".. public-health officials have worried over infections in the young — assuming they would eventually help bring the disease back to those much more vulnerable."<p>I had wondered why we allowed workers in long term care facilities to come and go and work in multiple facilities. In/out spread transmission vector devastated older at-risk. And NY forced known carrier patients from hospital into long term care, infecting more at-risk.<p>Also wondering why we aren't allowing low-risk children to get it naturally and develop anti-bodies while young so they can get on with their role of being children.
As the article notes, this isn’t new information - it was clear very early on in the pandemic. Infection fatality rates from the CDC and other sources showed people under 50 had very low risk, not just kids. The lockdowns made no sense to me because it felt like everyone under 50 was being constrained so that those over 50 could avoid staying strictly quarantined but instead enjoy partial freedom and go outside of their homes. In reality people, businesses, schools, and so on should have been allowed to take the risks they were comfortable with as individuals. The big dissonance was when many European countries opened up schools around mid 2020 and America didn’t. But little attention was given to this aspect by the public or news media.<p>So why was there so much fear mongering and safetyism, suggesting that even a small risk of opening up schools is unacceptable? In my opinion a big reason in America was because COVID became politicized in a contentious election year, since a crisis can be leveraged by critiquing how the crisis is managed and by hurting the economy (one of Trump’s strengths going into 2020). This irrational approach and unwillingness to consider data was enabled by a broader rise in safetyism even before COVID, which normalized it to some degree. For instance “vision zero” programs that seek to diminish or ban cars in pursuit of perfect safety. Or kids not being allowed to freely roam on their own. And so on.