It is RSV immunity debt that worries me. I think it's an example of our poor capability for risk analysis. I talk to so many parents here in California that are terrified of covid for their kids. So they still limit activities. But statistically kids have very, very low risk. RSV, and even flu, on the other hand are more dangerous for kids and any immunity debt may make that worse.
It reminds me of how few parents realize the statistical risk of kids in cars versus how rare abduction is (if kid walks alone to school as an alternative to a car, for example). Again it is emotional/anecdotal thinking rather than data.
The car thing is very frustrating. It's the most dangerous thing most parents do with their kids (myself included) but for the most part we're blind to it.
Of course, pedestrian deaths have shot through through roof in the US and that makes it harder to justify walking to school.
It's a purely emotional response about what a parent can control. Driving the kids to school, you have some control over the situation; e.g. you can swerve out of the way of a potential accident. When they walk alone to school, there is nothing you can do to help them or prevent accidents from happening and that lack of control opens up the imagination to all sorts of scary things.
I didn't check your pedestrian deaths during the daytime statistics, but ~4 per day would be ~1400 a year. I did check the number of mass shooting victims, and in 2019 (the most recent year for which data is really meaningful) the total was 180 (~.5 a day), of which 71 were deaths (~.2 a day)[1], or about 20x less likely than getting killed by a car during the daytime.
That's pedantic, but I just wanted to clarify because mass shootings are also in the news.
While it’s possible and maybe even likely that I overrate my own driving ability, I’ve never been in an accident in 20+ years and drive in a paranoid, defensive, assume-everyone-is-crazy style that I feel must push the statistics in my favor quite a bit.
So despite statistics I tend to worry more about other things. I also have a hard time with my 3 year old daughter being driven by others unless I’ve seen their driving firsthand. There are people I know who I flat out won’t allow to drive her and it has created some awkward situations. I will also only let her go in an Uber/taxi if there’s no other option.
The world is bigger than the USA. The chances of getting caught in a mass shooting are lower than you are estimating, and pedestrians are more impacted by automobiles.
Your numbers and statements seem logical but can you provide any datasets to support? I’m slightly surprised a random mass shooting would be a higher likelihood than something automotive related.
It has to do with at what percentile of wary and being good drivers we think we are. Also abduction is not the only risk for children.
I believe that often than not people do the right thing, if it something done in mass there is a reason for it and it is just hard to pin point the reason.
There can be social reasons for it, also we don't know if there is some implicit higher chances of getting abducted for kids who get drove to school. Like them walking to school will increase the chance of them abducted.
That sense of control is a dangerous illusion, though. Cars move way too fast for people to be able to react when something unexpected happens. Drivers included.
> That sense of control is a dangerous illusion, though. Cars move way too fast for people to be able to react when something unexpected happens. Drivers included.
That's a dangerous fatalistic (literally) assumption. One must train and practice car control. Which unfortunately isn't required in the US, but training is available for those who seek it.
A driver can most certainly safely control mostly any slide or emergency manouver. But it does take training and regular practice.
I regularly drive on Hwy 17 (a windy highway in the hills just south of silicon valley) and have witnessed countless times cars which start to slide and the driver panics and doesn't know what to do so they end up crashing. But watching the slide, all of them would've been easy to control by a driver exposed to a decent amount of car control training. It's unfortunate we allow people to drive without requiring car control school and frequent referesher training.
I tried to explain the fact that covid risk comes in many levels to someone I'm living with by referencing the risk we take on by driving, and she just immediately jumped to drunk driving. I guess people find it uncomfortable to live with the fact that there's a small but nonzero chance of dying.
If you take out 18 and 19 years old, that is no longer true.
We have way too many firearm deaths in this country but the way these studies choose their age ranges always feel like folks are in search of the conclusion they desire.
Not really a discussion I particularly want to get into, but many people think “an increase in suicides” should be counted as a negative consequence of firearms.
I think we can be more nuanced and discuss casual relationships for suicide and those for homicide and recognize that there are many differences. If we aggregate the two we will likely have bad policy and be inefficient at fixing either.
Regardless, from the POV of day to day risky things, none of this crap matters.
All of these "average risks" people are slinging back and fourth like idiots are dominated by outliers who are engaged in specific behaviors that have a strong causal link to that means of death. Said outliers drag up the average making it completely unrepresentative of the typical person's risk.
Don't drive drunk, don't pedestrian while drunk, don't get involved in drug industry business disputes and don't let mental illness go untreated and you will almost certainly not get killed by a car or bullet.
Depends if those lives were genuinely a net negative due to suffering.
How many people suffer longer than they should due to lack of access to suicide? I suspect the answer is "fewer than commit suicide due to temporary and fixable chemical imbalances and an easily available gun" but the question should be asked and evidence gathered.
This somewhat begs the question that there are the same rates of suicides in the two areas you are mentioning. So, no, it is not intentionally misleading, but it does need more data to show it is meaningful.
> This somewhat begs the question that there are the same rates of suicides in the two areas you are mentioning.
It’s not hard to find examples; Japan has a much higher rate of suicide. No guns.
Almost universally, men use guns or hanging, depending on what’s locally available.
> So, no, it is not intentionally misleading
They’re juking the stats to be able to make proclamations like “guns are the leading cause of death for children”.
When most people hear that, panic bells start ringing. They assume this means school shootings are killing an incredible number of children each year. This is a crisis!
People don’t realize that to manufacture that number, activists had to extend “children” to 19 years old, and include “suicide”.
It’s intentionally misleading.
If only they’d dedicate the same energy to exploring why our educational and cultural institutions are failing teenagers so spectacularly that they’re suiciding at unprecedented rates.
I'll grant it can be misleading. I don't think it necessarily is. I say this as someone that has had gun suicides in the family. I also have Saturday Night Special running through my head, now...
I don't understand the fixation that counting kids as up to 19 and including suicide is somehow a concern. Seems generally alarming that people under 21 is that high for this statistic, period.
Edit3: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/suicide is an interesting source on this. I find it amusing that they are able to have articles that mention limiting access to pesticides as an effective way to reduce suicides, but don't look at limiting access to guns. It is listed in the top three methods. (Sadly, I'm stepping away from computer for a while now. Will be delighted to engage more on this later, but will probably be a day or so before I remember to check back here.)
Maybe it was _much_ higher a very long time ago, but it has been on a downwards path for a long time. And the US's on an upwards path... for so long that it has actually past Japan. So not only is Japan's suicide rate not _much_ higher, but it has been, for a few years, slightly lower.
> This somewhat begs the question that there are the same rates of suicides in the two areas you are mentioning
I think if you look at gun deaths and suicide you're going to have significant autocorrelation. 60% of gun deaths are suicide, so the data is baked in. But I have another correlation that may be more fruitful and interesting. It isn't 1 to 1, but there is significant overlap with (per capita normalized) overdoses[0] and gun death rates[1]. We'd have to dig deeper, but I think it wouldn't be surprising to find that rates of gun suicide and overdoses has many similar root causal factors. The north east seems to be the biggest mismatch
I'm not sure what you are claiming. Seems safe to assume that suicides do correlate in numbers. Question is if they substitute in magnitude.
That is, if it isn't 1:1 in correlation, then it is reasonable that you can prevent suicides by limiting access to guns. Just as you can prevent suicides by limiting access to drugs.
> That is, if it isn't 1:1 in correlation, then it is reasonable that you can prevent suicides by limiting access to guns.
The problem here is you're assuming that there's a singular dominant causal factor. You don't need a one-to-one relationship for either a weak or strong causal relationship.
On the other hand, what I'm claiming is that there are causal relationships between gun suicides and drug overdoses. That solving one will help solve another if we look at the causes from a standpoint beyond the first order viewpoint. We need to ask why people are depressed and what in society is causing that. I'm sure you'll recognize that this issue is likely rather complex. I think you'll agree that getting to the root of this issue will save more lives overall (some people will for sure just choose an alternative method of suicide -- such as drugs -- though you are also likely to save a few that are acting in the moment and getting a gun -- which is why waiting periods can be helpful. But either way, they are still depressed, which is a problem we need to solve).
