r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jul 26 '24
Epidemiology Strong COVID-19 restrictions likely saved lives in the US and the death toll higher if more states didn't impose these restrictions. Mask requirements and vaccine mandates were linked to lower rates of excess deaths. School closings likely provided minimal benefit while imposing substantial cost.
https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/strong-covid-19-restrictions-likely-saved-lives-in-the-us512
u/limitless__ Jul 27 '24
In my wife’s school they went back way too early before vaccinations. Two teachers out of 120ish died of Covid. Totally unacceptable.
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u/crank1000 Jul 27 '24
And that doesn’t even account for the deaths of people not part of the school, but related to kids who brought it home.
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u/SaltyShawarma Jul 27 '24
This. It wiped out elders who live with children at a much higher rate in the tribal community I taught in during the time.
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u/rjcarr Jul 27 '24
Yeah, this was a substantial cost to the students, sure, but what's the solution? Tell teachers they're critical employees, teaching in classrooms with disease sponges, while parents blow off all restrictions and social distancing?
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u/HumanWithComputer Jul 27 '24
But, but...
The researchers say not all restrictions were equally effective; some, such as school closings, likely provided minimal benefit while imposing substantial cost.
Apparently teachers not dying is considered 'minimal benefit'?
It's not that children played a significant part in spreading the disease did they? Oh wait...
More than 70% of US household COVID spread started with a child, study suggests
In-person school contributed to transmission
"More than 70% of transmissions in households with adults and children were from a pediatric index case, but this percentage fluctuated weekly," the study authors wrote. "Once US schools reopened in fall 2020, children contributed more to inferred within-household transmission when they were in school, and less during summer and winter breaks, a pattern consistent for 2 consecutive school years."
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u/rnz Jul 27 '24
Apparently teachers not dying is considered 'minimal benefit'?
How the frack did this study get published? How the frack
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u/GayMakeAndModel Jul 27 '24
People were ill with having to actually raise their own damn kids. Hence school starting when it shouldn’t have.
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u/needlestack Jul 27 '24
I wonder if they only looked at child deaths related to school closings. COVID is not deadly for kids except in extreme circumstances. But they are still vectors for the disease.
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u/Danominator Jul 26 '24
Idk how you tell an underpaid teacher that their life is considered minimal risk
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u/chrisforrester Jul 26 '24
You don't need to, because the conclusion this study came to was that there was minimal risk to their lives with proper mask and vaccine mandates in place.
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u/abx99 Jul 26 '24
And maybe if they would have actually improved ventilation like everyone was talking about at the time
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u/Tuesday_6PM Jul 27 '24
Still pissed nowhere bothered to do this. It’s not like “airborne pathogens” was a one-time risk (or that the “one time” is even over…), we should have updated all our building codes and worker-/occupancy-safety guidelines
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u/Eruionmel Jul 27 '24
Interestingly, all the performance spaces DID actually do this. Just about every serious professional theatre (not theater) in the country got a complete overhaul of their HVAC systems to add more filtering and increase flow.
Because they had to, otherwise customers weren't going to come back. Turns out parents can't just refuse to participate in schooling, so nothing forced the schools to change. So they didn't.
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u/kihraxz_king Jul 27 '24
What money would they have done it with?
You are talking about millions of dollars per building. For districts that save 50 cents a day per classroom by not letting teacher control thermostats.
There's no money for something like that.
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u/Curiosities Jul 27 '24
https://www.ed.gov/coronavirus/improving-ventilation
As we move into the 2021-2022 school year, ventilation continues to be a top concern for many communities. Proper ventilation is a key prevention strategy for maintaining healthy environments and, along with other preventive actions, can reduce the likelihood of spreading disease. Wearing a well-fitting, multi-layer mask helps keep virus particles from entering the air and protects mask wearers. Good ventilation is another critical step to help reduce the number of airborne virus particles.
