> would you be willing to take responsibility for spreading coronavirus to n other people so you can play the piano?

Would you be willing to accept responsibility for the increased depression and loneliness among the young people who live together in this building that could result from banning the piano?

Yes, exactly. We have conflicting values to balance. I hope most of us can do it most of the time from the goal, however quixotic, of doing the most good for the most people. I don't claim to know what that is, and I am not saying that the kid in the example shouldn't be able to play the piano (though, on that note, it seems to me that if a student's well-being depends that directly on being able to play the piano, the school itself is foundering). But I get you. It would be all too easy to settle for some sort of rhetorical first principle that abstracts away all the complexity: sharing things makes people sick, we shouldn't share things. Or, other people getting sick is their own problem, damn the torpedos, I'm jamming in the lounge.

> if a student's well-being depends that directly on being able to play the piano

It's death by a thousand cuts. The piano policy isn't that devastating by itself, but it's one of 50 things that have been taken away.

It's exhausting. And the piano policy in the example is totally absurd. I hope my remarks didn't come across as personal. I have kids in school too, and although I'm currently favoring masks, I'm also miserable about how my kids' early childhood social and academic development have been impacted.

Why do kids even need masks? Like, they aren’t at risk… this is a known fact since like March of 2020. Why force kids to wear them? Who are they supposed to be protecting? Fully vaccinated teachers? Who?

Kids are less at risk. That doesn't mean they aren't at risk. They can, and do, still catch Covid, even if they are less likely to suffer severe hospitalization.

On top of that, if they end up with long-covid or some other long-term complication from the Covid infection, they're quality of life is impacted for a far longer time. Some known long-covid complications include things like (potentially) permanent loss of smell or taste, reduced mental faculties, and organ damage. Would you sentence a child to a lifetime of being unable to taste their food for the rest of their lives just so they don't have to wear a mask for a tiny portion of their lives?

Also, adults seem to hate masks, but plenty of kids don't feel the same way. My oldest loves to accent his outfits with his cloth masks, and wears them over surgical or N95 masks now.

Who are they protecting? They're protecting each other and everyone around them. That could be a teacher who could catch a breakthrough case, a sibling or family member, and anyone they might come into close contact with. That also cascades. That vaccinated teacher who may have caught a break through case might infect their family causing a small outbreak in their home.

By wearing a mask, they're reducing risk, even if it might be a small amount. Those few percentage points could mean the difference between life and death for someone in their contact circle.

That just sounds like completely ungrounded fear. More kids get fucked by pool accidents than Covid. Kids have no business wearing masks.

The damage caused by masks and treating kids like nothing more than disease vectors vastly outweighs the absolutely minimal risks Covid poses to them.

48 million Americans get food poisoning every year, many dying. Are you going to stop cooking for your family and friends?

Yeeeaaah, I realize my point was easy to make a caricature of, but that's a pretty specious caricature. I'm talking about an effort to balance safety and freedom from a more collective and thoughtful perspective.

How is him playing the piano spreading anything aside from possibly joy and happiness? What a ridiculous thing to say.

Yeah, sorry for not being more clear, but I wasn't talking about that person, or the piano, or about the odds of someone contracting COVID from surfaces. I was using the quote to illustrate what I see as a difficult pair of values to balance that situations like masks in classrooms, or other shared-space restrictions, really throw into painfully high relief: how do we collectively, as a society, balance our own personal inclinations (i.e., in this case, to play the piano, or in OP, to let our kids go unmasked) with whatever risks we impose on other people (i.e., in this case, which for the record I totally agree is excessive, that the shared piano will help spread disease; or in the outer case, that fewer masks in the classroom could lead to, e.g., more sick grandparents, or teachers)?

In the case of the piano, it's very simple: anyone who is worried about catching Covid by listening to the piano is free to not listen to the piano. There's really nothing to balance.

Solid, got it. Next time I talk to criddell's kids' university's dorm administrators, I'll try to set them straight. Hopefully they'll be able to zoom out a bit from whatever conversation-impairing details they've latched onto.

This myopic focus on exactly one specific illness to the literal exclusion of everything else is not healthy. People need to accept the risks and move on.

There is more to life than a singular focus on spreading Covid. Life would be robbed of all that is worth living for if every action and encounter we take has to pass the “willing to spread Covid” question.

There are countless more problems and risks in life than Covid. Many are much more important to individuals.