From the studies I'm seeing, limit access to the means of suicide, and you reduce suicides. Do you eliminate them? No, but a reduction is still a reduction.
Note most of the studies I saw were not about guns, but pesticides. I see no reason to think they would not apply similarly. Would be nice to see studies in them.
Now, should we /also/ try and tackle more issues down the chain? Yes. Not sure why this has to be a "pick one" scenario.
> There’s no evidence of correlation or a causal link between guns and suicides.
There's definitely evidence of correlation. But the thing is that there are clearly other factors. Access to guns is definitely a causal variable (you can't shoot someone unless you have a gun) but the question is if it is weak or strong. I think it is pretty clear that this is a weak causal variable. It's clearly naive to think that simply having a gun makes one more likely to murder someone or kill yourself. Similarly women do not are not subject to gun deaths (suicide nor homicide: killer or victim) at nearly the same rate as men when controlling for household ownership.
This is why I've encouraged people to look at a more complex picture. Clearly suicide, homicide, and mass shootings have different principle causal variables. There's definitely overlap as well. People are comparing to European countries and Australia simply based on number of guns. But this ignores a lot of other factors like access to health care, household debt, trust in government, social mobility, and many other things. The US consumes far more opioids per capita than European countries. We also have higher suicide rates. I'm willing to bet that there's some coupling relationships here.
But I agree it is misleading to lump homicide and suicide together. There's plenty of statistical paradoxes that depend on aggregating data that shouldn't be aggregated. If we over-aggregate data we'll have no hope of solving any of these issues. I'd make the argument that it is of the upmost importance that we be nuanced in these conversations and communicate in good faith. We must have self doubt in our own models. It is a complex problem, we've been handcuffed in obtaining data (forcing aggregation), and people with agendas are trying to oversimplify the problem and have us make decisions based purely on emotions. We live in the information age yet it is sad we have so little here and think so broadly about this problem. It is getting people killed.
One thing to note is that there's a pretty decent overlap between gun deaths/capita and drug overdoses/capita
Does shooting up some place count on the suicide figures, almost always it's going to be a decision to die (you might not die, but surely death of an 'active shooter' is the expected outcome).
Every single child (and people under 18 are just that: children) dying because their parents couldn't be arsed to follow even the most basic gun safety laws is one too much. Toddlers shooting themselves with the gun that their reckless father left under the pillow? Even in countries with very liberal attitudes to guns such as Switzerland don't have that problem.
Not to mention, the cutoff at age 18 is obvious because most people have finished education at that age - and the most shootings happen at high school.
So in a country with around 75 million under-18s, that works out to an approximate risk of 1/500,000 per kid per year. And per the article:
> The most likely age group to be both shooters and victims are teenagers ages 14 to 17
Maybe we should make firearms safety and hunters education classes once again part of the school curriculum to prevent these accidents? Just like with driving classes, training and experience in a controlled environment is a great way to reduce the frequency of accidents. Although that assumes the incidents in question are accidents, rather than "accidents".
Firearm deaths and vehicle deaths, particularly vehicles killing pedestrians, both are more likely to befall poor people, which is correlated with certain ethnic groups in the US. Though a well-designed city is nearly the safest you can be in terms of places to walk.
Regarding the "your", I bet vehicle collision related deaths are more randomly distributed than homicides and unintentional shootings of children (and probably firearm suicides too, for that matter).
That last link is so upsetting. Not just because of the racial composition, but also because of the assailant/victim ratio being 25/220, which means an average of 11 victims per assailant.
The homicide clearance rate in Chicago is at or under 50% and approximately 50% of those identified as assailants had no charges filed against them. This implies the assailant figures may be 4x under represented. Who knows?
Double false. First's it's not true. #1 and #2 are Texas and Californa
Second, unless you at least divide by population the comparisons are meaningless. A state with 1 person in it is going to have less death in general than a state with a million people
Dividing by population the top 10 are
Mississippi
Louisiana
Wyoming
Missouri
Alabama
Alaska
New Mexico
Arkansas
South Carolina
Tennessee
> it correlates stronger with income than anything else
If it were only income, we wouldn't see reductions in deaths from mild gun-control law (like banning high-capacity, automatic "assault-style" weapons) within the same state.
We also wouldn't have seen the large increase in gun deaths after such laws were invalidated, and we have seen that[1].
So income is certainly some component of it, but access to untracked, powerful firearms is a big component of it.
Just a quick point of correction, not to derail the conversation, but "automatic" weapons have been heavily restricted since 1934. Buying one requires a tax stamp, background check (even if private sale), notifying the ATF of where the weapon is at all times, and giving the ATF the right to search the premises of the firearms at any time without need for a warrant or reasonable suspicion.
As far as I can find data for, legally-licensed automatic weapons have only been used in 2 homicides since 1934 (both by police officers, weirdly) and a single suicide.
To address your data directly, it has some issues.
The first is that there was no "large increase in gun deaths". The lowest gun deaths during the 1994-2004 period was 5.9/100k, and the highest it's been since 2004 is 6.2/100k. About a 5% increase. 2001 was actually the highest since 1994, at 7.1/100k. That's per CDC data. The incidence of mass shootings is what they're talking about, not gun violence overall.
The second is that we're working with small numbers here. Homicides with a rifle are exceedingly uncommon; per FBI data, it's about 300/year. Your link is specifically discussing mass shootings, which are rarer yet. For the 3 periods, they list 19 events, 12 events, and 34 events, each spread across a decade. Columbine happened in the middle of that period.
The third is that the correlation isn't as tight as you might presume. Have a gander at https://www.statista.com/statistics/811487/number-of-mass-sh... Unless someone pointed it out, it would be hard to guess where the assault weapons ban even is in time. The numbers aren't really notably different until 2001. Mass shootings aren't even noticeably high until 2007 when we hit the recession, which is a massive confounding factor.
The fourth is that if assault weapons are to blame, you would expect numbers to roughly match before and after. They don't. 2005-2006 follow roughly the same trend as before. It's not until 2007 when they go up (again, recession), and 2012 before it gets really crazy. 2012 is coincidentally when US median wealth hit it's lowest after the recession, and hasn't really recovered since then. California has more mass shootings per year now than they did before 2016 when they passed their high capacity magazine ban. I don't think it's causal, just of note.
There are just so many other factors that play into this. Increased media attention on mass shootings, niche online communities forming, increased political polarization, increased wealth inequality, zero tolerance school policies, etc.
I also find it a bad thing to focus on. Every death is a tragedy, but rifles are low on the chart of causes. Homicides by rifles are roughly equal to deaths by ladder. About 2 times as many people are beat to death with hands/feet. About 5 times as many people are stabbed to death. About 10 times as many people die from foodborne illness. About 20 times as many people die of anemia.
It just doesn't make sense. Even if you want to focus on guns, why rifles? Handguns are used to kill roughly 50 times as many people.
Teasing out the correlation and causation here is difficult. People generally don't like getting shot, so it's plausible that stricter gun control is at least partially responsible for the higher wages, since places with better gun control laws are more attractive areas to set up businesses in.
Wouldn't the correlation run in the opposite direction if that were the case, since the employees would basically demand the higher wages as a sort of hazard pay?
> This is almost universally due to gang activity and not the kids picking up weapons from friends and family and shooting themselves or others.
This doesn't seem to be accurate. Research [1] looking at data from a few years back (before firearms became the leading cause of death for children in the US) found:
Firearm deaths in children were 53% homicide, 38% suicide, 6% unintentional.
Of homicides in older children (13-17) the leading circumstances were argument (40%), precipitated by another crime (31%), and gang related (21%.)
It really has been hard explaining to fellow parents that their unvaccinated kids are still way lower risk than they are with their vaccines.
Edit: Leaving the original wording, but the "they are with the vaccines" is referring to the parents. Not the kids. I agree that vaccinated people are better off than unvaccinated, other items equal.
Irrelevant when the parents are doing what they can to reduce the risk for their kid. As soon as you are willing to let them go to school, you have increased the risk to them more than getting them vaccinated will reduce it.
