I can’t believe how dismissive people are about people who are worried about their finances during this. So many false equivalencies being made about bankruptcy being preferable to death. I am not one of these people that is cavalier about COVID, it’s a real danger and the long term damage to the body is just being discovered. But we all know for sure what the long term health effects of poverty are. Whether you like to admit it or not, the economy is vitally important to our health, life expectancy, and quality of living. You can be worried about both COVID and the economy.
If you care about the economy, the best thing we (the US) can do is follow the lead of other countries that have gotten this under control with evidence-based measures, and push the government to provide support to those in need, so the economy can bounce back quickly, rather than sliding into depression.
New Zealand has just had to quarantine 1/3 of their population, again, because of 4 cases. Until the virus is contained everywhere you will yo-yo between closing everything and opening it.
Unless we build a wall around every developing country this will be going on for years.
The economy can bounce back from one quarantine, can it bounce back from 12?
Evidence from other countries suggests that there is no way of getting this under control and returning to normal, and it wouldn't save the economy anyway. Europe is seeing a resurgence of cases, previous success story South Korea is stuck unable to reopen without a similar resurgence and with no path to eliminating the disease, even the latest remaining success stories Vietnam and New Zealand discovered the hard way that their belief they'd eradicated the disease was an illusion after it had spread unimpeded. And even countries which have managed to dodge much of the direct economic damage have suffered a huge amount of indirect damage from the entire rest of the world shutting down.
Edit: I can't reply due to rate limiting, but you can't just dismiss the resurgences of cases in Europe because the absolute number of cases is small now - this is exponential growth with a rather alarming exponent, and that always starts out small until it isn't. Remember, it takes the same amount of time to go from say 1 to 2 cases per 10k as from 15 to 30.
I'm sorry but this is just poorly informed. The US is projected to be either near the top, or at the very worst right in the middle, of projections for GDP growth to finish out 2020.
There is a sliding scale here, of course. If we locked everybody in their houses, we could get the covid numbers to 0, but it would also completely destroy our economy, and obviously would result in substantial loss of life due to the effects of poverty. What the US has done instead is to take a hit on covid in service of economics. So far it seems to be working (with regards to GDP, I mean.)
People (especially online) have been shockingly dismissive of everything, in COVID context.
Worried about the economy? You probably only want to get rich on the stock market. Worried you might lose your job? You probably have one of those shit-jobs we've been hearing about, no big loss there. Worried remote schooling might affect children's long term development? Schools are useless anyway. Worried that art and culture like concerts, museums, theatres might disappear? We don't need them, just watch operas on Youtube and browse pictures of famous paintings. Travel? Just go to StreetView.
It's scary how quick people are to let go of elements of society and civilisation, some of which took centuries to build. Yes, nothing is perfect but these attitudes are not working towards implementing something better.
The article says that parents are 5x as worried about C19 than about paying their mortgage. They're 1/5th as worried about the possible deaths of their family members as they are about their mortgage, which suggests that they, too, are very concerned about the economy.
> The article says that parents are 5x as worried about C19 than about paying their mortgage.
> They're 1/5th as worried about the possible deaths of their family members as they are about their mortgage
These two statements seem to be in conflict? I think your 2nd statement means to say "They're 1/5th as worried about their mortgage than they are about the possible deaths of their family members."
It feels like that this is an issue where the problem is looking at the averages, which are meaningless here.
We have a bunch of people who are rightfully very worried about their finances, but we also have very many people who are quite certain that their finances are going to be okay while other people will get kicked in the nuts by the downturn resulting in poverty and bankruptcies, so they have other priorities that they are worrying about - such as infection and schooling.
If 1 in 5 people can't pay their mortgage, that's an economic catastrophe - but even if such a catastrophe is upcoming it makes all sense if the other 4 in 5 people wouldn't be worried about paying their mortgage.
the problem is not people who are worried about their finances - that is understandable. The problem is people who want to put finances over covid, mostly because covid requires certain measures in order to be eradicated (objectively) whereas an economy can (at the very least temporarily) be switched to a mode where people do not have to worry about their finances (such as UBI or a command economy). What makes at least me angry is people who are pretending that the way our economy functions right now has to be how it functions in every situation. It comes off as dogmatic and religious thinking.
100% this. The economy isn't part of nature. In it's current form it's a relatively new social construct that honestly doesn't seem to be working very well for a lot of the global population
The US implemented essentially an entire year of forbearance on federally backed mortgages (6 months automatically, and another 6 months for filing a form with no documentation). Remaining local eviction moratoriums will expire in the next few months, although court backlogs will probably provide an additional time buffer. There are still more initial unemployment claims than there were at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis. The $2400 per month unemployment subsidy has just expired and won't be fully replaced. In other words, the economic and social fallout has barely begun. Overdose deaths are already up 50% from last year in many places.
>Remaining local eviction moratoriums will expire in the next few months, although court backlogs will probably provide an additional time buffer.
