The idea is to reduce the spread of the virus in order to protect everyone from a lack of hospital beds and exhausted medical staff. It's not about protecting the individual children (at least not primarily, because they are so low risk). Whether or not this is still a useful approach probably depends on the locale. It seems like places where the Omicron wave is rapidly ending, having children wear masks is entirely pointless.
>The idea is to reduce the spread of the virus in order to protect everyone from a lack of hospital beds and exhausted medical staff.
People keep saying this, but if hospital capacity was actually the "real" bottleneck in treating covid then why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity? "Do this thing that is marginally beneficial for adults and potentially actively harmful long term for children to possibly impact hospital capacity elsewhere" is not something that makes sense to me. If this was just another bottleneck in some system and not related to the pandemic you'd address the real problem, right?
> People keep saying this, but if hospital capacity was actually the "real" bottleneck in treating covid then why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity?
You mean like calling in the national guard to help alleviate the problem or busing in nurses from all over the country, or creating temporary wards, or fighting to get more ventilators and medications? All of those things and more have been happening.
> "Do this thing that is marginally beneficial for adults and potentially actively harmful long term for children
Not only are you minimizing the benefits here, but you're prioritizing potential outcomes over proven ones. That is not something that makes sense to me. I want to make my choices based on our best understanding of the evidence we have right now, not based on things that may or may not ever happen in the future.
Right now, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask when community spread is high in your area are proven to do a lot of good to help prevent very real harms. That's enough for me.
Nurses in Boston have been striking for almost a year. I've seen one instance of calling in the national guard recently, and ventilators are no longer the preferred treatment protocol in every case. I haven't seen a single effort to literally build more hospital wings with ICU beds. Have you?
>Not only are you minimizing the benefits here
CDC's own studies did this, not me.
>but you're prioritizing potential outcomes over proven ones.
Yes exactly. We know that kids have an infinitesimally small risk from covid, we know that teachers have a similar risk profile if they're vaccinated. The "potential" outcomes are catastrophic to development, and we won't know for years what detrimental effects forcing small children to wear masks all the time will have.
Sorry, still doesn't make sense to me. We have one set of known knowns, and one of unknown-ish unknowns, and we're still doing this because people (not you, necessarily) seem to think the goal is to "never get covid".
> Nurses in Boston have been striking for almost a year
I'm surprised more haven't been. Nurses are being outright abused, but that doesn't change the fact that nurses are being asked to travel great distances to help with staffing issues. The whole situation in nursing is a huge mess right now for a lot of reasons.
> I've seen one instance of calling in the national guard recently
you should be paying more attention to the news, or possibility looking critically at where you're getting your news from since it's not serving you very well. I don't know which one you heard about but your list should include Washington, Georgia, Ohio, Oregon, Maine, New York, and New Hampshire. New Mexico has also called in the national guard because of omicron, but they want troops acting as substitute teachers.
> and ventilators are no longer the preferred treatment protocol in every case
> I haven't seen a single effort to literally build more hospital wings with ICU beds. Have you?
Yes I have. Most hospitals don't want to add entire new wings full of beds because covid isn't going to be like this forever, but in just the last few months here are some examples of hospitals doing wherever they can to add capacity:
https://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol-nursing-homes-covid-...
This is on top of all the beds and overflow centers hospitals have been adding over the last two years. It's not that every hospital is waiting until they have people dying outside their doors to start adding beds either. One of the best US hospitals for heart surgeries is just outside of Chicago and they've renovated parts of their old partially demolished hospital building to keep on standby so they can handle covid cases in case they get overwhelmed like so many others have. It's a pretty smart way to gain some extra ICU space while keeping costs down.
Your facts are just very wrong or very incomplete. I recommend looking into this stuff a bit more using new sources.
"why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity?"
Maybe we should, but we are talking about an astounding cost, with ongoing upkeep, for once-every-hundred-year events. And that's just for new facilities - we already have nursing shortages.
Instead, we (and just about every other country) have used mitigation efforts to reduce the transmission rate when hospital capacity is threatened. It's a lot cheaper and can be done quickly, unlike building new ICU capacity and training new doctors and nurses (many of whom would be out of the job once the pandemic is over).
You say this is expensive and hard, but so what? Isn’t that what you do when a pandemic occurs?
You also point out we have a nursing shortage currently (we did before the pandemic as well). Isn’t that a reason why we should do this? Kill two birds with one stone … solve the prior nursing shortage with a training and hiring blitz.
Expanding hospitals, building new hospitals and training scores of new highly-skilled staff all takes many years. In addition to being extraordinarily expensive.
And then what? The pandemic ends and we have incredibly expensive facilities sitting empty (but still incurring maintenance costs forever) and a surplus of highly-trained staff who cannot find jobs because 98% of the time, we simply don't need any more capacity than we had in 2019.
Training staff does take time but new hospitals can be built quickly. The Chinese built an entire new hospital in 10 days. It probably isn't as good as a modern US hospital, but it's better than nothing.
The mitigation efforts have cost trillions of dollars in relief spending to make up for the economic damage they caused. Could we not have expanded capacity with one or two of the trillions we spent?
Makes you kinda wonder what kind of emergency this is? I mean they tried setting up fully staffed field hospitals in the beginning but they were closed—most without seeing a single patient.
Whatever the hell society is doing right now, it ain’t to protect hospital capacity. If hospitals were truly falling apart we’d have done something to fix them.