Are you trying to suggest people should not vaccinate because school is a higher risk to health than vaccination is a reduction of risk to health?
Maybe life is not only about survival but the upside to school is on balance worth the added risk, but not vaccinating is not worth the added risk (complications from vaccination are pretty small -- though I certainly don't advocate vaccination without any consideration of the risks).
Hey you might want to take a look at the latest research. I thought COVID had the same risk profile as the flu for children until I started digging into the stats a bit more. What I am finding is that these latest variants are more contagious, even controlling for less social distancing and masking.
We have this sense that COVID isn't as deadly towards kids because they honestly had not been spreading it as much as we feared until fairly recently.
I never viewed "as the flu" as a minimizing view. You don't want to get the flu.
This has always been something almost as deadly as the flu for everyone. More deadly for older folks. And as contagious as the cold. Not something to take lightly.
I'm not sure what choice you think I'm making. Me and my kids are all vaccinated. Even boosted. Except for the four year old, and that is just until five.
Makes sense. And I can see how my comments my have been closer to anti vaccine. My point was more that I also take flu seriously and we vaccinate for that every year, too.
He’s saying, that unvaccinated kids are at a lower risk for serious COVID than is a vaccinated adult. It’s true as far as I can tell. So far, COVID has proved to be quite low on the list of things that kill kids. The ratio of fear to danger is / was way out of whack vs other things on that list.
COVID has proved to be quite low on the list of things that kill kids
The leading causes of child mortality are accidents, homicide, suicide, cancer and congenital diseases. Children are not supposed to die, we are trying to control these factors, they won't let you take your newborn home from the hospital unless you show them car seat. There is law enforcement, counseling for parents and children, genetic counseling and all that.
But when it comes to COVID we are told not to worry, the risk is low. It doesn't make sense.
The risks to children from the action necessary to prevent Covid infection -- namely, social isolation -- are well understood and far higher than their risks from COVID itself. Vaccines and masks are being mentioned a lot in this thread but neither are very effective at all in preventing infection.
The risk to children from COVID-19 is much lower than most of those other things you listed. It's basically just a cold for children who don't have serious co-morbid conditions.
Your comment still remains unclear. My interpretation, with major changes in (parentheses):
"It has been hard (for me) to explain to fellow parents that (the parents') unvaccinated children have a much lower Covid infection and consequence risk than (the parents themselves) do from any Covid vaccine."
Unstated: that the parents' risks of a Covid infection and long-Covid consequences are also much higher, with infection via their children being a highly likely route.
I did not mean any risk from the vaccine. I was only talking about the risks with the vaccine. If that makes sense.
I am in no way arguing against vaccinations and booster shots. Do that. If you are sick, please stay home. Don't refuse to go to the park with your toddler because they aren't vaccinated yet.
It made sense to me, but I chose the interpretation that was obviously true (kids are at very low risk from covid, adult vaccination doesn't prevent infection very successfully) rather than choosing the interpretation that was controversial.
Lots of comments on kids getting covid and it not being lethal. But it’s not as binary (life vs death). There are lots of reports of permanent lung scarring, reduced cognitive abilities, changes in breathing patterns, the list is long.
If you can avoid these things, it’s for the better.
This is the exact attitude that OP is talking about. Kids are at very, very, very low risk for all of those issues, and it's highly likely that the overprotection/overconcern from the exceedingly small chance of them happening is having very real second order effects that are net worse than covid. RSV in particular is way more dangerous for kids than covid. Plus it's a huge PITA, I had to nebulize my ~4mo old multiple times a day for weeks.
You can't avoid these things. There are lots of endemic respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19). Unless you live as a hermit, you should expect to get exposed. It's better to catch those infections when we're young and our immune systems are most effective; the resulting cellular immunity then protects us as we age.
I've been tussling with my wife about putting our kid into daycare when he's 6 months old. I feel it's way too early, partly due to concerns about contracting a virus (though from the perspective that it would cause more hassle for us, rather than concerns about him getting sick per se, which I figure is inevitable).
That being said, I hadn't even thought that RSV would be a bigger problem due to the pandemic.
>rather than concerns about him getting sick per se, which I figure is inevitable
It might be better to be exposed to immunity-challenging activities before a child is one year old in order to prevent the most common childhood leukaemia which is theorised to occur due to a combination of genetics and the lack of an immune-priming event in the first year of life.
We put our kid into daycare around 7 months old. Obviously every kid is different, but we're happy we chose that time. Around 7 months, our child had developed an understanding that we leave and come back, but was still young enough that separation anxiety wasn't a problem. The kids who start daycare at 1 or 2 seem to really struggle. She does get sick all the time, but it's becoming less frequent over time. It's annoying at the time, but her immune system is getting stronger and that is a good thing in the long term.
We had to put ours in at 6 months. About a week in, she caught her first cold, then it was continuous illness (for all of us!) of one kind or another for about 2 months.
Things have gotten much better since.
Solution: move somewhere else where workers are not treated as cattle by big corporations. Like, say, anywhere in Europe.
Seriously, we pay $380 per month for childcare and each parent gets 20 days of paid your-child-is-sick leave, on top of the 20 days of regular sick leave and mandatory 25 days of holidays each year. All of the above is according to law and applies to everyone, whether you work in tech or you're the school janitor. I have never seen a hospital bill above $100, and I have a chronic autoimmune disease. With a population larger than Alabama we have never had a school shooting in the entire history of firearms. I can keep going like this, but you get the picture.
When the rubber hits the road, people prefer the money.
You see lots of people from Europe moving to the US for a better life. Rare to see the opposite. Not sure which country you're referencing but I've looked at jobs in Europe (seriously too) and the salaries were honestly a joke. At least for SDE. $30-40k in Spain for a qualified SDE. Made more than that as an intern.
No, people fall for the propaganda of American exceptionalism, and they haven't done the actual math to see if they actually would have more or less money moving to another country.
Yes there are differences in pay level within Europe, which broadly also reflect differences in cost of living. In Northern Europe where I live a primary school teacher makes above $50k a year.
But you cannot just compare salary numbers like that, you have to do a full budget with real numbers and compare how much you're left with each month after you've paid all expenses. And you have to add PTO and health insurance and all that jazz. Health insurance is $0 here. An average a parent here will have maybe 15 days of my-child-is-sick and 5 days of I'm-sick per year, in addition to 25 days of vacation, plus Christmas and Easter and other public holidays combining to 10 days on average, so 55 days total of paid leave per year for a parent with small children. And when the child was born, the mother received 9 months of paid maternity leave while the father got 3 months of paid leave.
Did you know that the average total monthly payment for a house in the Bay Area is $5300? Where we live you are paying way less than half of that for a similar house. Say you pay half then, $2600 a month, meaning you live in a large house in a posh neighbourhood. That $2600 per month that you don't spend means you can live just as well with $31k lower salary. And we are just getting started.
To continue the example, we pay about $1500 per year for all our insurances - house, car, boat, travel. We own a 1900 sq.ft. semi-detached house with a large garage and nice garden, which is biking distance from downtown, our monthly mortgage cost is about $1700. The property tax is $500 per year.
With kids the cost of day care is $350 per month until they start school at 6, then it's $200 a month for after-school care until they are 10. School itself is free all the way up to and including PhD level, there is nobody here saving up for their kids going to college.
I ride my bicycle to work in 10 minutes. The longest commute of anyone I know is 45 minutes one way. How big of a pay cut would you take if your commute was less than 30 minutes?
Then you have things that are even harder to put numbers on, like the fact that my 7-year-old just walks by herself to and from school, we only drop off on Monday and pick up on Friday when there is a lot of stuff to carry. And there has never been a school shooting, ever. My 10-year-old can ride public transport to the city center by herself to meet friends, and I don't have to worry. The probability of a fatal car accident per million miles driven is reduced by 75% compared to the US. The infant mortality rate is less than half of that in the US. My life expectancy here is 4 years longer.
>In Northern Europe where I live a primary school teacher makes above $50k a year.
Where do you live? Because that's less than a teacher makes in the US, lol.