Only if you're lucky enough to live in one of the progressive states, Louisiana has already started evicting people. In Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has already released documents saying that local governments can't stop or delay evictions.
You can also be worried about both but more worried about one or the other. I'm a parent who was laid off because of COVID and I'm more worried about my kids health than the economy or my ability to get another job. That doesn't mean I'm not worried about the economy or trying to minimize the impact a bad economy will have on society/individuals.
> Whether you like to admit it or not, the economy is vitally important to our health, life expectancy, and quality of living. You can be worried about both COVID and the economy.
We have the technology to revive an economy - remember, we're on an all time stock rally & going higher.
At least from the NZ example (or Canada), it is clear that a war footing on the pandemic does bring back demand - the supply is easier to revive.
The economy is made of people, even if the entire supply side is automated.
Though if you automate both sides, you can end up with a two-body simulation of a high GDP economy[1].
Yeah this is definitely not surprising to the least! Even if I was laid off I am more worried about my children having long term health effects (or worse) than missing a few bills, and that is before considering how flexible lenders are claiming to be (I've gotten emails from all my major bills about covid related help they can provide).
I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid. Yes they have less effects than adults but some children do go to the hospital and ICU. And also they can easily spread it to the parents/grandparents.
It's all about risk. Humans are terrible at understanding probability. There must be a threshold where it becomes ok to take on the risk (e.g. driving a car everyday for most Americans). So where is that threshold?
Another way to think about it is, what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years? What activities do we allow and under what new mode of operation / conditions?
It might be the case that opening schools for younger ages with 2 shifts to reduce density (2 weeks in person, 2 weeks from home) could have an acceptable risk profile.
> Another way to think about it is, what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years? What activities do we allow and under what new mode of operation / conditions?
Then we'd actually put real effort into controlling it so we could go back to life as normal even with the virus not fully eradicated.
The problem with all of these simple "risk profile" analyses is that we as a country are being forced to accept risk we don't have to. With cars, we understand there is some amount of risk but also we as a society also care about those deaths and make tons of regulations and improvements to make driving safer. As such, death rates have fallen over the decades even as miles driven have accelerated.
Whereas with the pandemic we seemingly are just accepting high death rates and hoping for the best instead of putting in the level of effort to fix it. That makes it not just about risk tolerance, but frustration with the level of concern the country is putting into fixing the problem.
I think this is textbook confirmation bias. When you have two seemingly equivalent theories (the threat of C-19 is serious vs overblown), you select the one that is more convenient for your worldview.
Mr. and Mrs. Applecart both have full-time jobs and four children; they don't have time to home-school and wouldn't know how if they did. Their lives would be more functional if the threat is overblown, so they believe the threat is overblown.
Mrs. and Mr. Bandersnatch work in the mining industry. If scientists are correct, the fossil fuel industry is going to lead to climate collapse within about twenty years. Their livelihoods depend on oil extraction. They have a vested interest in being skeptical of scientific authority.
As someone else here pointed out, the study doesn't seem to factor economic security. I bet you would find a very strong correlation between economic security and willingness to keep children at home that would cross political lines.
> what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years?
What societies have done throughout history for diseases like smallpox, polio, malaria, tuberculosis, the flue, etc. Essentially, we learn to accept it.
Yes, I know, eventually a vaccine was found for smallpox, etc., but those diseases had been around for centuries (millennia?). Only very recently have we found ways to deal with them.
> I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid.
Well, it's not that surprising when you have a disease whose harm factor is a function of your age. The vast majority of covid deaths are the elderly. The tiniest minority of covid deaths are young children. Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.
> Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor
Others have mentioned this, but just for emphasis: you do not know that. Nor does anyone else. Repeating it is irresponsible, and you should stop doing that.
There have been a lot of lessons the epidemic can teach us. But one big one is that magical thinking is still accepted as a substitute for reason by a frightening number of people, and that's before you get to the outright grifters.
> Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.
But that's one of the biggest unknowns. While children are at far lower risk of dying, according to data we have, we still don't know about long term health effects and we're finding out new information all the time. And much of that new information doesn't seem great.
Even if the kids are fine, if both parents get sick at the same time it's going to be hell taking care of the kids. Especially when you can't hire outside help due to social distancing requirements.
> Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.
Even if this is true (we already have evidence it's not for some children), it's completely irresponsible to allow schools to open. We know children are infectious and easily spread the disease. There are other members of society besides children. Letting the virus run rampant in schools will lead to parents and other adults getting sick and dying. It's not ok for children to die but if their parents, grandparents, teachers, or parents' friends die it's somehow ok? What kind of logic is that?
Sure, but they can pass it as easily as an adult can (saw a recent paper that said that children under 5 have higher viral loads than adults so they might actually be more infectious). There's a myth that kids can't pass it, but it's only a myth.
> Well, it's not that surprising when you have a disease whose harm factor is a function of your age. The vast majority of covid deaths are the elderly. The tiniest minority of covid deaths are young children. Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.
