Kurt Eichenwald has tweeted about the virus

quote:

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Stop talking about percents. Let's talk about dead children.

57 million kids attend schools.

Assume a ridiculously low infection rate of 2% - that's 1,140,000 children sick. Assume a death rate of 0.5%. That's almost 6,000 dead children. Like two 9/11s, with just kids

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Is it possible to have a more facile, clickbait take than this? Just off the top of my head:

--The death rate for children is way way way lower than .5%. The overall population death rate is likely to be only that or lower. Kids are maybe like .05%

--Doesn't even establish a baseline - he just takes as a given that not re-opening schools = 0 child infections/deaths. Also, just takes as a given that schools being open when there is no coronavirus = 0 deaths

--When theoretically doing a cost/benefit analysis, ONLY considers the COSTS...AND even then, only along the vector he cares about. This means he ignores the impact of prolonged periods of "remote learning" on student outcomes. I'll bet he's very very publicly concerned with inequality also - yet causing already vulnerable student populations to fall even further behind by ruining years of their schooling (thus impacting their career outcomes) doesn't seem to bother him at all

--Completely ignores the acceptable deaths we absorb daily from the very act of keeping schools open during normal times. We don't have a "cure" for automobile crashes or any other infectious diseases that kill children with no warning every year.


This cult of "safety-ism" bothers me maybe even more than the cancel culture shite going on.

Twatter

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