It sounds more like “less shitty” than “flourished.”
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I didn’t write the headline. Take it up with Jeff Bezos.
Or because it would be near impossible to calculate.
You’d have to identify the grandparents and ideally you’d want to have some sort of adjustment for how often the kids see their grandparents. Maybe grandma lives in the same home as the kid. Maybe grandma lives 2,500 miles away and they only visit once or twice a year. Maybe grandma died 10 years ago.
Vaccination status, age, prior health conditions and more would all factor in as well. And the average age of the grandparents probably is correlated with the income of the school district. Vaccination rate would correlate with political slant… you certainly couldn’t assume any sort of a random distribution.
It’d be hard to draw meaningful conclusions from grandparent mortality without taking all of the relevant factors into account and that would be a very complex study.
I’m not too surprised by the article (although i appreciate you posting it). I’m not surprised that an affluent school district did ok not masking. I suspect most of those parents had paid time off when they got sick, had good access to healthcare, etc. It’s not clear to me what we are supposed to learn from that.
Based on my own anecdotal experience, i think there was probably not enough cost assigned to children missing in class instruction, especially in the first year of the pandemic.
But i think far too much cost was assigned to wearing masks. Again anecdotally, the vast majority of kids do just fine with masks. I think a lot of parents modeled resentment towards mask wearing for their kids, and that is what made them so unhappy wearing them.
And masks decrease the risk of children missing in person learning because it slows the spread of covid through both students and faculty.
We’re close to 1M dead of covid in the post two years. An awful lot of those people were someone’s grandparents. It’s a remarkable number of deaths.
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Yes, it is a remarkable number of deaths. But you can stop blaming kids going to school. That has not significantly driven the number of deaths at any point in the pandemic.
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I don’t think we actually know what does and doesn’t increase deaths. The data are extremely muddy. The only thing that really seems clear in the data is that the first wave hit the big liberal cities hard, and since then deaths by county have been strongly correlated with “% voted for Trump”. Is that all vaccination? Is some of it a correlation between politics and other behavior?
Anyway, i agree with @magillaG that while the cost of keeping kids out of school was enormous, there remains a weird overestimate of the cost assigned to wearing masks.
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That may very well be true, but it’s only overshadowed by the weird, huge overestimate of the benefit assigned to wearing masks.
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This may be true if we define the expected benefit using a propensity definition of probability. In other words, it may be that if we knew everything about covid, we would understand that children really are at low risk, and don’t spread it well.
But i don’t see how this can possibly be true using a degree-of-belief definition of probability. We simply do not understand the long term consequences of covid on children very well, nor do we know how well they spread it. I know that some pediatricians are very concerned about the long term effect of covid on children’s hearts. And the frequency and severity of long term covid in children and adults is not well measured or understood. This creates a “thick tail” in the probabilistic cost of covid, which in turn creates a relatively large expected benefit of masks.
I don’t believe the argument against masks really depended on evidence at all. I never saw any serious evidence presented. Rather it depended on a psychological and political need to deny that this “thick tail” of probable covid costs existed at all.
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You’re begging the question.
I don’t think i am.
My argument depends on us poorly understanding the risks of covid, but also that there is some reasonable evidence those risks exists. If that isn’t true, then my argument isn’t true. I’m not going to bother posting that evidence.
I will agree that there are some individuals who are scared by this thick tail or covid risk, and have a psychological need for masking to give them a sense of control. Again, I do not think this is really a matter of evidence. But practically, these people give too much benefit to masking. There is probably an argument that this kind of thinking has influenced policy in some cases, for example through teachers unions. However, i do not think it has taken a central role in policy setting, the way that non-evidence based psychological needs have for policymakers against masking.
Well, if there is heart damage to kids from covid, I suppose we’ll see the impact in 40 years, when they start to hit their heart-attack prone years. Or, some of you may see it, I suppose I won’t be around to learn the results of that experiment.
I have a friend who has been completely quarantined since the pandemic (like, he’s still having groceries delivered and hasn’t seen anyone face-to-face except his children and grandchildren for 2 years, now) because he’s trying to protect his grandchildren from heart damage. He’s told me he will emerge after all his grandchildren are vaccinated.
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My expectation is that the vast majority of children will get it at some point in their life, vaccinated or not, so a lot of the mitigation is delay, not prevent. Does not feel like that helps much if we are measuring cost as potential problems decades in the future.
There is the argument that getting covid vaccinated is less risky that getting it unvaccinated.
This was one of my frustrations with some schools opening unmasked in september 2021. A vaccine for children was right on the horizon. Why not wait 4 more months (at the most) and let them get it vaccinated? I didn’t see how the cost of masking possibly justified opening unmasked.
If there had been no potential for a vaccine, then i would have seen more merit in opening unmasked. To your point, they are going to get it eventually, and if anything risk seems to increase with age.
That is a valid point about lower risk if vaxxed, though don’t think we know how well it helps with potential long term effects
My kids schools came back with mask mandates, and actually had pressure the other way with some parents wanting more remote options. The mask mandate went away on Monday: my son says about 80 percent of kids still wear them, and half of teachers. Will be interested to see how that changes over time.
I think Marcie’s point is that mask mandates don’t slow the spread since cloth masks aren’t very good and kids probably aren’t wearing masks correctly anyway.
Certainly anything that actually slows the spread is in a different category than something which accomplishes precisely nothing.
Marcie has also argued the masks interfere with oxygen levels.
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I would argue this is still not begging the question. To wonder whether that is true is not identical to wondering whether people are overestimating the benefits of masks.
There is an argument that basically goes: mask efficacy is approximately 0. Therefore, the benefits are approximately 0.
I don’t consider this to be an evidence based position. The only evidence i have ever seen for this are tweets, and either misunderstandings or intentional misrepresentations of the technical phrase “not statistically significant.”
I agree. It could be we look back at this with more knowledge, and decide masking was not necessary. But i think masking was the right decision given the information available at the time.
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