I think that's assuming that death is the only thing you have to worry about with this disease, and that if you don't die you'll recover and be no worse for wear. That may be a false assumption, and it could be that many children suffer from some kind of long term damage from the disease.
There is absolutely no proof that children will not have long term health impacts that could reverberate for the rest of their lives. There are signs of chronic health repercussions for adults who have been infected. There is no telling yet what we can expect for children as they grow.
People put a lot of weight in early studies from countries that didn’t see outbreaks in schools. My problem with those studies has been: 1) Community spread in those areas was very low. 2) Kids were/are not being tested at anywhere near the same rate as adults. 3) We really have no idea whether there are long term effects in asymptomatic individuals.
Regarding both 2 and 3, kids seem to be largely asymptomatic. That would explain the lower testing rates. People are generally not going to go have their kid swabbed if there’s no apparent reason to do so. But given that asymptomatic adults might have long term negative effects, it seems pretty cavalier to just assume kids won’t. Hopefully they don’t, but we really don’t know.
This type of thinking often gets dismissed as “alarmist”, however a bit of alarm (and an abundance of caution) over a rapidly spreading novel virus is warranted.
(This is my armchair analysis. I’m not a health expert.)
People put a lot of weight into early proprietary models that turned out to be absolute garbage.
> But given that asymptomatic adults might have long term negative effects
Unfortunately, there's no control for these assumptions. People are exposed to all sorts of things over their lifetime. Not everyone produces antibodies, so there will be no definitive way to link any person having an infection and any long term effects. Need to establish the risk compared to existing baseline.
So far, deaths are down for the year, so everyone's switched to 'unknown long term effects.'
> Yes they have less effects than adults but some children do go to the hospital and ICU
You see this kind of vague claim online all the time when it comes to COVID but with no actual data.
What are the actual risks of a child going to the hospital as a result of COVID infection? How does that compare to other risks that you regularly expose your kids to?
The risk in children is from diabetes and metabolic syndrome, conversely what protects children most is a relatively well functioning immune system.
As we've seen that coronavirus immunity is enhanced with exposure to other coronaviruses, and innate immune system function, it appears children should not be isolated. By this rationale, they shouldn't even be wearing masks.
About 1% of detected cases in children require hospitalization. That number of course does not account for undiagnosed, subclinical, and fully asymptomatic cases in children.
Compared to the flu, just looking at the proportion of children who are diagnosed positive cases, children would be about equally as likely to require hospitalization, but this likely overstates the hospitalization risk of COVID.
In terms of death rates, flu is significantly more deadly (at least 10x more deadly) in children 0-14, and about equally as deadly for ages 15-24. [1]
Plus we know nothing about the long term health consequences. Kids may not be dying at a high rate but they may suffer long term heart, lung, or organ damage. It feels like everyone is just assuming that if it isn’t death then it is fine. Just because you survive something doesn’t make you stronger.
Or people are assuming that the long term effects of COVID on children are similar to that of the flu on children, given similar death rates. (Which seems plausible, if you count '10x higher' as 'similar'. Overall, the flu is about 1/30th the IFR of COVID-19, but apparently most of the difference is at older ages)
EDIT: And, in fact, the CDC says that the Flu is more dangerous to healthy children than COVID-19: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm and search for 'children'. Though the CDC may not be a trusted source for many...
I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid.
Those people think "opening the economy" is worth more than human (kid or otherwise) lives. They're either politicians trying to convince an electorate that they didn't fail miserably at their job, or are regular Joes falling victim to disingenuous cable news networks.
I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid
Perhaps people are simply desensitized to kids catching colds & flus? My kid probably brought home twenty different novel coronaviruses, all before his second birthday.
> I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid.
Because we have forgotten how to say to ourselves, "I generally agree with this ideology, but on this subject, I agree with other people." Politics (and this is, sadly, political) is a zero sum game now.
> I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid. Yes they have less effects than adults but some children do go to the hospital and ICU. And also they can easily spread it to the parents/grandparents.
Minimization and denial are powerful psychological forces, and the fact that some children get the condition without severe symptoms lulls some people into complacency.
The fact is that the virus inhabits the lungs, and damages tissue as it replicates. Just because someone isn't having an acute symptomatic response doesn't mean that there couldn't be long term effects from infection.
> The fact is that the virus inhabits the lungs, and damages tissue as it replicates. Just because someone isn't having an acute symptomatic response doesn't mean that there couldn't be long term effects from infection
If this is the way to treat with life, how would you be still alive? Isn’t it the very reason we get ill because the body is treating the virus.
Do you have any source to believe that asymptomatic infected person has long term negative effects from infection?
It’s impossible to force a parent into the choice between working a life-threatening job interacting with the public or eviction so long as they have a child at home.
The parent will not abandon the child home alone to go to work, no matter how big the stick.
School being effectively state subsidized working hours daycare, it must resume before low wage workers can once again be coerced back into risking their lives to avoid homelessness.