>No, people fall for the propaganda of American exceptionalism, and they haven't done the actual math to see if they actually would have more or less money moving to another country.
So a greater % of Europeans vs Americans are just ignorant? I don't honestly believe that.
>But you cannot just compare salary numbers like that, you have to do a full budget with real numbers and compare how much you're left with each month after you've paid all expenses.
So, realistically, what is someone that is paid $30-40k left with each month?
>Health insurance is $0 here. An average a parent here will have maybe 15 days of my-child-is-sick and 5 days of I'm-sick per year, in addition to 25 days of vacation, plus Christmas and Easter and other public holidays combining to 10 days on average, so 55 days total of paid leave per year for a parent with small children. And when the child was born, the mother received 9 months of paid maternity leave while the father got 3 months of paid leave.
And again, Europeans are very willing to give these up if it means a higher salary/ability to work in the US.
>Did you know that the average total monthly payment for a house in the Bay Area is $5300?
No, because I don't live in the Bay Area and I find anyone that does to be insane... but the salaries mostly scale to reflect that. The _average_ salary for the bay area for SDE is $230k. That's more than enough to cover that cost. A lot of people just rent or get an apartment to build wealth and then move somewhere else though.
Again, all the stuff you're saying is great and if that's your choice all the power to you. I don't see how any of that negates the simple fact that Europeans try very hard to get SDE jobs in the US.
The US is incredibly huge and diverse. You can find almost any type of living situation you want. No matter how you spin it, its hard to beat SDE opportunities in the US. Only thing I can think of is getting a job with an American company in Europe to have the "best of both worlds" but even then, not sure you'll find too many ppl willing to take it.
So you're saying $30-$40k for SDE in Spain, the internet seems to say $10k above that, but never mind. My knowledge is from Northern Europe, so I'm basing my math on that.
So in our case, the average SDE salary here is $98k, and let's say your partner is a teacher, so a combined gross salary of $150k/yr for the family with small children, let's say living in the capital (most expensive). Then statistically you have more income than 80% of couples with small children living there, so already you know you're well off.
After tax you're taking home about $8000 per month. We already said you're spending $2600 on your nice house. Let's say you have two kids, one electric car and one petrol car. Then the official reference budget published by the state says you're spending $3400 a month on food, clothing, the cars, public transport, furniture, childcare, most of the necessary expenses. We are missing a couple of things like insurance, utilities etc., which is about $500 a month. So you're left with something like $1000 to $1500 a month for discretionary spending. And you have basically no commute and live in a perfectly safe place with free healthcare.
As for "Europeans try very hard to get jobs in the US" - that is not supported by the data. By a very large margin the people immigrating to the US are from Asia, South America and Africa. The first European country on the list is the UK in 22nd place with 10k people per year. The next is Poland and Germany with about 5k people each, and software devs is obviously just a tiny fraction of that. Meanwhile Germany plus the UK are home to an estimated total of 1.6 million software developers, so the percentage of devs emigrating is obviously extremely, ridiculously small.
>So you're saying $30-$40k for SDE in Spain, the internet seems to say $10k above that, but never mind. My knowledge is from Northern Europe, so I'm basing my math on that.
Those were the numbers I found when looking into an extended stay in Spain. Seems to line up with the first result on the internet (google).
>So in our case, the average SDE salary here is $98k
Where is "here" ? At this point we might as well be comparing states with such an insane variability of nearly double the salary (if your numbers are correct). We're flipping between Europe and your country, lol
>So you're left with something like $1000 to $1500 a month for discretionary spending. And you have basically no commute and live in a perfectly safe place with free healthcare.
Well, that's exactly my point. Using your same scenario, an average SDE in the "most expensive city" makes $230k. After 3-5 years its close to $300k. If their spouse is a teacher, they make ~65k. That's easily 2-2.5x the salary right there. Again though, while the bay area is popular, its not for everyone and there's thousands of remote jobs that pay $130k+, allowing you to live anywhere.
>As for "Europeans try very hard to get jobs in the US" - that is not supported by the data
I never said most foreign devs are coming from Europe, just that often Europeans have and continue to move to the US in pursuit of better SDE opportunities. The opposite can't be said.
No, but that doesn't surprise me. So if daycare is inevitable, the child needs to go in "armed" with antibodies (including from the mother during pregnancy). Should pregnant women isolate? Does not seem like it.
Our family dog probably does a good job diversifying antibodies as well (I think there are studies showing the immunity advantages certain pets provide).
> No, but that doesn't surprise me. So if daycare is inevitable, the child needs to go in "armed" with antibodies (including from the mother during pregnancy).
Not sure how this works. Where to you get "armed" with antibodies if not from a vaccination (unavailable for some viruses) or prior infection? Antibodies from the mother vane over time as far as I recall.
"And babies born during the pandemic may have entered the world with few antibodies passed on by their mothers in the womb, because those mothers may have been sheltered from RSV and other respiratory pathogens during their pregnancies, said Hubert Niesters, a professor of clinical virology and molecular diagnostics at the University Medical Center, in Groningen, the Netherlands."
There's also a bit of herd immunity for the new kids. Kids that have lots of prior exposure to a virus are less likely to bring it to daycare if they're exposed outside daycare. Also less likely to be a link in the infection chain for intra daycare spread.
We put our then 2-year-old in preschool last fall. Even though the whole classroom was supposedly masked (toddlers are not great at this, though our child is actually very consistent), she got RSV within a couple months. It cannot be avoided.
Are there any data on masks to prevent RSV? Even for Covid the data is pretty patchy, and anecdotally they don't seem to be highly effective, at least in actual use. Countries where mask usage has gone from very high to low in a short space of time have seen virtually no change to infection rates.
As far as I've read, there is no effect of immunity debt. On the other hand, there are Covid interactions with reduction or destruction of certain classes of immune cells. This can have the effects which appear to be common viruses out of control. One example is the serious liver hepatitis cases with kids.
I'm not sure about fine. Probably just undiagnosed? According to this, RSV kills 100k babies and kids between 0-5 per year. 97% of them are in low and middle income countries.
I remember as a kid in 1st grade (California 1991) I would walk to school from my Grandma's house. There would be streams of kids coming from the surrounding neighborhoods. Now, when I ride by elementary schools, I see lines of cars a mile long waiting to drop off their kids in huge noisy modified cars and trucks. Even the one I used to go to. Now they are tearing out playgrounds to add parking and places to queue up to drop off kids...
Ironically the area is no longer safe for kids because of these cars. Occasionally I see lifted trucks hopping curbs and minivans blowing through occupied crosswalks at 10 over the speed limit. Crosswalks are a deathtrap because of right on red. Lights are timed with zero consideration to pedestrian traffic. Residential streets are wide and used as short cuts.
The problem with kids is, again, statistics. When you have, say, 5 million children and all of them get covid because that is what happens when a virus races on unimpeded, even a 0.1% severe/long term complication is 500 kids with a ruined life - ME/CFS is not a joke.
And then you have the kids with geriatric parents. It is no rarity to have 10 year old kids with 60-70 years old fathers and 50 year old mothers these days, and both with diabetes or smoking-associated COPD on top of their advanced age which is both known to be a massive increase in risk. Or they're already fighting some sort of cancer. For these kids, the knowledge that politicians do nothing to prevent them from catching covid while at the same time they have to worry about their parents is incredibly stressful.
A lot of these articles (seeing many in the same vein) seem to be implying that viruses are all making some vengeful comeback after the caution (some of us) exercised during the pandemic, but I'm not sure what scientific basis they are built on?
Some of the patterns we're seeing are surely just a statistical anomaly - the general dip in these infections when people weren't as exposed to each other's germs over the last couple years is now mirrored by a modest increase.
And naturally the news organizations want to pump every possible scenario that might lead to more doom-scrolling and eyeballs on ads.
> I'm not sure what scientific basis they are built on
The article mentions the flu. Flu cases have been way down for the last two years, so it's reasonably to assume our collective immunity to it is also down.
You might be right about Monkeypox and the hepatitis we're seeing in kids. Those could just be random, but the immunity debt hypothesis also fits.
