Kind of hard to cherry pick reports that don’t exist. If the reports you claim exist are so well-publicized, then quit making baseless claims and publicize them here.
Show your cards, or step away from the table.
Hopefully, we’re not talking “we can never get together again” – if we have any luck at all, by this time next year, we may be starting to have something that’s starting to get back to normal.
Also, for the record, I’ve been battling depression for months, in part due to not being able to safely see my friends and family; my mother is also fighting depression. People are lonely, and they’re sick of this shit. I GET IT.
Let us say, for argument’s sake, that you decide, “a little risk is worth it,” and you start going back to a normal social life – going to bars, going to restaurants, having a game night at your friends’ houses, etc. And, people being people, maybe you’re not wearing masks, or you’re sitting substantially closer than 6’ for an extended time, and/or you’re indoors with them for a while. Just a little risk, you think, but you really miss living a normal life, so it’s worth it, yes?
And, maybe nothing happens. But, maybe one of the people at the bar, or one of your friends, is asymptomatically contagious, or is just coming down with it, or, even worse, they’re a “super-spreader.” So, you come down with it. But, maybe you are asymptomatic, or you are contagious for a few days before you start feeling sick. And even if you don’t get seriously ill, you could wind up giving it to one of your friends, or one of your family members, or someone who just happens to be sitting in the next booth over at the restaurant – and that person gets really sick, and maybe even dies.
Is that worth it? Because that’s the calculus that the “it’s my right to decide for myself” people are willfully ignoring.
Also, TBH, if we had a country in which people were religious about wearing masks and socially distancing, it wouldn’t be this big of a fucking issue. But, the whole damned issue has become a lighting rod for the scientifically ignorant, and those who are willing to let certain leaders make it a matter of perceived political freedom.
Say Two, if you’ve got a plan than enables you to endanger your own health without endangering the health of others, you might persuade me to change my mind…although I would much prefer you didn’t endanger your own health either.
Well, I suppose that plan would be right in line after the one that allows people to sacrifice their own wellbeing – with all that entails, in the way of not only physical and mental health but also livelihood and purpose – without endangering the wellbeing of others.
Neither plan exists. And that’s a recognition that seems to be sorely missing from one of the perspectives in this debate. There are no silver bullets here. There are no solutions that can eliminate all suffering of every kind. We are eventually going to have to face that reality, in a mature and sober way, and figure out how to put the pieces back together. And things like ‘it makes me want to take a bat to their teeth’ are, I think it’s safe to say, not going to help in the least.
There are some plans that are better than others…but you seem to want the end result, “such as the schools in European countries that are back in session now or perhaps never closed in the first place, without much collateral damage” for free. Sorry, but if you want those kinds of results, then you’ve got to be willing to pay the price they willingly payed.
Oh, there is certainly no question that I think those Europeans are doing it right and we’re doing it wrong, and I apologize if I did anything to not give that impression. I am not aware of any evidence that in opening their schools they have paid any price at all, meaning that the populations in the schools have not been infected, and certainly not seriously diseased, at any greater rate than the same kinds of populations outside the schools.
Things don’t seem to be going as well as you envision them in Europe:
And when it comes to schools, they don’t seem to be as certain as you seem to be about their results:
edited to add: Did you ever find all those reports you said existed that support your point of view?
Here is one such report:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden-schools-idUSKCN24G2IS
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden’s decision to keep schools open during the pandemic resulted in no higher rate of infection among its schoolchildren than in neighbouring Finland, where schools did temporarily close, their public health agencies said in a joint report.
The report, which has not been peer-reviewed, found that during the period of February 24 to June 14, there were 1,124 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among children in Sweden, around 0.05% of the total number of children aged 1-19. Finland recorded 584 cases in the same period, also equivalent to around 0.05%.
“In conclusion, (the) closure or not of schools had no measurable direct impact on the number of laboratory confirmed cases in school-aged children in Finland or Sweden,” the agencies said in the report, published last week.
The report showed that severe cases of COVID-19 were very rare among both Swedish and Finnish children aged 1 to 19, with no deaths reported. A comparison of the incidence of COVID-19 in different professions suggested no increased risk for teachers.