> It’s impossible to force a parent into the choice between working a life-threatening job interacting with the public or eviction so long as they have a child at home
Impossible? definitely not. (i would argue this is the exact issue many people in the US face today).
highly immoral and with a total disregard to one's decency or life? absolutely.
Covid-19 might be a major challenge for the society, but individual risks for younger people wothout health issues are still small, at least based on the knowledge we currently have. I am afraid the attitudes described in the article are more due to uninformedness and normal parental anxiousness than anything rational.
I know 7 people now that have had it. The worst affected one had to stay in bed a day, most of the others just lost taste or felt a bit run down. Children had sniffles. 2 were asymptomatic.
> some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid
I mean, that point of view was literally expressed in a public forum by the president of the United States. It must carry weight in some circles at least.
The survey does say just enough about their methods to make it sound like it's not at all something that can be taken all that seriously.
"In a recent survey, we asked about 1,000 parents what their biggest worry amidst the pandemic was, and what we found was a surprise. It turns out that the majority of parents are worried about their families being infected by the virus rather than finding work or paying the mortgage."
I'm not sure why that's surprising. If you ask 1,000 people who have jobs that aren't gone or at immediate risk of going away, then yep, that's exactly what we're going to worry about. There's probably some serious statistical problems there.
Good question, I didn't really mean all those people had jobs, I guess what I really meant was more like if you're not careful in choosing who you ask you'll end up with 1000 people who have safe jobs, or just a way larger percent of people who have safe jobs than do in the general population.
Yup! I’m equally worried about my kids and bringing home the bacon because my travel industry employer is going out of business and I still haven’t found a new job.
People are, statistically speaking, really bad at figuring out what to worry about. See: terrorist attacks, plane crashes, shark attacks, abduction by strangers. So maybe this is good news about the pandemic.
No... that would just imply that it isn’t a useful signal. The case where it would be good is if people were good at worrying about the wrong things. I don’t think that is true, people worry about plenty of legitimate things too.
Are they? Nobody seems to care much about the ordinary flu, though lots still die from it. Hospital acquired infections are a major cause of death, but few worry about that. The most likely causes of death for children are drowning and car accidents, but people worry far more about terrorist incidents. And on it goes.
Worrying about a potentially deadly illness that you can do little about, vs worrying about losing your source of income and having to.. look for another job.
Yep. If you have to spend a week in hospital in the US it can break you even if you have "decent" insurance. Three words that strike terror into the hearts of Americans: "Out of network"
I worried about getting infected a lot back in February or March, so I ordered from Japan and India several different types of medicine with distinct mechanisms of action that were hypothesized to help with the disease. Several of these are in Phase 3 trials now or have had positive RCTs published outside the US. I still wear masks and avoid crowds, but it makes me feel a little better. For the sake of HN's SEO I won't list them out. This did not include the big bad one that was most heavily politicized, but these are also used by hundreds of millions of people per year.
I've personally heard from several tens of parents that they are primarily worried about the economic and social affects of all these so-called safety measures governments and communities are taking. Just because it's easy to measure cases and deaths and hard to measure lost human connection, depression, children being left in environments of neglect, delayed/paused innovation and economic growth, etc. doesn't mean that those costs are less than the loss of life incurred from not being "safe". I would rather my children (and I have 5) grow up not being told they need to be afraid of everything. I would rather they grow up being able to learn with and interact with their peers face to face. And I am absolutely willing to sacrifice possibly a few years of extra time I could have my grandparents around for that. My grandparents are also happy to make that sacrifice so their grandchildren and great grandchildren can grow up in a better world.
We all will die. Can't let a fear of dying prevent us from living.
How about the fact that long term effects are unknown. Or what sort of ongoing medical issues will people have for the rest of their lives?
There is people who believe that once you're done with this virus, it is gone from your system and you're back to normal. Certainly that is the case for many, but there are still many more that will continue to suffer from what they are calling now 'long haulers'.
Spend some time in a large (91k people and growing) Survivors group [0] to get a feeling of what people are facing.
Sure - but the point/principle still applies. Every day we confront unknown risks that we don't fully understand. But we just keep on living. I think we have enough data for people to evaluate their own personal risk and generally take appropriate personal measures for safety. We can and should make efforts to accommodate those who assess their personal risk to be significant. But when you/others ask schools to close - are you really considering what the short-medium-long term costs of those choices really are? I have personally taken neighborhood kids to pick up free lunches offered by schools while they were shut down - because those kids' parents didn't care to take them and neither cared to help them feed themselves. I've seen working parents leave their young children at home because child care logistics and cost were not acceptable for their circumstances. I know kids down the street that are basically ignored by their parents that are not likely to have a healthy structured school environment they can count on.
I believe these hard to measure costs are enormous but easy to ignore because the affected demographic can't fight for their rights/desires - they can't even vote. And privileged SV folks and internet yuppies are happy to drive this line forward. I have friends who have lost their jobs. I have a cousin who has lost their small business. Not because of COVID - but because of the "cure" for COVID.