No doubt a lot of it is reverting to the mean actions in place. But, that generally portrays as a rebound on low values, so I can see why it is seen as a "vengeance."
The article does a decent coverage of the different mechanisms that could be at play, as well.
> The article does a decent coverage of the different mechanisms that could be at play
I thought the 'scientific' mechanisms were clutching at straws tbh:
"And that increase in susceptibility, experts suggest, means we may experience some wonkiness as we work toward a new post-pandemic equilibrium with the bugs that infect us."
In addition I think it'll always be possible to find 'experts' who will supply a handy quote to reinforce the essential nature of their particular area of expertise.
Oh, to be clear, I agree it was clutching at straws. But it did a good job of listing all of the straws that it could, and studies/time will hopefully let us know which ones mattered.
One problem is that a lot of people in the field are very specialized in just one part of the spectrum. For example Marion Koopmans knows a lot about virusses but doesn't know a lot about immunology. That is totally ok, but also means that her view is limited and is very focused on viruses.
I think this article was fairly careful to not do that.
I could read it thinking that no more people will get sick next season then would get sick through three usual seasons anyways. And the danger comes more from piling up the cases not from any increase in severity of the diseases or number of people getting sick altogether.
What I wish I would have read in an article written by somebody who “covers issues broadly related to infectious diseases, including outbreaks, preparedness, research, and vaccine development”:
> Could the worldwide inoculation with fairly new mRNA vaccines be an impacting factor in this development? “No, that is unlikely” says [Renowned authority in immunology], “because [plausible reasons]”
What I instead got regarding this direction was:
> (null)
Don’t get me wrong, I am fully vaccinated and still recommend it to everybody.
But I do see the tendency of distrust against the new vaccination techniques rising in my surrounding since everybody is getting sick all the time now. Especially since this development didn’t show in the first opening after the first (or second for some) wave before vaccinations were available for wide audiences.
Please, tell them it’s not the vaccines. Discuss it, convince them, give them the truthful impression that their choice to trust in science and the government was not bad. Their doubts are honest and it must be allowed to doubt and to demand to see convincing evidence. Don’t write doubters off as heretics.
You're right that this should get talked about, simply because it's the sort of thing that some people will wonder about. That said, I'm pretty sure "everybody getting sick all the time" has basically been the expected outcome of since about winter 2020 or earlier.
After the lockdowns where started, rates of non-covid-19 respiratory diseses dropped, and the flu in particular was a lot less common, dispite a poor flu vaccine and uptake. Ever since the winter of 2020, the doctors in my country have been warning us that the flus could be particularly nasty as people stopped social distancing/masking/etc.
If you look at the same data release, the excess deaths are almost entirely in cancer and dementia in old people (with the exception of a spike in diabetes at the same time as the spike in COVID infections likely due to it being a significant comorbidity).
So whilst I m sure the higher excess deaths in Australia is difficult to explain (as there is probably a multitude of factors). The theory that somehow the vaccines give people dementia or cancer (which have not been associated with COVID or the vaccine) AND these usually relatively long term diseases go on to kill them within a 2-4 month period AND this only happens to old people for some reason AND other countries have not observed a similar pattern despite the vast number of vaccines given, seems highly unlikely.
In addition, assuming the author is referring to the UK ONS, our public health body does release excess mortality estimates on a weekly basis - and unsurprisingly they correlate with the waves of COVID infections, not the vaccination program.
An increase in dementia and cancer is exactly what contrarian scientists and researchers fear as potential long-term side-effects of breakdown of spike protein in the body (amyloid plaque deposits), and dysregulation of the immune system due to mRNA treatments (host immune system not fully-functioning results in ineffective disease suppression across the board).
An emerging thesis explaining diverse pathology in post-covid / post-vax (let us call it post-spike exposure) is that breakdown of spike protein results in beta-amyloid plaque deposits in the body, which leads to Alzheimers, systemic amyloidosis, fibrogenesis.
Other mainstream research is now also converging on this idea. [1]
One of the original researchers who appears early on this discussed it in the last few days with one of the DRASTIC researchers Jay Couey: "Amyloidogenesis of the Spike Protein" [2]
Jay has an interesting 10 minute monologue just prior to the interview which is also worth viewing. [3] He summarises the industry dogma (and why it's flawed) in a succint way: "Seroprevalence to an epitope is taken as a correlate of immunity to a pathogen on which that epitope is found. And if this mechanism is part of immunity, it is a small fraction of the total immune response..."
In terms of UK all-cause mortality data, Fenton's analysis has been very interesting. Also interesting to see him suddenly cast out of respectable society once he decided something was very off with the statistical analysis going on. [4]
> correlated surge in the 45-64 bucket, the last two charts in the link I posted.
Correlated surge is an absurd way to describe something that basically fluctuates around 0 over the course of a year, which makes me think this definitely isn't good faith.
> What you linked takes me to some generic description of the dataset.
I recommend clicking the buttons on the side, it's a dashboard.
In a world where the virus kills and the vaccines work what would you expect to see otherwise? In other words, for me, if the vaccines work and the virus kills I'd expect to see the same graphs.
Also, you can look at other countries and see if your theory holds up.
There are strange surges in US, Aus, and Taiwan, but not in the other two — but they undertook different vaccination campaigns.
> In other words, for me, if the vaccines work and the virus kills I'd expect to see the same graphs.
Well no — that doesn’t explain why the “all cause” mortality surges in Australia disconnected from the COVID deaths.
Even if we were undercounting the COVID deaths, we’d expect the phase of the waves to match, which is disputed by the first graph on that website (which compares COVID and all cause mortality across all sexes/ages.)
That author just put a line on a time series graph and said the event that occurred somewhere near that line is the cause of the change. Thats not a claim based on official data, thats not even a valid attempt at analysis.
Let me plot a time series of temperature by day. Now I'll draw a line where we see firework sales increase massively. Then after that point, temperature increases consistently. Science, official data, etc. No lies here. But now lets claim.... shooting off fireworks increases the temperature of the Earth causing the temperature to rise until the fall/winter. Now you need to expend resources disproving me.
If you excluded the reverse, that temperature caused the spike (as they did by showing the COVID curve didn’t account for the excess deaths), then that would be an argument worth refuting.
> No, that is unlikely” says [Renowned authority in immunology], “because [plausible reasons]”
You would like to see your preconceived conclusion in print without any evidence for its proof yourself ? I’d prefer evidence either way regardless of the conclusion
Anecdotally, I have two young kids in daycare, and everyone’s been sick more often than not since January. Frequent Covid swabs all come back negative.
My anecdata is similar. A constant 2 week cycle of getting mildly sick, recovering, and then getting mildly sick again. Dr said there's a ton of it going around.
Yep, we are also on a 2-3 week cycle. My family is currently sick in fact. We've yet to test positive for covid, ever. I'm at this weird place now where I just want to get it over with, but at this point it's like we can't catch covid even if we tried, due to the queue of other crap the kids are coming home with.
I don't think you can "get it over with" in any sort of permanent way. Antibodies acquired through vaccination or previous infection helped with Omicron, but they wane significantly over a few months. Similar things are happening with newer variants.
Exact same anecdote for me. I’ve been sick every two weeks, then one week recovered, and repeat for the past 3 months or so. I’ve been sick more in 3 months than in 5 years. It’s very odd. Never tested positive.
Like the sibling comment I've also been sick more often these last few months than I have in recent memory. Kiddo has been at daycare/preschool for a couple years now. AFAICT it's a real phenomenon.
Same as well with two kids 4 and newborn. Tons of colds coming through Preachool that aren’t Covid, according to the constant testing the school requires.
Also for those wondering there was a massive spike in RSV in early December. I would guess it infected the school and my family in days. Just unbelievably infectious, and with a baby RSV is quite scary as it’s the leading cause of infant pneumonia and is much more dangerous than people realize (we need a vaccine for RSV!)
Same here. We have had everything since December. In December, we had Covid-19, in April what seemed like the flu, and we also had different types of cold and stomach viruses. I have been almost permanently ill and tired since December. Now I feel much better! It seems we upgraded our "antivirus software". ;-)
Us too. We actually pulled our toddler from daycare for the summer just to not be sick for a while. He was in school 2 of 5 weeks prior to that with the other 3 home sick. It’s exhausting.
