this appears to be an example of mistaking good news for bad

covid-19 is extremely low risk for children

there have been 31 deaths from covid under the age of 14 in the entire US

mistaking mild/asymptomatic cases for a problem is how one creates bad, counter-productive policy https://twitter.com/tedfujimoto/status/1284437559821561856

over this same timeframe, 2.4X as many school and college aged kids have died from pneumonia. remember the last time we closed all the schools for pneumonia?

me either.

this is panic, not science and a massive mistake in terms of assessing costs and benefits.

when i was a child, parents had chickenpox parties to deliberately expose their children and generate low risk immunity

this is really much the same.

there are 104 million americans under age 25. there have been 188 covid deaths.

risk: 1.8/million.

under 14: 0.54/million

these death risk figures for children are about equivalent to overall US death risk from rabies and not even 1/10th that of syphilis.

~270 americans are struck by lightning each year.

0.82/million.

under 14 death from cov, 0.54/million.

let that one sink in.

these are outlandishly low risk figures and panicking over them is utter innumeracy.

1200 children under 15 will die from cancer in a typical year.

that's 20X annualized covid risk. are we really going to close school for something 5% the risk of child cancer?

statistically, the kids are more likely to die driving to school or to soccer practice. 4,000 a year die in car crashes. 1000 a year drown.

142 children under 14 die annually in the US from work related injuries.

paper routes are more dangerous than covid to an under 14.

so let's keep some perspective here.

kids are NOT at risk. we are not "protecting them" by closing schools.

we're harming them by projecting our own atavistic fears onto them.

dr mcdonald said it perfectly. https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1283858607889620994?s=20

and can we PLEASE dispense with this canard of the old, vulnerable teacher who will die if exposed to kids?

a teacher of 30 years tenure has seen more disease that a bangladesh water rat and has an immune system that would probably let them eat one raw and suffer no ill effect.

this is not a real thing nor a real risk and would be easily handled if it were by simply keeping a few teachers home.

why, if 1% of teachers are at risk is the answer to keep all the kids home from school and/or make up some bizarre and pointless rules for classrooms?

and the idea that kids are covid disease vectors and will infect teachers and parents is similarly false anyhow

it's a wonderful scare story, but the data comprehensively refutes it

kids don't get bad covid because their immune systems attack it readily https://www.uvm.edu/uvmnews/news/kids-rarely-transmit-covid-19-say-uvm-docs-top-journal

when you attack the virus right away, you never get high viral loads and thus do not have a lot of virus to shed

so you are not contagious and if you are, tend to pass on mild cases as severity looks correlated to size of exposure.

germany has been fine https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-07-13/german-study-shows-low-coronavirus-infection-rate-in-schools

this study is particularly telling. the swedes who left schools open as normal with no restrictions saw no more schoolkid covid that the finns who closed theirs.

there is not a death from covid under age 20 in the whole country of sweden. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publicerat-material/publikationsarkiv/c/covid-19-in-schoolchildren/

kids are not at risk from covid and do not pose covid risks to others.

but they ARE at risk from #Karen and her desire to disrupt their lives and educations so that she can strut around self importantly and project her fears onto others while playing bossypants.

she may mean well, but we all know with what the road to hell is paved...

stop dragging the kids into this grotesquery of data misuse and partisan scaremongering.

the CDC does not list a death of a school aged child in all of florida.

schools pose basically no risk to kids, families, & teachers, but keeping them closed poses massive risks and will probably kill multiples more children through abuse, economic harm from forcing caregivers out of work, and loss of access to meals than it could ever save from cov