> According to Makenbach, there are two main issues in dealing with the coronavirus. The first is to what extent this disease, which mainly affects the elderly, should be allowed to damage younger generations who are losing their jobs and falling behind in education, he said. And the second is to what extent the virus and measures against it should be allowed to further increase inequality. Socio-economically vulnerable people are more likely to become seriously ill, and also most disproportionately affected by drastic anti-coronavirus measures, Makenbach said.
It's a sad affair. The measures wouldn't have to be so severe if there wasn't so much noise about it.
A bit of cool headed thought, compliance, and leaders we could trust might have saved our grandparents while ensuring a pretty good upbringing for our children.
Alas, that's not the world we live in. We don't trust anything, the media is busy being sensational, big money only cares about making more money in way possible, our leaders continuely lie to us and foster partisanship and miscommunication.
> And I am absolutely willing to sacrifice possibly a few years of extra time I could have my grandparents around for that. My grandparents are also happy to make that sacrifice so their grandchildren ...
Sigh. I can’t believe this needs to be spelled out for you and your ilk.
There are other people out there beyond your grandparents. Regardless of how you and they personally feel — I don’t want to die just because your personal definition of “living” (hello, a few months of lockdown or similar is still alive) facilitates disease spread. I AM NOT WILLING TO DIE PREMATURELY just so your kids can avoid going a few months without physically engaging peers, or just so you all can avoid having to take simple personal precautions when outside.
Lest anyone accuses me of not understanding without raising children- I am literally holding my sleeping 5 month old as I type this.
It’s not about being told to be afraid of everything (where does this idea come from? literally no one is advocating that). It’s about responding to existing, real dangers with appropriate measures.
I think this is really unfair to OP. Who among us hasn't taken health risks because we enjoy our culture? When I heard about heart disease as the leading cause of death I did not immediately change my diet. I assume many others here did not as well.
And yet isn't not eating bacon a relatively easy step to take so one is around to spend time with family? The answer is not so clear.
One question I have is why you believe lockdowns will help? A vaccine may be approved but it's likely it won't work for obese Americans that make up 40% of the population.
> “Will we have a COVID vaccine next year tailored to the obese? No way,” said Raz Shaikh, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
> “Will it still work in the obese? Our prediction is no.”
> In 2017, scientists at UNC-Chapel Hill provided a critical clue about the limitations of the influenza vaccine. In a paper published in the International Journal of Obesity, they showed for the first time that vaccinated obese adults were twice as likely as adults of a healthy weight to develop influenza or flu-like illness. [0]
This essentially means we are going to have large numbers of cases for the next 3+ years.
But how many people? Should 10,000 kids lose school and all the problems that can avalanche into for the future to save 1 year of 1 life of one person who already has degrading health?
The rest of society is certainly not happy to make that sacrifice for your extreme selfishness and callousness and frankly, we shouldn't have to die because your kids might grow up fearful. What a selfish, disgusting attitude.
Around my city I'm seeing a lot of kids lonely, anxious and unhappy where I've never seen before. My children were really looking forward to school and seeing friends, were crushed when told it wouldn't be happening.
And a lot of adults were similarly disappointed. I mean, aside from the whole possible loss of livelihood and disruption to earning potential thing... I’ve seen adults who were really looking forward to these things that didn’t pan out as planned thanks to COVID:
- professional conferences
- sport games
- concerts
- school reunions
- weddings
- grieving death of elder together with family
- baby showers
- travel/vacations
- birthday parties
- having friends over for support while stuck at home with a newborn (editors note: it me)
It’s been hard of everybody. Maybe this is my perspective from having grown up in poverty/underclass talking- but I don’t get this hand wringing over how hard this is for children in particular.
Seeing their friends. In a mask. Without being allowed to talk or interact with them before, during, or after class.
Sounds fun. The reality of what in-person school looks like isn't anywhere close to what your children are looking forward to.
Our oldest is going into Kindergarten this year. We chose distance learning before that became the only option because we didn't want her first experience with "big girl school" to be something out of Handmaid's Tale.
I think teaching kids to be afraid of disease is one of the few things separating humans from animals. It’s one thing that’s let us survive for so long and build societies.
You perhaps were being sarcastic, but there is truth in the statement. And while it is unpleasant, I think it is an aspect of this pandemic that is worth considering - not necessarily in an of itself, but perhaps as a way to begin discussing our culture's unhealthy view of prolonging life at all costs. I don't want to spend my last days/weeks/months slowly rotting in a hospital bed.
This is a terrible article. It’s subtle clickbait, seemingly designed too discourage constructive discussion while encouraging argumentation.
The choices are ambiguously worded to the point that one could project a spectrum of meanings to them. We know nothing about the sample other than that there are 1000 of them and they are parents. We don’t know where they live. We don’t know whether they’re employed and what their level of employment and financial circumstance is. We don’t know how old they are or how old their children are.
Finally they are asked what their greatest worry is and then they have to choose between three choices or assert that they have no worries at all.
At the same time the completely ambiguous results and ambiguous wording allow anyone who feels like arguing to project their own hopes and fears to the results.