Same situation. Child is just short of five. For last half year, she is consistently out sick at least half the time. The whole family is sick constantly. It is an exhausting and challenging time.
Half of my office is/was out with COVID. My youngest has told me that the teachers, and students, are frequently absent in the middle school because of COVID infections.
I don't think that it's impacting daycare too much but it's definitely racing through offices and schools here. (Eastern Pennsylvania)
Anthony Leondardi has posited that covid reduces naive T cells and leaves people more vulnerable to new infections by aging the immune system
He’s been right on a lot of things. Time will tell if this prediction is also right. If the respiratory diseases are this bad next year the immunity debt theory will have to be discarded.
Has China got an epidemic of respiratory viruses? Did Taiwan have one before they let covid rip? We have control groups we could investigate
I never masked, socially distanced, or got vaccinated. I have been going to regular social events and businesses since summer 2020, and have not taken ill. In the last month, four of my friends, who are vaccinated and followed recommendations, are sick. Strange anecdata
I’ve been sick 5 times this year so far with colds, each one seemingly worse than the previous. I’m not convinced that COVID wasn’t a biological attack on our immune systems.
I had longcovid 14 months until June 2021. Over the last year I haven’t been sick once.
I’m not convinced the VACCINE wasn’t a biological attack on your immune system. All my family who took it get sick repeatedly, I’m exposed to the viruses they have and don’t get sick.
All that is anecdotal, but it also jives with what Kirsch and others have been saying about the mRNA shots:
Well, the vaccines (plural) were of course going to have an impact on your immune system, that was the point, but I wouldn't call it an "attack". It's more like a wargame, preparing for an enemy you expect to attack in the future; there is risk, but it's a lot less than going into the eventual war without having done any wargames.
We all get exposed to viruses frequently, all the time. If your immune system suppresses them without much effort required, you don't feel sick. If your immune system overreacts, it suppresses them even better, but you will feel sick (from the fact that your immune system is going into overdrive). If your family's vaccination is causing their immune systems to give a stronger reaction to normal viruses, that is annoying, but it doesn't mean the vaccination wasn't a good idea. It's taking on an increased risk of an immune system making you feel sick for a couple days because it overreacted to a normal virus, in order to get a reduced risk of getting hospitalized because your immune system did not take a virus (covid-19, in this case) seriously enough, soon enough.
The immune system is a tricky beast, no question, and unexpected results can happen. But just because your family gets sick, and you don't feel sick, from a normally circulating virus (e.g. perhaps one of the four non-covid coronaviruses that cause 'colds'), that doesn't mean the vaccine isn't working correctly. It just means they're trading a higher risk of a small problem for a lower risk of a much bigger problem.
This also just came out, first time I'm aware of OAS being mentioned in the news (though not by name, that would give too much credit to conspiracy theorists): https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/328102
COVID-19 continues to impact us. Has there been any progress on determining the origin of the virus and how to prevent a future outbreak?
Are efforts underway? I don't see any, but maybe the media isn't highlighting them.
Seems like an important thing to look into. SARS outbreak was in 2003. SARS 2 20019. Given the increase in travel and environmental encroachment is there any reason to believe the next one will be in fewer than 15 years?
There has been no substantial progress on determining the origin of the virus. It could have been a natural zoonotic transmission, or could have originated in a lab. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report in 2021 and it remains accurate as far as we know
And that's fine. Assume both are true and come up with a plan to mitigate the next pandemic.
Here's my bad idea: If China doesn't allow international monitoring of it's wet markets every person entering your country from China must quarantine for 14 days.
Any person traveling form a country that doesn't follow the above policy must quarantine for 14 days.
That's just pointless and unrealistic. While China should be encouraged to improve food hygiene practices, and end trade in endangered wildlife species, most zoonotic viral transmission events never had anything to do with Chinese wet markets. While we'll never know for sure, there is some circumstantial evidence that the 1918 influenza pandemic might have started in a US pig farm. And quarantine policies are ineffective without secure borders. Human trafficking gangs bring people from China to Mexico, then smuggle them over the US land border. All it takes is one index case to start spreading a virus in a new area.
Sounds about right. I had Covid in January 2021. Had long Covid for what felt like a year. Everytime I’m sick(because of kids), I can’t test positive for Covid but the flus feel a bit stronger than they did previously. Usually to the point of knocking me out for a week. Used to be only a couple days. Hopefully my immune system is getting stronger each day.
Where do you live? Everywhere I've been this year have all been post-Covid. The only places that still seem to be having problems are places with authoritarian governments.
Well yeah that seems to be the consensus that it'll be seasonal like the flu. And like the flu it moderates over time and isn't that big of a deal, even less of a deal if you get your flu shot.
Virtually nobody dies from the "harmless" diseases, so any very small chance of myocarditis etc. would make it a bad decision. Waste of resources when we have better things to go after.
Apparently harmless diseases are not that harmless as the example of strange previously unnoticeable hepatitis shows.
We have no idea what chance of myocarditis (and other things) those harmless diseases cause because additional risk from them is counted towards our baseline estimate.
It might be that all of spontaneous cases of myocarditis are caused by viruses we nowadays consider harmless, because we can't shield ourselves from them so we don't know what would health look like without them.
Also keep an eye on the rise of auto-immune diseases in the following years. Two years of lockdown will give rise to a lot more children developing peanut allergies, asthma, hay fever, diabetes type 1, etc.
Kids staying at home, in overly sanitized environments, and socializing much less with other children. Their immune systems don't get "trained" as much. Not saying that you should let your child lick public restrooms knobs. But there is a balance. It is called the "Hygiene Hypothesis". I think it was niche idea a while ago but I think it is pretty much accepted now.
I have no idea what you're talking about. The facts totally contradict your comment, which is unfortunately typical of the way Swedes and the Swedish authorities have tried to rewrite the actual outcomes at every stage of the pandemic.
Sweden was hit by a historically severe RS-virus wave in the autumn of 2021[0].
Here's a deepL translation of one section of the citation below:
"In the 2021-2022 season, Sweden has been hit by a historically severe epidemic. Paediatric care in several parts of the country has reported a strained situation. The peak of the spread of infection usually reaches its highest levels in March, but already in the summer of 2021 many cases were reported to the Public Health Agency."
I am amused that folks seem to think we could eradicate so many widespread diseases with just masks. Keeping people away from each other? Sure. His long do we reasonably think we can do that? (Speaking as someone that lives as a hermit with kids.)
Edit: it seems the best case scenario in the article is that these outbreaks were always there, and we are better seeing them? Do we expect that to hold up? Or will we start ignoring it again?
Who are you talking about thinking that diseases were eradicated by masks?
Public health people talking about low incidence of diseases being due to pandemic isolation and masking almost certainly weren't implying that they were gone, more commenting that they were suppressed by those changes to behavior.
I am kind of fascinated that there is so little call to do things like improve ventilation. There's some, but people haven't seemed to catch on that we could do things to reduce disease that cause ~no individual inconvenience. Or like send people home when they come to work with a cold, change that culture.
For outbreaks, I doubt a few hundred cases of monkeypox (outside of the endemic areas) would have been such major news a couple years ago. It's largely an attention phenomenon. It is certainly something to keep an eye on, but it doesn't appear to be spreading uncontrollably. Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the endemic areas, has more cases this year than the non-endemic areas.
Even at the height of the pandemic, it was quite frustrating to see so little public places taking easy measures like keeping the doors/windows open, but focusing so much energy on arrows on the floor or non-sense like that.
Increased ventilation even helps with concentrating in school, as high CO2 is not good for schooling. I used to fall asleep all the time while I was in school, elementary, secondary, university, even staring at a computer. Now that I work from home, I never fall asleep that way. I was clearly just so tired from high CO2.
You put the arrows down once and the signs up once. Opening windows and doors and managing airflow is a constant effort. Installing better ventilation can get costly. Cheaper to just do the theater.
