The risk posed to school-aged children by COVID-19 is extraordinarily low. We need to base our re-opening plans on rational risk assessments. Not panic.
Also, crowding kids into a classroom with no distancing and no masks is less dangerous than throwing them into a swamp full of hungry alligators.
Throughout COVID I have been very, very wary of people who speak in terms of absolutes. Our understanding of this virus, both in terms of immediate transmission and long term harms, is still being developed, and more than once we've been given "facts" that turned out to be wrong.
On this question I'll side with the teachers. They seem pretty uniformly to think that re-opening is a bad idea unless there are a lot more resources to ensure safety.
Finally, a question. If one child death per 10,000 is an OK fatality rate, at what point is it too high? 10 per 1000? 100? If you're going to say "Your dead child is no big deal" you should be prepared to say how many more dead kids are acceptable to you.
Parents aren't generally irrationally scared their kids are going to die. They're worried about their kids getting it while packed into a public school and the virus spreading exponentially from there. Grandparents don't have to live in your home to catch it from their grandchildren, by the way, and this car crash analogy is absurd. We're talking about a novel virus we know relatively little about and for which there is no vaccine. If parents are fortunate enough to be able to keep their kids out of the school system this fall, they ought to do it, regardless of what a childless ICU doc who likes the odds has to say about it.
Matt, what do you think about potential long-term health impacts? It's true that mortality is very low in the young, but aren't there other health outcomes to consider?
Also, crowding kids into a classroom with no distancing and no masks is less dangerous than throwing them into a swamp full of hungry alligators.
Throughout COVID I have been very, very wary of people who speak in terms of absolutes. Our understanding of this virus, both in terms of immediate transmission and long term harms, is still being developed, and more than once we've been given "facts" that turned out to be wrong.
On this question I'll side with the teachers. They seem pretty uniformly to think that re-opening is a bad idea unless there are a lot more resources to ensure safety.
Finally, a question. If one child death per 10,000 is an OK fatality rate, at what point is it too high? 10 per 1000? 100? If you're going to say "Your dead child is no big deal" you should be prepared to say how many more dead kids are acceptable to you.
Parents aren't generally irrationally scared their kids are going to die. They're worried about their kids getting it while packed into a public school and the virus spreading exponentially from there. Grandparents don't have to live in your home to catch it from their grandchildren, by the way, and this car crash analogy is absurd. We're talking about a novel virus we know relatively little about and for which there is no vaccine. If parents are fortunate enough to be able to keep their kids out of the school system this fall, they ought to do it, regardless of what a childless ICU doc who likes the odds has to say about it.
Matt, what do you think about potential long-term health impacts? It's true that mortality is very low in the young, but aren't there other health outcomes to consider?