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by DuskStar 2150 days ago
But Bill Gates is only a good person to listen to when he agrees with the current political zeitgeist - otherwise he's a billionaire monopolist who should thus be ignored.

Honestly, I'd love to hear what circumstances people would accept opening schools in. Would "COVID is 10x less deadly than chicken pox for children under 15" be enough, if there was some way to protect teachers? What about "less deadly than driving to school for a year"?
2 comments
yokaze 2149 days ago
The problem is less for the children, but the social environment they live in. And that doesn't end at the teachers or their parents.

To my knowledge, the grand-parents have a much greater role in child-care in Spain and Italy, than in Germany and Sweden. To complicate matters, closing all schools and kindergardens even increased their importance, as parents still had to work somehow. Probably, closing the schools _might_ have even made things worse, as someone has to take care of them.

But that is not necessarily an argument in favour of opening them again. It shows, how children, while largely unaffected, have potentially a huge impact on the spread of the virus.

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crooked-v 2150 days ago
How about 'after successfully reducing new infections to almost zero', like many other countries? There are many solutions here other than 'shrug and give up' as the current federal government and many state governments have done.
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DuskStar 2149 days ago
And if that's the minimum you're willing to accept, that's fine! I'd also be ok with evidence showing kids don't die at more than 1 per million and also don't spread the disease to others. (This implicitly values a year of in-person education at a millionth of the life of a child. Arguably this is far too low, considering that we pay thousands of dollars for a year of education and almost every statistical measure of the value of life is under $10 million. If the difference in education is worth more than $100, that would put the acceptable deaths at at least 1 per 100,000)

If you're looking for case studies... Well, Sweden is the one everyone seems to be eyeing.

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