Indeed. Parents should also be vaccinated. It would be reasonable to delay school until that point. (This is an additional delay over those previously mentioned in parent comments in this thread.)

However, we should also expect that all parents will be exposed to the virus sooner or later, as we have been told from the earliest days of the pandemic, and thus we should limit further delay.

Yes, parents will get COVID from kids who go to school. Yes, unfortunately, there will be children orphaned as a result of that exposure. No, there won't be substantial numbers of net orphans -- certainly not such that crippling public education for years or even decades is the more humane response.

Also what number of orphans is acceptable? 30% of the US won't vaccinate. Delta has a mortality rate of 3+%(1) by the most charitable takes. Rough math would show that could add somewhere under 1 million orphans to the system.

Do we also ignore medical costs for those who get sick? What about the hospital resources those people take up?

Again, there's just so much more than "just the children"

1. I'm estimating 3% for Delta by taking the NHS estimate of 1.9% CFR for Alpha and the subsequent estimates that Delta had around double the risk of fatality.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

EDIT: HN won't let me reply to the comment below me until the cool down period. They say my argument is not in good faith, which is an odd assertion to make. Their comment assumes a higher case count than reported, which while likely, is not an assumption I'm making because it's hard to discern whether there is also therefore uncounted mortality.

What's your reference for that?

> 3. Please present evidence of long term effect in a non-negligible percentage of children

> There is no long term data either way anywhere because we have to live through it first.

If we don’t have long term data one way or the other, why is the starting assumption that children will experience long Covid to the same extent and same severity as adults (especially given that they have much lower rates of getting a serious case of covid compared to adults)?

And again, children don't exist in a vacuum and can therefore cause long term issues in adults.

This is about being cautious based on what we do know. And we do know it's a crippling societal risk that children are such a huge vector.

What will my mother's friend's family do after their father, husband and sole provider died within 10 minutes of taking the vaccine, right there on the spot, on the vaccine queue? (Answer: the family almost got evicted by the way. And lived in poverty for 7-8 months before recovering.)

Where do we draw the line, I ask?

Someone having the vaccine also doesn't increase the risk of someone else dying. It's pretty simple.

This is a non-sequitur. I ask the reverse: how do I help society by vaccinating? Judging by the contemporary info out there -- I don't in any way or form. I don't reduce the spread and I won't reduce my symptoms because I got through it 3 times without realizing and only the first time was bad (and it was before the news of the pandemic even started so I couldn't have known; and there were no vaccines back then so I had no choice).

Your reply is not helpful.

> Simple statistics show that the risk of dying by taking the vaccine is significantly lower than the risk of dying from covid.

So it's okay if people die of taking the vaccine but it's not okay if they die of Covid? Got it, thanks.

"Smaller percent" is a very inhumane way of looking at it. You're counting lives as if they are rice grains. You should be ashamed of yourself. People still die, regardless of percents.

It's IMO understandable that many elders in my country decide against the vaccine because in many of them it evokes a severe immune response that carries an actual risk of death on the same day. Do you just write them off with "they are a smaller percent than Covid deaths"? How humane of you.

Your response is shockingly insensitive.

Vaccination helps reduce the risk of you catching the virus, spreading the virus, reduces the risk of hospitalization, reduces the risk of you taking medical resources from someone else.

The risk of a "severe immune response that will cause death" is statistically MUCH lower than the risk of catching and dying from covid.

Not accommodating your sealioning is the humane response.

You should tone down the conspiracy theorist act and look for actual human beings with worries and a lot to lose because, you know, that's exactly what's going on.

Think what you will though.

The US is sitting on 860K deaths from 60m cases. A bit over 1%. Vaccine related deaths are about 6k2 in 187m people. Or 0.0018%.

It's only no help if you consider reducing deaths by orders of magnitude and freeing up resources for the more needy "nothing".

You also need to stop thinking about individuals when talking about public health policies. It sucks but at population levels you're talking about millions of faceless individuals.

Edit: I should really have tried to find deaths in fully vaccinated individuals vs unvaccinated. E.g https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Within the vaccine-eligible population of Scotland aged 65–79 years, the death rate per 10 000 person-years was 64·8 for unvaccinated individuals and 4·2 for fully vaccinated individuals. This difference in death rate was most marked in the population older than 80 years (14·0 deaths per 10 000 person-years for fully vaccinated vs 420·1 deaths per 10 000 person-years for unvaccinated individuals older than 80 years) but attenuated in individuals aged 18–64 years (0·8 deaths per 10 000 person-years for fully vaccinated vs 3·1 deaths per 10 000 person-years for unvaccinated individuals aged 18–64 years). For fully vaccinated individuals who subsequently tested positive, there was a median of 8·0 days (IQR 5–13) between a positive test and dying of COVID-19.

So why should I do it? I will not help anybody (and no I won't hog an ICU bed).

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...