Just stay away from bullsh*t like this. It’s poison.
"Just stay away from bullsh*t like this. It’s poison."
I say that to myself so much when reading any kind of news on the pandemic. The pandemic landing in a US presidential election year has made it at least 3x worse in my opinion.
Readit News
Unless we build a wall around every developing country this will be going on for years.
The economy can bounce back from one quarantine, can it bounce back from 12?
Edit: I can't reply due to rate limiting, but you can't just dismiss the resurgences of cases in Europe because the absolute number of cases is small now - this is exponential growth with a rather alarming exponent, and that always starts out small until it isn't. Remember, it takes the same amount of time to go from say 1 to 2 cases per 10k as from 15 to 30.
There is a sliding scale here, of course. If we locked everybody in their houses, we could get the covid numbers to 0, but it would also completely destroy our economy, and obviously would result in substantial loss of life due to the effects of poverty. What the US has done instead is to take a hit on covid in service of economics. So far it seems to be working (with regards to GDP, I mean.)
Worried about the economy? You probably only want to get rich on the stock market. Worried you might lose your job? You probably have one of those shit-jobs we've been hearing about, no big loss there. Worried remote schooling might affect children's long term development? Schools are useless anyway. Worried that art and culture like concerts, museums, theatres might disappear? We don't need them, just watch operas on Youtube and browse pictures of famous paintings. Travel? Just go to StreetView.
It's scary how quick people are to let go of elements of society and civilisation, some of which took centuries to build. Yes, nothing is perfect but these attitudes are not working towards implementing something better.
> They're 1/5th as worried about the possible deaths of their family members as they are about their mortgage
These two statements seem to be in conflict? I think your 2nd statement means to say "They're 1/5th as worried about their mortgage than they are about the possible deaths of their family members."
We have a bunch of people who are rightfully very worried about their finances, but we also have very many people who are quite certain that their finances are going to be okay while other people will get kicked in the nuts by the downturn resulting in poverty and bankruptcies, so they have other priorities that they are worrying about - such as infection and schooling.
If 1 in 5 people can't pay their mortgage, that's an economic catastrophe - but even if such a catastrophe is upcoming it makes all sense if the other 4 in 5 people wouldn't be worried about paying their mortgage.
I thought we were flattening the curve...
What makes you think this can be eradicated? Source?
Only if you're lucky enough to live in one of the progressive states, Louisiana has already started evicting people. In Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has already released documents saying that local governments can't stop or delay evictions.
We have the technology to revive an economy - remember, we're on an all time stock rally & going higher.
At least from the NZ example (or Canada), it is clear that a war footing on the pandemic does bring back demand - the supply is easier to revive.
The economy is made of people, even if the entire supply side is automated.
Though if you automate both sides, you can end up with a two-body simulation of a high GDP economy[1].
[1] - https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-01-14
Dead Comment
I am just so confused why some people are acting like kids are a different species when it comes to covid. Yes they have less effects than adults but some children do go to the hospital and ICU. And also they can easily spread it to the parents/grandparents.
Another way to think about it is, what do we do if we learn that the pandemic will not end for the next 10 years? What activities do we allow and under what new mode of operation / conditions?
It might be the case that opening schools for younger ages with 2 shifts to reduce density (2 weeks in person, 2 weeks from home) could have an acceptable risk profile.
Then we'd actually put real effort into controlling it so we could go back to life as normal even with the virus not fully eradicated.
The problem with all of these simple "risk profile" analyses is that we as a country are being forced to accept risk we don't have to. With cars, we understand there is some amount of risk but also we as a society also care about those deaths and make tons of regulations and improvements to make driving safer. As such, death rates have fallen over the decades even as miles driven have accelerated.
Whereas with the pandemic we seemingly are just accepting high death rates and hoping for the best instead of putting in the level of effort to fix it. That makes it not just about risk tolerance, but frustration with the level of concern the country is putting into fixing the problem.
Mr. and Mrs. Applecart both have full-time jobs and four children; they don't have time to home-school and wouldn't know how if they did. Their lives would be more functional if the threat is overblown, so they believe the threat is overblown.
Mrs. and Mr. Bandersnatch work in the mining industry. If scientists are correct, the fossil fuel industry is going to lead to climate collapse within about twenty years. Their livelihoods depend on oil extraction. They have a vested interest in being skeptical of scientific authority.
As someone else here pointed out, the study doesn't seem to factor economic security. I bet you would find a very strong correlation between economic security and willingness to keep children at home that would cross political lines.
(yes, I know, confirmation bias cuts both ways)
What societies have done throughout history for diseases like smallpox, polio, malaria, tuberculosis, the flue, etc. Essentially, we learn to accept it.
Yes, I know, eventually a vaccine was found for smallpox, etc., but those diseases had been around for centuries (millennia?). Only very recently have we found ways to deal with them.
Well, it's not that surprising when you have a disease whose harm factor is a function of your age. The vast majority of covid deaths are the elderly. The tiniest minority of covid deaths are young children. Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor, not the disease itself.