In my experience, that sleepiness might also be due to forced sleep patterns, commuting, and heavy food - things that you likely experienced in school but not now.
You didn't see many scientists saying this. But early on in the pandemic many people were saying Covid would be completely over if everyone masked for a month, or if we locked down for a month, etc. I saw this a lot within my own network of very liberal, twenty-something peers. Some people still believe this, albeit probably a small minority now.
> But early on in the pandemic many people were saying Covid would be completely over if everyone masked for a month, or if we locked down for a month,
It's technically true if every single person on Earth did this at the same time.
But it was over in multiple nations that did take the precautions seriously ... only to come back when they somehow were convinced to relax the recommendations.
It is more of a local feel, honestly. Many on twitter and around the schools I do go to seem convinced that if the rest of the nation had just been as good at masking as we were, they would have not had it as bad. And that if we are diligent in the future, we wouldn't have as severe of outbreaks.
I can't even really say they are wrong. I don't know. My weight would be more on our 90%ish percent vaccination rate, but I could see both having impact.
Edit: I'm actually somewhat skeptical that ventilation will work as well as folks hope. Living in a place that largely does rely on outside air, we had just as large of outbreaks as anyone else. (That is, it is common to have open windows here. The kid's schools are even made to take advantage of that, if I understand it correctly.) Again, I am /not/ saying it is wrong. I just doubt it weighs as heavily as portrayed.
> if the rest of the nation had just been as good at masking as we were...
I'm sure the CCP is saying that about lockdowns right now.
Don't forget that fabric masks were found to be only marginally effective, and surgical masks are only somewhat effective. At this point, if you're in a mask, it should be at least N95 or don't bother. I'm still amused when I see people diligent about using masks, but not concerned enough to use an N95.
My realization during this has been that it couldn't be stopped, it could only be delayed. As soon as you roll back restrictions, it will resume spreading until ~everyone has immunity. There will always be jurisdictions that don't care as much, so no amount of hard lockdowns work unless you can seal your border. There was never a window where we could eradicate it with vaccines because delta was already circulating by the time vaccine distribution had ramped up in April, 2021.
There's a slight chance the omicron mRNA vaccines will have sterilizing immunity as good as the original vaccines and the original variant, but there's no reason to think a new variant won't evade the new vaccine.
> And that if we are diligent in the future, we wouldn't have as severe of outbreaks.
If you're willing to do continue restrictions indefinitely, sure.
The mRNA vaccines never provided durable sterilizing immunity even against the original wild type virus variant. That wasn't even a goal, or a primary end point for the clinical trials.
Of course better ventilation won't outright stop diseases from spreading, the point is that it will reduce the spread with reasonable cost and little downside (like another commenter mentions, if the existing ventilation isn't keeping up with CO2 concentrations, there can be other benefits).
From what I saw with our schools.... it didn't really cut the spread. Estimates are that the school had just as high of spread as elsewhere. And that is with near 100% vaccination of the kids in said school.
I should note I'm not against trying. It seems a low hanging fruit to reach for. Just, evidence has shown that this particular disease goes for saturation fairly effectively.
But of course, COVID spreads so easily that this can reach the limit (especially Omicron) and in an environment where kids will interact together in all kind of ways, but this would have definitely helped a lot more in the first few waves (pre-omicron) without needing to shut down schools entirely.
There was never any need to shut down schools at all. Some countries such as Sweden left primary schools open throughout the pandemic (without mask mandates) and they did fine.
That does bring in an interesting case to look at to try and counter my point. If I am right that schools were one of the largest vectors of all of the other sicknesses that have been heavily suppressed in the past couple of years, than I would expect that in Sweden this suppression was not as pronounced.
Any chance you know of where to look for that data?
The personal evidence of my kid's schools. Three kids, three schools. So, yeah, small N.
I'm confused on the particular study you picked. The main claim for positive evidence "supports the use of negatively pressurized isolation rooms for patients with these diseases in hospitals" but it goes on to basically acknowledge we still need more information in larger environments. Specifically, in the abstract, "However, the lack of sufficient data on the specification and quantification of the minimum ventilation requirements in hospitals, schools and offices in relation to the spread of airborne infectious diseases, suggest the existence of a knowledge gap."
I'm all for more studies. And, again, I expect and hope we learn more.
> I am kind of fascinated that there is so little call to do things like improve ventilation. There's some, but people haven't seemed to catch on that we could do things to reduce disease that cause ~no individual inconvenience.
Some countries are actually putting significant resources into this. But if you're in a country that isn't, well, realistically, who is going to pay for it? Public health experts pretty much everywhere are saying that it should be done (mind you, they were saying that before covid, too; "proper ventilation would be beneficial" is hardly a new idea), but the only way it happens is through state funding.
> but the only way it happens is through state funding.
Is it really that expensive to open a window?
I remember even in the dead of winter our school would regularly open windows to let in some fresh air. And in the hot humid summers we would regularly keep open windows, no matter how hot it got outside, 25 kids inside would make it way hotter. And smellier.
So in general when people talk about improved ventilation, they're _mostly_ not talking about opening a window (impractical in many places at certain times of year, anyway); they're talking about some sort of mechanical ventilation, particularly for large buildings. Improving that sort of thing is expensive.
In (most?) building this would also mean replacing the HVAC system and ducts which would take months-years and close the building down for the maintenance period. I’m really not sure what the pitch is realistically.
How about systematically examining the current performance and likely retrofit cost of existing larger buildings?
Then the discussion can be about a more specific cost (and time) estimate and include better information about the changes the updates would bring about.
Or we could just assume it is too expensive and inconvenient to be worth looking into.
> I am kind of fascinated that there is so little call to do things like improve ventilation. There's some, but people haven't seemed to catch on that we could do things to reduce disease that cause ~no individual inconvenience.
People still think SARS-CoV-2 spreads by droplets, so in their minds things like that wouldn't do anything.
There are also other, novel things we could do to fight infectious diseases that get pretty much no traction. Far-range UVC lights immediately come to mind. These kill viruses and single-celled organisms quickly while not harming humans. Just imagine this installed in all public, closed spaces! Schools, offices, restaurants, public transit all could be heavily reduced in how well any infectious diseases gets spread there. Yet, this is almost entirely absent from public discourse.
Beware of unintended consequences. Humans evolved with constant exposure to pathogens. Living in overly sterile environments seems to be a risk factor for autoimmune disorders.
I wonder if we could address this by not activating the lights everywhere all the time. Always on in hospitals and other places with vulnerable people. Only on in restaurants and public transit during time of increased thread like a pandemic or maybe flu season, since that in fact kills a lot of people.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of intentional and unintentional misinformation going around.
Mask was not meant to "eradicate" anything, that was not the intent. The same thing with lockdowns, it was not meant to eradicate anything.
The original intent back in the very early stage of the pandemic is to slow down the pace of hospitalizations (or as they market it, flatting the curve); the best way to do that is to slow down the number of people getting sick. What were the best solutions?
1. Be vigilant with cleaning up and avoiding contact with sick folks (self)
2. Stay home if you're sick, wear masks and so on. (self)
3. Lock down when it was getting out of control. (community)
Also, this can have an impact on reducing the variants by having less hosts to infect and to mutate but this failed, so we're likely to stick with COVID for a very long time like the cold and flu.
People should still be masking up if they're sick and can't stay home.
> I am amused that folks seem to think we could eradicate so many widespread diseases with just masks.
This is a claim that is novel to me.
Masks help limit transmission. The immediate benefit is likely reducing transmission between an interaction of random people. A secondary, less supported benefit, is the reduction of viral load in transmissions - which can help reduce severity of an infection.
This is not shocking when you consider the fact that surgeons have worn masks for a long time - with nearly the sole intention of reducing infection in their patients (albeit, not necessarily airborne infections).
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IMO, people should be more outraged that the gov't did seemingly little to actually increase the healthcare's system to accommodate COVID patients. My understanding is mask mandates were almost always tied to significant capacity restrictions in the healthcare system. The idea of wearing masks was to create a buffer for healthcare to catch up.
