1c. Even prediabetes can impair the immune system.
This doesn't contradict your anecdote though. Its totally possible that you and your friends are getting more sick now given increased exposure and high rates of prediabetes in the country ( 41% of men , 1/3 overall population)
Avoided Covid until about three weeks ago. Kid brought it home from preschool.
4x Moderna.
Symptoms were sore throat, persistent cough, mild fever and sweats. No loss of taste or smell.
Edit: not sure why this was downvoted, I’m not complaining at all about my vaccine assisted recovery. I’m also immune compromised (in the last 6 months) and fairly happy with how well things worked out. I didn’t really even need to take time off and went to (remote) meetings. Covid was nothing compared to some bad drug interactions I had a few months prior.
I thought not losing any sense of smell or taste was most interesting and it was likely due to some combination of the specific variant, the Moderna vaccines and paxlovid that prevented that class of symptoms.
Depending on age and health, it really makes it difficult to say if getting vaxxed was the “smart” move when weighing the risk of contraction vs the unknowns of any potential side effects.
If memory serves, most of the panic in the early stages was really about the risk of overloading hospitals (which mostly didn't happen) and a lack of ventilators (which it turned out that ventilators made things worse for most COVID patients). COVID-19 itself wasn't extremely lethal at any point.
> COVID-19 itself wasn't extremely lethal at any point.
On a population level, it's the most lethal virus in the last 100 years. A virus that infects everyone and that kills 0.5-1% of those it infects is almost a worst-case scenario for public health.
The idea is a 5-10% fatal virus would have far more severe social distancing and thus couldn't infect everyone. Otherwise, a "100% fatal, infects everyone" disease would be the worst case scenario.
I wish I believed you, but sadly I think we learned nothing from COVID and if version 2.0 happens and is 5-10% fatal, we would make the same mistakes all over again: ignore it, downplay it, politicize it, and then finally half-ass the fight with the same weak uncoordinated actions.
The problem with COVID was that 70% of the deaths were in the 65+ range. So it didn't feel as severe to society as it would going by the death rate alone. We lost 3 years of life expectancy (it’s not clear if it will be recovered quickly or not), most people don’t think ahead that far so the problem feels abstract.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
If you have any specific qualms with the content of the article, we’d love to hear them, but a publication’s political leanings does not have any impact on its veracity.
When a publication has no credibility, it's entirely reasonable to point that out. This is the publication arm of Falun Gong, which is a cult that could be described as the Chinese version of Scientology.
Didn't know that. It does seem in this case, they are just reporting on the studies as far as I can see. Here is the source material from Science, Nature, Vaccines, BMJ and other peer-reviewed medical journals:
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Naturally Acquired Immunity versus Vaccine-induced Immunity, Reinfections versus Breakthrough Infections: A Retrospective Cohort Study https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/75/1/e545/6563799?login...
This is literally how modern internet propaganda works: selective reporting that provides enough truth to be plausible but omits enough and/or distorts to avoid being comprehensive and accurate.
There's lots of studies that discuss both the pros and cons of this subject - this epochtimes article has pointed out the ones that on their face support their narrative, and (very very very likely, given their well-earned reputation) omitted those that don't, and may/probably have come to a conclusion that the study authors would not have.
This is why everyone's so stupid right now: we're all overconfident that we understand the small shreds of evidence we have and that they're the complete picture, and that overconfidence means we talk past each other in our separate realities. The only way to get around this is a) be an expert who has a comprehensive view of the range of evidence and what precisely it means (hard), b) be humble about what we can understand, select our sources extremely carefully, and get multiple perspectives (medium), or c) ignore the noise and wait for broad consensus (easy but slow and not perfect).
One-sentence summary: IgG4 suppresses the immune response, stopping the body from fighting back, so you don't have allergic reactions to things like pollen and dust.
It’s the New York Times opinion columns that it calls far left (which I’d call accurate), while it considers the news articles to be just left of center.
I’ve never seen the NYT opinions section advocate for far left positions, like abolishing money for instance. Calling the NYT far left is like calling Joe Biden a socialist.
Sure, but what they don't tell you in the title is that the number of household transmissions is incredibly low in the first place (39k of 780k cases | ~5%) and most of that transmission is child-to-child (16k cases), child-to-adult made up (12k) of those cases. Further, it's telling that most of the transmission was reported during Omicron and beyond, long after vaccines were widely available and adopted.
Policy makers want really badly to justify what they did to kids during the pandemic, but even with this report's poor methodology, the data just doesn't back up the narrative that kids were "killing grandma" by bringing covid home from school.
Maybe regulate very good air quality and/or air purifiers in daycare and school buildings. Something along the lines, CO2 not allowed to go over 800 ppm, and at least 6 air changes per hour for every room.
At least here in the UK, the official advice if a family member caught Covid was to isolate them in a separate room, with no allowances made for children. Sounds like we already tried this!
When in reality, being over 65, obese, diabetic, and suffering from hypertension, or otherwise unhealthy, were the major demographic of deaths. Kids were fine.
Ah, remember the headlines when Trump was taking it more seriously than the press, and the press was comparing it to the flu and Pelosi in Chinatown SF saying don't be racist, come on down.
It was much worse than the flu if you were over 65; it was predominantly a pandemic of the elderly and ill, but gotta sell the poke and boosters to the tune of $40B per round. I had to argue the efficacy of natural immunity from having had it to keep from getting vaccinated for work, and yet they forced my older kids and nephew to get booster after booster if they wanted to continue to attend university. My nephew immediately had chest pains within 8 hours of the vaccination, and he was diagnosed with myocarditis, and is still being checked for heart issues. He was a runner and did not have any of the comorbidities to push him to get the vax given he had already had COVID and should not have been advised to get vaccinated. They did a great job of memory holing natural immunity the CDC and Fauci and Co.
