Colin Powell DD

[Dan Druff]

If my kid died of anything at a young age I wouldn't be "cool with it".

But that doesn't mean potentially harmful measures should be forced upon him, in order to reduce what is already a tiny chance of death.

Every day is a series of risk calcluations. When I chose to take my kid on a road trip in July to Colorado and Arizona, I was definitely increasing the chance that he would die in a car accident during those two weeks. However, the benefit of the trip versus the low chance he'd die in a car accident made the tradeoff worth it.

Similarly, I do not feel the need for oppressive masking and distancing rules (which have definite social costs to developing kids), nor do I feel the state should mandate vaccination for a disease which is handled very well by almost all kids, and where it appears they are rarely transmitting.

Why didn't you support mandatory masking during the 2018-19 flu season, which killed a similar number of kids per month as COVID has?

Knee-jerk idiots are casting the COVID danger of older adults onto kids, and it's not at all comparable. We wouldn't be talking about COVID if the general population was dying from it at the low rate kids are. It would be a non-issue, like the Swine Flu was.

99% of all COVID deaths in the US are people over 35 years old, even though people 35+ make up only a little more than half the population. Kids under 18 make up 0.06% of all COVID deaths, despite being about 23% of the population.

Mathematics doesn't seem to mean much to the SCIENCE left, though.

I agree with your math for younger adults + kids.

However the problem is if you let covid run wild from age 35 downwards, what do you think is going to happen when they visit grandparents or other family?

Or they get in close contact with their basketball coach or whatever.

If your answer is to vaccinate 35+ at a rate of 100% I'm slightly more interested but what do you do about the idiots who won't get vaccinated?

People who choose not to vaccinate take the risk into their own hands. I don't think we should work policy around them. Everyone in the US over 12 can get a vaccine if they want it.

It does not appear kids transmit COVID much. See other thread. There have not been any known student-transmitted school outbreaks in the first 2 months of the 21-22 school year. There have been a few where the teacher has infected the class, but not many because most teachers are vaccinated. The only pediatric outbreaks have been community-related, in areas with high general transmission, where kids likely got it from infected parents.

It appears kids can get COVID as easily as adults, but they don't transmit it much, and they rarely have worse than flu-like symptoms.