Back in the day, all they had to do was whisper there’d been an outbreak of cooties to keep kids apart for a while. Simpler times… 
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You start the sign in process. After the first step, it shows you all the sites nearest the address you entered
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Oh look, more completely irresponsible editorializing from people who aren’t fucking epidemiologists. I don’t give a single solitary shit what a professor of economics has to say about child immunity to COVID-19.
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Anecdote, but both of my brother-in-laws kids got it, and they assume they were the vector (both in daycare) for basically his whole extended family to get it. Ages three and one. One showed symptoms, the other didn’t, and all the rest is the family showed symptoms, except the brother-in-law. Curiously, the younger, who had the symptoms, never tested positive, nor did the brother-in-law, but everyone else did.
Incidentally, the younger children was actually hospitalized, but just for 24 hours, and he seems fine now.
I guess he was just insanely unlucky.
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Now there’s a troubling thought.
ETA: Do you know if it was PCR or antibody testing, and/or if there was more than one test done?
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Just as the sense that we have turned some corner has started to spread, another reminder that this virus isn’t going anywhere.
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I don’t remember, but I know they tested the brother-in-law twice, a rapid test and a more accurate test, and neither came back positive.
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i think he might be a lawyer rather than an economist but sometime near the beginning of the pandemic ben shapiro went all-in on minimizing the risks of the illness and claimed that no more than 500 people would die from it . . .
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Off by three orders of magnitude. Impressive, and horrible.
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It’s amazing all those Cato institute/far right lawyers talking medicine types still have the fig leaf of academia supporting them. I’d have curled up in shame and withdrawn from public life but “think tank” ghouls have no shame and no integrity.
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Almost a separate topic but…
I deal in risk, pricing risk. “Real Options” are a mathematical approach to putting a value on taking or not taking a risk. Very (very) roughly, if you have the option to make a decision later, rather than now, the value of that is the difference between (say) a coin toss today and a coin toss where you can decide at the last minute when you know the outcome. That’s a trivial example, of course, but the approach lets you put a rough value on the options you often have to postpone decisions until more information comes in.
What’s interesting is: if you price the option value into a decision, suddenly a lot of classical “irrational behaviour” that the economists talk about becomes quite sensible. People have an innate sense of the price of risk… lots of these “a dollar now” decisions are made by humans pricing the risk, not just the “net present value”.
I see people not wanting to get vaccinated, particularly in the 
, and as a risk guy I see people who are pricing risk. (Perhaps mispricing, but stay with me…)
What I see are people who perceive any interaction with the health care system as expensive and having uncertain outcomes. The innate pricing system we humans have is saying “the option to not interact with the health care system is worth more than ‘buying’ the vaccine and its outcomes”. For a median income American, used to a system that we learned on Wednesday is many times more expensive than counterparts in the first world, they are not being irrational when they perceive the cost of not dealing with that system as an expensive option to lose.
Just my $0.02, but watching the CNN piece on folks in Oklahoma not wanting to be vaccinated I think they came in for slightly too rough a ride. Yes, they should get vaccinated, but it occurs to me that hesitancy on that front may have a real economic explanation based on their experience of expensive and uncertain care.
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But the vaccine is free. 
They are just guided by FoxNews period. They could be rich and it wouldn’t make any difference.
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But the vaccine is free
Yes, but if they perceive any interaction with the health care system as expensive and risky, then giving up the option to stay away from it looks like a bad trade.
They have some control over the outcome by not taking the vaccine, and perceive taking it as a loss of control to an expensive and arbitrary system. (One that often bankrupts “rich” people.)
I’ll bet if CNN walked in there and said “we’ll insure anyone who takes the vaccine for all COVID-related costs for life” you would have had a different reaction. That would have reduced their risk…
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Absolutely not an economist, nor even adjacent. Just an ol’ country doc. But honestly, I have given up on any model that assumes any human group will behave as “rational actors.”
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
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I loved this quote as a kid in the theater and still refer to it to this day.
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But honestly, I have given up on any model that assumes any human group will behave as “rational actors.”
I hear you, but if you can explain the irrationality then it might provide an avenue to address it.
If the decision is based on a skewed perception of risk, or a perception of risk based on personal experiences, then I’m interested in how can we identify where the risk perception is, and address that perception to get the true low-risk outcome.
…and I’m country folk at heart (well, backwoods, anyhow) and I’d have welcomed a kinder treatment in the CNN piece.
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There’s a city in Germany, Greiz, which has a very high 7d incidence. The representative (chief district administrator, in a rough translation) claims this is due to mass testing, which is a standard modus operandi for people who attack the measures like shutting down in-person shopping, or even limiting shopping to 1 person per 10 m².
The important bit is: they used now-available antigene lateral flow tests on contact person’s without symptoms. Around 900 tested, around one third of those positive (after PCR) - and around 150 of those kids.
While I think the representative is an idiot, and repeats talking points which bloody well led us where we are now, there is no doubt that children DO play an important role in the spread of the virus when other groups are either vaccinated or ‘unavailable’ for the virus (e.g. because they can’t go shopping as they whish, or are WFH, etc.).
We need to protect children, and their families. And currently, we get no support for that. Zilch, zero, NADA. Fuck this shit. I’m so done in.
ETA: sorry, this should have been about the kids, primarily. I deleted stuff which was just about me.
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