Note the bolded part at the end, which addresses the teachers as well.
That article is from the 15th of July. How are they doing lately?
My understanding is that it’s about the same. Any reason you think it wouldn’t be?
Actually, there is a way to socialize without endangering others. Only socialize once every two weeks. If I only go to [bar, church, game night, family reunion] once, then isolate two weeks, I can be reasonably sure that I’m not spreading it to anybody else next time I go out.
That study is a bunch of BS. Adults in ICU are no longer contagious. Of course children with COVID will be more contagious than someone who is not contagious at all.
Maybe start. No, nothing you posted supports the claim you make. More nothing is still nothing.
Schools have been open more like 6 weeks now. As covered in the thread devoted to the subject, over the weeks after opening there has been no surge of community transmissions associated with districts and regions that have opened over ones that have not. Only data available shows that teachers have lower infection rates than other adults in their region. Even in crowded conditions like in India children are not spreading to adults in big numbers (an infected child index case has child contacts infected but very few adult contacts infected, and an infected child contact was usually tied to an adult index case). Data from Italy at the peak showed kids, effective transmitters or ineffective, less frequently having asymptomatic infections than adults, ruling out the potential for huge numbers of “silent spreaders”. There REMAINS no evidence that supports kids as drivers of infections in the community or even to teachers in numbers higher than community rates.
But all that is a hijack here. Conflating open schools (no evidence of harms from opening and strong evidence of harms from not) with opening bars ( huge evidence of risks with fewer harms to society overall by keeping shut) is silly. No way that schools should be closed from in person with bars open, but that has been the prioritization made in many regions.
Because staying locked down is not sustainable and we have not had the leadership or space in discussion that allows for a rational graduated process of opening up that which has the least risk for the most benefit first and holding off on that with more risk and less benefit. The discussion instead is declarations of faith all shut or all open and given that choice few leaders will opt for all shut with no end in sight.
I’m skeptical. I just checked the number of total confirmed cases per capita for July 1st. Sweden had 5 times as many as Finland. Are we saying that the rate of infections was 5 times as much among the general population, but equal among children of school age? That just doesn’t add up.
The expression “There’s something fishy in Denmark” almost applies here.
Your understanding?
Based on what?
Based on the reports I’ve read and I continue to read.
I assume you have read reports about, or seen graphs that indicate, the course of the epidemic in the respective countries. Again, is there any reason you have to think that the situation now, or in the past couple months, would be markedly different than the situation throughout the first several months of the ordeal, when cases were probably a hundred times or so what they are now? What, they seemed to have survived while things were raging, but let’s withhold judgment until they can keep surviving for a long time while it’s relatively tame?
I’m sure there are facets of that study that deserve scrutiny, as @Monocracy has pointed out. I’m not sure, however, that the fact that it’s from mid-July is any reason at all to discount it. In fact, I’m not even sure I know what you are getting at.
The article compared infection rates in schoolchildren, but the question isn’t about the kids- we know that they don’t necessarily get sick even though they can spread it like crazy.
So the real question that the article doesn’t address is whether or not those kids are spreading it more readily in Sweden than Finland to adults.
Illinois has been fairly strict about Covid, and Chicago particularly so. Not as strict as New York, but stricter than most. Mask-wearing has been both mandatory and routine since all but the earliest weeks. The governor and mayor, alongside each one’s public health director, have updated the public daily on Covid.
But Illinois and Chicago have somewhat softened their Covid regulations over the months, while keeping a firm eye on the numbers and being willing to reinstate some regulations as the data required. For instance, limited indoor dining and gyms opened up some months ago, though significantly later in Chicago than statewide. Limited indoor bars have opened, but then closed and opened again (and in some areas have closed again) over the months as needed.
Are the Illinois governor and Chicago mayor “reckless, stupid and not a little bit insane” because they’re not mandating the same countermeasures they were in mid-March?
Did the entire state attend the wedding? There were only 10 covid related deaths in Maine for all of August and 9 in September.
6 of the 7 deaths were in a nursing home in Madison, ME. None of the victims attended the wedding.