Others have mentioned this, but just for emphasis: you do not know that. Nor does anyone else. Repeating it is irresponsible, and you should stop doing that.
There have been a lot of lessons the epidemic can teach us. But one big one is that magical thinking is still accepted as a substitute for reason by a frightening number of people, and that's before you get to the outright grifters.
But that's one of the biggest unknowns. While children are at far lower risk of dying, according to data we have, we still don't know about long term health effects and we're finding out new information all the time. And much of that new information doesn't seem great.
Even if this is true (we already have evidence it's not for some children), it's completely irresponsible to allow schools to open. We know children are infectious and easily spread the disease. There are other members of society besides children. Letting the virus run rampant in schools will lead to parents and other adults getting sick and dying. It's not ok for children to die but if their parents, grandparents, teachers, or parents' friends die it's somehow ok? What kind of logic is that?
I think that's assuming that death is the only thing you have to worry about with this disease, and that if you don't die you'll recover and be no worse for wear. That may be a false assumption, and it could be that many children suffer from some kind of long term damage from the disease.
Regarding both 2 and 3, kids seem to be largely asymptomatic. That would explain the lower testing rates. People are generally not going to go have their kid swabbed if there’s no apparent reason to do so. But given that asymptomatic adults might have long term negative effects, it seems pretty cavalier to just assume kids won’t. Hopefully they don’t, but we really don’t know.
This type of thinking often gets dismissed as “alarmist”, however a bit of alarm (and an abundance of caution) over a rapidly spreading novel virus is warranted.
(This is my armchair analysis. I’m not a health expert.)
> But given that asymptomatic adults might have long term negative effects
Unfortunately, there's no control for these assumptions. People are exposed to all sorts of things over their lifetime. Not everyone produces antibodies, so there will be no definitive way to link any person having an infection and any long term effects. Need to establish the risk compared to existing baseline.
So far, deaths are down for the year, so everyone's switched to 'unknown long term effects.'
You see this kind of vague claim online all the time when it comes to COVID but with no actual data.
What are the actual risks of a child going to the hospital as a result of COVID infection? How does that compare to other risks that you regularly expose your kids to?
As we've seen that coronavirus immunity is enhanced with exposure to other coronaviruses, and innate immune system function, it appears children should not be isolated. By this rationale, they shouldn't even be wearing masks.
Compared to the flu, just looking at the proportion of children who are diagnosed positive cases, children would be about equally as likely to require hospitalization, but this likely overstates the hospitalization risk of COVID.
In terms of death rates, flu is significantly more deadly (at least 10x more deadly) in children 0-14, and about equally as deadly for ages 15-24. [1]
[1] - https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/07/14/coronavirus-covid-death...
I'm not anti-vax, but anti-vaxers use this same tactic; they use ambiguity to breed fear against vaccines.
I get that some unknowns are dangerous, but there has to be a limit, right? We can't be afraid of everything we don't know.
EDIT: And, in fact, the CDC says that the Flu is more dangerous to healthy children than COVID-19: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm and search for 'children'. Though the CDC may not be a trusted source for many...
Those people think "opening the economy" is worth more than human (kid or otherwise) lives. They're either politicians trying to convince an electorate that they didn't fail miserably at their job, or are regular Joes falling victim to disingenuous cable news networks.
What about the long term health consequences of poverty? At least those are known.
Perhaps people are simply desensitized to kids catching colds & flus? My kid probably brought home twenty different novel coronaviruses, all before his second birthday.
Because we have forgotten how to say to ourselves, "I generally agree with this ideology, but on this subject, I agree with other people." Politics (and this is, sadly, political) is a zero sum game now.
Minimization and denial are powerful psychological forces, and the fact that some children get the condition without severe symptoms lulls some people into complacency.
The fact is that the virus inhabits the lungs, and damages tissue as it replicates. Just because someone isn't having an acute symptomatic response doesn't mean that there couldn't be long term effects from infection.
If this is the way to treat with life, how would you be still alive? Isn’t it the very reason we get ill because the body is treating the virus.
Do you have any source to believe that asymptomatic infected person has long term negative effects from infection?
That was what the Chinese data said - they had fewer cases so presumably they didn't see the full range of possibilities.
The parent will not abandon the child home alone to go to work, no matter how big the stick.
School being effectively state subsidized working hours daycare, it must resume before low wage workers can once again be coerced back into risking their lives to avoid homelessness.
Impossible? definitely not. (i would argue this is the exact issue many people in the US face today).
highly immoral and with a total disregard to one's decency or life? absolutely.
It's a failing of the government that so many Americans have to face this choice.
I mean, that point of view was literally expressed in a public forum by the president of the United States. It must carry weight in some circles at least.
Dead Comment
"In a recent survey, we asked about 1,000 parents what their biggest worry amidst the pandemic was, and what we found was a surprise. It turns out that the majority of parents are worried about their families being infected by the virus rather than finding work or paying the mortgage."