Except there's no guarantee that fatal cases and child-initiated cases are independent. Given that older people are more likely to die and less likely to have children in the home, it's entirely probable that children are responsible for a far smaller number of deaths.
No the author is not some homicidal maniac. In interviews he emphasizes that no policy should be made based on his findings. But if policy were made, he would focus on universal healthcare, pre-school, government funded maternal leave, etc to support women.
Daughter came home from school with a note telling us that a kid at the school had spent 3 days in class with a positive test, but the parents sent her anyway because they had nobody to watch her and because kids didn't "have bad reactions."
A few days later, I noticed that I lost all sense of smell and I've had long covid ever since. I miss being able to enjoy citrus and peppers and days where I'm not completely exhausted by 5pm.
Long covid may be tied to the high levels of COVID spike protein (i.e., body never clears out the virus). It is also known that ivermectin binds to Covid spike protein.
I might put two and two together at this point and do something about it were I ill with long covid and "completely exhausted by 5pm". But since I am exposed to IVM every now and then (treating cattle) I'll likely never know!8-))
We had our elementary school kid wear a KN95 mask in school this year, except during meals of course, and he got sick only once or twice whereas all of his friends in class were sick every few weeks and having to miss school and miss sports. Wearing a mask is easy and works, and I never understood the fuss.
Wow, where to start, whether it's the well documented inhibition of language development in young kids who are learning to speak and are unable to see mouth movement, to the demonstrated health problems caused by breathing in your exhalation all day, to the fact that masks made zero difference in "controlling" the spread of an aerosolized virus (something that was well known and even documented by CDC and WHO well before 2020).
Kids need faces. That is the fuss. It requires absolutely no further debate.
It’s almost criminal abuse to force kids to wear masks for something they aren’t even at risk for.
You are free to force your kids to hide their face and treat others as nothing more than disease vectors… but pre-2020 most would rightly consider that child abuse.
Additionally, the methodology is questionable, but the conflict of interest/CDC funding is even more so. Especially if participatory surveillance becomes mandatory in a future pandemic with these types of studies trying to back common sense.
> Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Ms Bloch reported employment with stock options at Kinsa Inc during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported.
"Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Ms Bloch reported employment with stock options at Kinsa Inc during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported."
At the rate covid studies are being retracted, I’m hesitant to make ANY conclusions related to covid 19 spread for at least another few years. We still need time to let the dust settle.
In the UK, several peaks happened during the summer (July 2021, July 2022 [1]). I am sure kids contribute, like they typically spread many other contagious diseases, but they are far from being the only way covid spreaded. And given the educational cost of school closures, I hope people won't start concluding that closing schools is a good way to stop diseases.
The link you provided does not discuss retraction rates. Rather its about papers citing retracted papers. I hesitate to make conclusions about your bias at this point.
Nah, 5-7 out of 6-8 (2 times questionable, mild and not tested).
Fast spreading viruses have careless, often coughing, sneezing, unhygienic kids as infection centers. But I still dont think it was a good idea to close schools, we saved possibly few additional grannies or other frail people, but fucked up non-trivial amount of kids for life. Many grandmas worth their salt would gladly take the extra risk given the options
Quite the opposite in my household. I gave COVID to my older and younger children and wife. I wouldn't have known, but I went for a COVID test because I was going to do an inspection at an elder care facility's structure. I would have thought they gave it to me if they called me with their positive test days later, so I think the study may not have filtered on this type of occurrence.
I still haven’t gotten Covid yet, but if/when I do get it, it will surely come through one of my four kids in public schools. I work from home and rarely go to stores. They are pretty much the only infection vector for me.
"The researchers said the finding that pediatric COVID-19 transmission was negatively correlated with new community cases during most of the pandemic is consistent with that of a previous study."
They kind of incoherently try to explain away this, but it seems to run directly counter to their basic thesis. I mean, everyone who has worked in daycare or grade school knows that kids can get each other sick, so it would be surprising if it were different for covid-19, but this seems like the a significant issue with their data that is the more interesting finding, and they sort of shrug it off.
I may be a bit biased because I live in Texas, and we actually had the highest covid-19 rates when it was hottest, i.e. when schools were not in session, just like most of the Sun Belt.
It’s not the kids it’s how we manage them. They interact with 100s of other kids daily in small boxes with poor ventilation. Obviously airborne diseases are going to be a problem
(https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/16649160363518525...)
> It assumes that if a kid gets a fever first and then an adult in the house 1 to 7 days later, then the kid got covid and passed it to the adult.
This is a bad way to infer the direction of transmission. It's possible that parents had a fever, but didn't bother to check themselves until after their kid developed a fever and they checked them.
The paper does not even test a single participant for covid, so the fever might not represent covid at all. Nor does it check for other contacts the adult or kid may have had outside the house
Additionally, the sample is self-selected: it consists of people who opt into a fever reporting app -- not representative of the population as a whole.
The result is at odds with more careful contact tracing studies, like the Icelandic study from early 2020, which concludes the opposite. The paper is not a reliable guide to the relative risk that kids pose for disease spreading.
More broadly, the paper has no policy import. Would closing schools have protected anyone from getting covid? The evidence from studies comparing places that closed them vs. places that opened them suggests no. I
That closing schools is bad for the health of children is out of the scope of the ideas considered by this study.