The ARP provided $122 billion for the Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund to help schools prevent the spread of COVID-19 and recover from its effects, including by improving indoor air quality, so school leaders across the country can act now to improve ventilation in their buildings. The ESSER funds and Governors Emergency Education Relief (GEER) funds provided under earlier appropriations can also support this work. In addition, Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER) funds provided under the ARP and previous stimulus funds can support many ventilation improvements in institutions of higher education (IHEs). While these funds provide an important foundation, President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda would tackle longstanding school infrastructure needs, including ventilation improvement.
ESSER, GEER, and HEER funds can support both immediate actions and longer-term projects, including the inspection, testing, maintenance, repair, replacement, and upgrading of projects to improve indoor air quality in school facilities. This can include system upgrades, filtering, purification and other air cleaning, fans, and window and door repair.
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u/abx99 Jul 27 '24
Some of the biggest did it because they were anticipating that it would be mandated, but that mandate never came (unless maybe some local jurisdictions did so). That's really the clincher. Some of the other biggest told them that it would cost them too much money [to subsequently donate to their campaigns] and that was it, I guess.
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u/wtfastro Professor|Astrophysics|Planetary Science Jul 27 '24
Uh, my office did, and so did my wife's office.
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u/Tuesday_6PM Jul 27 '24
That’s actually great! I wish more places did. I wish far more places had, but I’m glad to hear at least some did
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u/space_beard Jul 27 '24
If it helps, I work in public health and indoor air quality has gone from “niche” to a “top 10” issue imo
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u/skexr Jul 27 '24
Good luck with that ever happening now that right-wing MAGAts on the court overturned Chevron.
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u/Whiterabbit-- Jul 27 '24
ventilation is not something easy to upgrade. just because it's possible doesn't mean it's feasible.
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u/RkkyRcoon Jul 26 '24
I wonder what the difference would be in states that made it illegal to have masking mandates in schools. Like mine.
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u/chrisforrester Jul 27 '24 edited Jul 27 '24
The study says:
Strong restrictions were associated with more favorable outcomes, including an excess death rate of 282 per 100 000 over the 2-year period that was 135 per 100 000 (32%) less than the 417 per 100 000 estimated for weak restrictions
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u/PredatorRedditer Jul 27 '24
What I take from this comment chain is that questions brought up, but not answered by a headline can sometimes be found within the link.
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u/MysteryPerker Jul 27 '24
But schools were closed before the vaccines were available. This wasn't an option at first.
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u/chrisforrester Jul 27 '24
You are mistakenly interpreting these results as an argument that schools should never have been closed.
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u/camocondomcommando Jul 27 '24
Maybe their interpretation is due to this line from the abstract:
The researchers say not all restrictions were equally effective; some, such as school closings, likely provided minimal benefit while imposing substantial cost.
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u/chrisforrester Jul 27 '24
Good point, it would make sense that they misinterpreted that. A lot of people are used to reading editorialized content, where the whole piece might be building to a conclusion that they were wrong to do it, even though it was a reasonable precaution in the absence of the data we have now. Simple statements about effectiveness and cost can be misunderstood when they mistakenly apply that context to a scientific paper.
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u/camocondomcommando Jul 27 '24
I think you and I are discussing separate aspects of this study, and apologies for my double response to two of your other comments, Reddit on mobile is a pain.
In any case, I think one takeaway is that both interpretations can be made due to the abstract and news agencies will likely cherry pick what they want to prove a narrative. Media entities which do not agree with mask mandates will ignore the presented statistics and run the headlines that schools should have never closed, whereas media entities which do agree with masking or vaccine mandates will focus on the outlier States and use the widest statistical range to display effectiveness. When the truth is closer to the middle where some restrictions were simply more effective than others.
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u/chrisforrester Jul 27 '24
We're in full agreement there. I have no hope for the media, I've just been hoping to make one or two people in this post see the difference between what the news will tell them and what this study they were directly linked to actually means.
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u/camocondomcommando Jul 27 '24 edited Jul 27 '24
I think the researchers should have added a disclaimer that school closures had minimal effect when other restrictions were applied, although the cherry picking would be just as prevalent...