I'm not sure why that's surprising. If you ask 1,000 people who have jobs that aren't gone or at immediate risk of going away, then yep, that's exactly what we're going to worry about. There's probably some serious statistical problems there.
If I have a steady job, then of course I will worry more about my kids -- because I don't don't have to worry about the bills!
If you have kids you will worry about their safety.
If you lost your job, you may still worry about their safety more than your bills, since you know that the bills can always be dealt with later.
This survey seems quite flawed.
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I'm definitely more worried about infection, too.
Financial problems are, aslong as the basic needs are met (food, water, housing etc) purely a societal problem.
A disease with a deadly track record and no cure is far worse and is something you or anybody else in society has little to no control over.
We all will die. Can't let a fear of dying prevent us from living.
How about the fact that long term effects are unknown. Or what sort of ongoing medical issues will people have for the rest of their lives?
There is people who believe that once you're done with this virus, it is gone from your system and you're back to normal. Certainly that is the case for many, but there are still many more that will continue to suffer from what they are calling now 'long haulers'.
Spend some time in a large (91k people and growing) Survivors group [0] to get a feeling of what people are facing.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/groups/COVID19survivorcorps/
I believe these hard to measure costs are enormous but easy to ignore because the affected demographic can't fight for their rights/desires - they can't even vote. And privileged SV folks and internet yuppies are happy to drive this line forward. I have friends who have lost their jobs. I have a cousin who has lost their small business. Not because of COVID - but because of the "cure" for COVID.
> According to Makenbach, there are two main issues in dealing with the coronavirus. The first is to what extent this disease, which mainly affects the elderly, should be allowed to damage younger generations who are losing their jobs and falling behind in education, he said. And the second is to what extent the virus and measures against it should be allowed to further increase inequality. Socio-economically vulnerable people are more likely to become seriously ill, and also most disproportionately affected by drastic anti-coronavirus measures, Makenbach said.
https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/06/netherlands-dealing-coronaviru...
Alas, that's not the world we live in. We don't trust anything, the media is busy being sensational, big money only cares about making more money in way possible, our leaders continuely lie to us and foster partisanship and miscommunication.
Sigh. I can’t believe this needs to be spelled out for you and your ilk.
There are other people out there beyond your grandparents. Regardless of how you and they personally feel — I don’t want to die just because your personal definition of “living” (hello, a few months of lockdown or similar is still alive) facilitates disease spread. I AM NOT WILLING TO DIE PREMATURELY just so your kids can avoid going a few months without physically engaging peers, or just so you all can avoid having to take simple personal precautions when outside.
Lest anyone accuses me of not understanding without raising children- I am literally holding my sleeping 5 month old as I type this.
It’s not about being told to be afraid of everything (where does this idea come from? literally no one is advocating that). It’s about responding to existing, real dangers with appropriate measures.
And yet isn't not eating bacon a relatively easy step to take so one is around to spend time with family? The answer is not so clear.
One question I have is why you believe lockdowns will help? A vaccine may be approved but it's likely it won't work for obese Americans that make up 40% of the population.
> “Will we have a COVID vaccine next year tailored to the obese? No way,” said Raz Shaikh, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
> “Will it still work in the obese? Our prediction is no.”
> In 2017, scientists at UNC-Chapel Hill provided a critical clue about the limitations of the influenza vaccine. In a paper published in the International Journal of Obesity, they showed for the first time that vaccinated obese adults were twice as likely as adults of a healthy weight to develop influenza or flu-like illness. [0]
This essentially means we are going to have large numbers of cases for the next 3+ years.
[0] https://ctmirror.org/2020/08/09/americas-obesity-epidemic-th...
- professional conferences - sport games - concerts - school reunions - weddings - grieving death of elder together with family - baby showers - travel/vacations - birthday parties - having friends over for support while stuck at home with a newborn (editors note: it me)
It’s been hard of everybody. Maybe this is my perspective from having grown up in poverty/underclass talking- but I don’t get this hand wringing over how hard this is for children in particular.
Sounds fun. The reality of what in-person school looks like isn't anywhere close to what your children are looking forward to.
Our oldest is going into Kindergarten this year. We chose distance learning before that became the only option because we didn't want her first experience with "big girl school" to be something out of Handmaid's Tale.
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The choices are ambiguously worded to the point that one could project a spectrum of meanings to them. We know nothing about the sample other than that there are 1000 of them and they are parents. We don’t know where they live. We don’t know whether they’re employed and what their level of employment and financial circumstance is. We don’t know how old they are or how old their children are.
Finally they are asked what their greatest worry is and then they have to choose between three choices or assert that they have no worries at all.
At the same time the completely ambiguous results and ambiguous wording allow anyone who feels like arguing to project their own hopes and fears to the results.
Just stay away from bullsh*t like this. It’s poison.
I say that to myself so much when reading any kind of news on the pandemic. The pandemic landing in a US presidential election year has made it at least 3x worse in my opinion.