Surgeons have primarily worn masks and other PPE to reduce the risk of bacterial infections in open wounds, and protect themselves against bodily fluids. Protecting against respiratory viruses is something quite different.
The mask mandates implemented in most places were always pointless pandemic theater. Only a properly fitted (i.e. tightly sealed with no facial hair) N95 or equivalent does much to block transmission of a highly contagious respiratory virus. It was never realistic to get the general public to do that.
> I am amused that folks seem to think we could eradicate so many widespread diseases with just masks.
Sorry, who "seems to think this?". I haven't seen this claim, or anything like it, anywhere.
The point many were making was that the overwhelmingly successful suppression of all these other diseases was clear proof that "masks work" to suppress disease, and by extension that we should wear them to effect the suppression of a much more dangerous pandemic. So when there's a largely uncontrolled pandemic happening, you should wear a mask.
Now, general immunity seems to have reached a point where the pandemic is at least reasonably controlled without mitigation strategies. Covid of mid-2022 is now a worrisome endemic disease, comparable to (but yet rather more dangerous than) the worst flu seasons we've seen in the past century (since 1918).
So... we can take our masks off now (most of us, admitting that some people have different levels of risk tolerance, etc...). The calculus changes because the facts on the ground have changed.
None of that is an argument that you shouldn't have worn a mask in late 2020. You absolutely should have, and it remains horrifying to me that so many of us didn't.
Countries and states with strict mask policies did not do better than those without these policies (see US States for an example).
So do mask work?
It is like a religious belief system, you would get the same reaction when questioning if God existed and asked parishioners and atheists. Everything is evidence for those that want to believe.
Studies that claim to "prove" that masks work turn out to be shambolic messes - yet are published in the most selective of journals, see for example:
Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance.
> We failed to establish a relationship between school masking and pediatric cases using the same methods but a larger, more nationally diverse population over a longer interval. Our study demonstrates that observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables.
If you look at the plot - there were more cases when masks were required!
So what? We know that well fitted masks are able to filter virus particles, we don't have to do a randomized controlled study on school children to prove it.
It's weird that people arguing against masking as a policy intervention go after the masks rather than the obvious problem, which is compliance. When someone tells you that you have to have a mask on to be in a building and then pulls their mask under their nose (happened to me last week), the effectiveness of masking isn't being evaluated, it's the effectiveness of masking as a policy intervention that is being evaluated.
Read the paper. There were more cases per student when masks were required.
Look at the paper and their plot when they talk about cases overall.
We do not understand what masks do and what people do when masked with these silly measures. Putting on and off a mask cannot be good for you.
The mask proponents "think" simplistically and that it "ought" to work. "Logically it MUST work.
There is no such thing "I know it works", so no need to do it. Anything we "know" is because we ran solid tests and collected clear cut evidences many many times. None of which are true for masks.
Oddly, you are making the claim I question here. This "proof that masks work" is likely more just proof that not having kids in schools cuts a lot of spread. I really cannot underscore enough how much more sick you will get when you have kids in school than when you don't.
And homeschool isn't really an answer here, sadly. It is fairly well documented that kids that come out of homeschool and finally enter a workforce or other social environment are at a heightened risk of sicknesses that the general populace just doesn't notice.
Edit: I hasten to add that I agree this is not an argument that masks don't work. And I don't understand why some folks still insist on fighting not to wear them.
Before we can have a debate about "masks" we have to define what masks are.
It's undeniably clear that wearing actual respirator N95 or ffp2 masks that are fit to the face work in preventing infection and spread. That's just physics. But when most are only wearing a partial covering "mask" that just blocks spittle of course it's not going to prevent infecting or infection by an aerosol spread disease.
The real problem with "masks" was that our governments' intentionally lied about the need for them at the start of the pandemic. The messaging never recovered from this and I imagine even if government health institutions stated the truth today, that face fit respirators are required, it'd just be ignored. The problem wasn't ever actual masks, it was people lying about them and people not wearing them.
Sure, unfit "masks" might have some mitigation potential and it's better than wearing nothing. But masks, in the context of an aerosol spread infection, have to mean fit respirator masks.
I think you also need to consider direction of spread. It is easy to see how spread from an individual is cut with masks. Spread to the individual is almost certainly affected, but to really cut it down, you almost certainly need gloves and a ton of hand washing going on.
But, again, I am /not/ arguing against masks. I fully agree that if you are sick, stay home and wear a mask when you do go out. My point is that much of the reduction is more easily explained with "stay home" than it was "a lot of folks were wearing masks." I further agree that both had an likely had an impact. But, just as having a more streamlined car will give you better gas mileage, if you are trying to make a bigger impact, you are almost certainly better focusing on buses than you are personal vehicles.
> This "proof that masks work" is likely more just proof that not having kids in schools cuts a lot of spread.
It is? I mean, something worked. You think the fact that flu deaths dropped to essentially zero for two years was exclusively due to school closures? Is there any evidence for that?
I'll admit to some individual dithering on the evidence for any given mitigation strategy. But clearly, on the whole, societal mitigations for covid worked very well to control disease. You admit that much, right? People freaked out about school closures too. They freaked out about distancing. They freaked out about travel restrictions. (also covid-specific rules like testing requirements, and vaccination programs). And it was, overall, the same people arguing against all this stuff that was, again, clearly working as evidenced by its effect on influenza and et. al.
So why did people argue so hard against exactly those (working!) mitigation strategies?
I did not mean my point to be that it was only school closures. My guess is that it was a combination of all items. I would just wager that school closures are the dominant factor.
I cannot underscore enough just how sick families get by having their kids in schools.
To your last point? I got nothing. At large, we were trying to make a bad situation better. The vehement arguing and digging in on not doing anything seems like it is really only going to make things worse.
I will also throw under the bus that it was a single thing that worked. Even my "I think it was largely the school closures" is banking that it is one of the largest factors, but I don't think it was large enough that it alone could accomplish what we did see.
Is there any evidence for that? This again seems like the kind of whataboutism designed to deflect and not engage.
Clearly what we did worked vs. the flu. So arguments that "what we did" was not effective vs. covid seem prima facie wrong. Right?
It's OK to argue at the margins about what the most effective strategies were, and I'm happy to engage on that. But almost everywhere I see this argument, it seems more like an attempt to paper over a historical refusal to accommodate any mitigation at all.
There's exactly as much evidence for that as there is for any other mitigation, which is to say none because the CDC has spent approximately 0 dollars trying to study any of them seriously. We're all just guessing.
And once again, that seems much more like an evasion to me than a debate. Something worked, per the influenza numbers. You admit that much, right? So, is it so weird to assume that the most obvious hypothesis (general social distancing and mask use) is correct? Must we go in circles of denial and redirection like this?
> Something worked, per the influenza numbers. You admit that much, right?
I admit that it's possible that something worked, but I don't even think that's a given. We don't know how covid and influenza interact, and perhaps covid is outcompeting it. I'm not at all a virologist and have only a vague understanding that this hypothesis exists, but just throwing it out there to say I'm not 100% convinced that something we did worked.
> So, is it so weird to assume that the most obvious hypothesis (general social distancing and mask use) is correct?
This is just begging the question. Why is mask use the most obvious hypothesis? To me the most obvious hypothesis is that by closing nursing homes to outside visitors we shut off the main vector by which new influenza infections enter the facilities.
And again, this is just both of us guessing, because we don't have data.
> But some scientists theorize that this virus may have always been responsible for a portion of the small number of unexplained pediatric hepatitis cases that happen every year.
This doesn't feel like something that needs to be theorized about. Were the hepatitis instances depressed during covid? If integrating since the start of covid until now, do the current cases push the hepatitis caseload beyond the comparable average in preceding years?
Articles like this are frustrating. Obvious questions unanswered. No information as to the identify of "some scientists".
I think such unclear reporting triggers conspiracy theories by making people feel as though information is being hidden. I don't doubt that this is incompetence rather than malice, but damn, humanity needs to fix the journalism problem.
It reminds me of how few parents realize the statistical risk of kids in cars versus how rare abduction is (if kid walks alone to school as an alternative to a car, for example). Again it is emotional/anecdotal thinking rather than data.