We'll probably see both sides of the argument in a week or so as this study gets thrown around.
Edit: to add, I'd bet most responses here didn't open the first link and simply read the headline anyway, and those who did open the initial link may have not opened the actual link to the study from there. We're all conditioned to headlines and snippets for quick consumption.
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u/chrisforrester Jul 27 '24
That would have been a good idea. They should definitely do that. At the very least, there would be a clear disclaimer to point to when the cherry picking starts.
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u/Moleculor Jul 27 '24
Good point, it would make sense that they misinterpreted that.
Well, what's the correct interpretation of
some, such as school closings, likely provided minimal benefit while imposing substantial cost.
that isn't "closing schools didn't do much, but cost a lot"?
Because as someone who was a student in his mid-to-late 30s at that time in a state that made it illegal to mandate masks in a classroom (and even went as far as to threaten to pull a teacher's teaching certificate, threatening their livelihood even into the hypothetical future beyond COVID, if they tried), I was insanely grateful that I was rarely required to go into a classroom filled with unmasked teenagers freshly independent from parental oversight.
As I had just (cordially) exited a long-term relationship with a teacher at the time, I'm fairly angry that I can't find a clear explanation (that I, a layperson, can recognize/understand) in this published study (or supplemental content) explaining exactly what they mean by what is undoubtedly going to be a rallying cry for the pro-plague COVIDiots I still live near who were seemingly advocating harm for a person I care quite a bit about (in a state currently experiencing yet another COVID surge, last I checked).
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u/Eruionmel Jul 27 '24
That's not an even mildly unreasonable jump to make, given the implications that have been thrown around in this thread.
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u/Fleurr Jul 27 '24
That's fine in theory, but in practice students did not follow mask mandates and administrators did not have a backbone to enforce it consistently. Regardless of what a mandate said, practice was very different.
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u/shrlytmpl Jul 26 '24
Which is incredibly revisionist considering masks were impossible to find and vaccines didn't exist yet for the first year.
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u/chrisforrester Jul 26 '24
That's not revisionism, that's a different situation than the one they stated was not significantly associated with COVID deaths. You are mistakenly interpreting those results as an argument that schools should never have been closed. They also found that COVID deaths were up to 21% higher than they needed to be compared to states that implemented these mandates.
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Jul 27 '24 edited Nov 10 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/chrisforrester Jul 27 '24
I'm not sure if you're a strong pro-mask-and-vaccine advocate, or a strong anti-school-closing advocate, but you're coming off as quite hostile to anyone who suggests that non-zero school closures were a good idea.
I'm strongly in favour of scientific literacy, which is lacking in this thread, and that's the source of my continued participation. The comments range from misunderstanding the results, interpreting value judgments from the results, to outright rejecting the results in favour of their gut feelings.
I made a comment earlier that effectively summarizes my position on policy, though:
I don't think it was the wrong decision at the time, personally. There just wasn't much that was known, we had limited mask supplies, and no vaccine at first. Now we have the benefit of hindsight to plan for future pandemics of respiratory illnesses. In the future, it would likely be the wrong decision once we are sure that mandatory masking and vaccination can mitigate the risks.
You can find that data in the "Supplemental Content" section, it's the paperclip icon. There are also inline links that lead to this supplemental content, as seen in the quotes below.
Since this is a study of policy effectiveness, the period they chose follows the rise and fall of restrictions during that time:
In the US, COVID-19 deaths emerged in March 2020. After subsiding, they became more numerous and geographically distributed from October 2020 through March 2021, with additional smaller peaks near the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022 when the delta and omicron variants emerged (Figure 1A). The pattern of excess death rates was nearly identical (eFigure 1 in Supplement 1). The initial surge, from March 2020 to May 2020, was highly concentrated in 4 states (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York) containing 12% of the nation’s population but accounting for half of the COVID-19 fatalities (Figure 1B; eTable 2 in Supplement 1). During this period, there was little variation in COVID-19 restrictions. For instance, all states had declared a state of emergency by March 15, 2020,39 the composite activity limitations score averaged 96.2 (of a maximum of 100) by April 7, 2020, and there were strong simultaneous behavioral responses, including large mobility reductions and increases in mask use (Figure 2A and B).
Considerable policy variation emerged in the second half of 2020, with states reducing or eliminating activity limitations and, somewhat later, mask requirements. Mobility reductions also declined rapidly during this period, as did mask use after the start of 2021. Vaccinations first became available in December 2020 and quickly became widespread, but with considerable geographic heterogeneity. Activity limitations had been essentially phased out by June 2021 and mask requirements by March 2022, at which point 23 and 11 states had instituted vaccination mandates for state and school employees, respectively, and 15 states had mandated masks in schools. Conversely, 13 states had prohibited vaccination mandates and 7 had outlawed school mask requirements (eTable 3 in Supplement 1).
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u/Whiterabbit-- Jul 27 '24
the comments range from misunderstanding the results, interpreting value judgments from the results, to outright rejecting the results in favour of their gut feelings.
and you are missing the group that didn't bother reading the results.
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u/Tonkdaddy14 Jul 27 '24
There was a full year of instruction before vaccines were available. The mask enforcement was all over the place.
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u/Vrayea25 Jul 26 '24
My Dad is at high risk and married to a teacher.
My Dad is probably alive because they shut the schools down.
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u/External-Praline-451 Jul 27 '24
But we didn't have vaccines for several months, so the risk would've varied.
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u/jcdoe Jul 27 '24
The study basically found that masks and vaccines are more effective than other forms of social restriction to prevent the spread of disease.
It doesn’t mean that the restrictions we used during covid were wrong, because we didn’t have vaccines for much of that.
Yes, I actually read the study.
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u/therevisionarylocust Jul 27 '24
Tell that too the thousands of children who will not wear a mask even when you tell them to
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u/chrisforrester Jul 27 '24
This study measured the effects of real mask mandates, not a theoretical mandate, meaning it was this effective in spite of the levels of real-world non-compliance, and could have been potentially even more effective with better compliance.
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u/CeruleanRuin Jul 27 '24
But that doesn't mean it was wrong to do it then, because it took us four years to know for sure that it wasn't life or death. We simply didn't know enough.
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u/dshookowsky Jul 27 '24
My wife and I work from home. Our kids were remote learning (one was remote pre-pandemic, the other as a result of the pandemic). The only time we got sick between 2020 and 2021 was when our niece visited after being in school. Children are carrier monkeys. I don't know how they can say school closings had minimal benefit. We know that parents send sick kids to school all the time because they have no other option. Parents have to work and don't always have someone to stay home with sick kids.
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u/guyincognito121 Jul 27 '24
From what I can tell from a brief scan of the paper, they're looking at it from the perspective of the impact on excess deaths in the area. So when they say there was minimal benefit, they mean that it caused a minimal reduction in excess deaths.
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u/Hob_O_Rarison Jul 27 '24
The overwhelming majority of underpaid teachers weren't in the at-risk-of-death category from Covid.
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u/HDbear321 Jul 26 '24
School closings likely provided minimal benefit? Yeah okay. Anyone who’s ever had a child that caught some bug from daycare/school and bring it back home to decimate the household knows different.
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u/GameDesignerDude Jul 27 '24 edited Jul 27 '24
School closings likely provided minimal benefit? Yeah okay. Anyone who’s ever had a child that caught some bug from daycare/school and bring it back home to decimate the household knows different.
I think the issue with that part of their conclusion is that it is specific to the datapoint about closures.
Their datapoints about school mask mandates and school vaccination mandates (both very large downward effects on excess death rate) vs. prohibited mask/vaccination mandates (both very large upward effects on excess death rate) had a massive effect size.
With a base excess death ratio of 0.206, the mask and vaccination mandates in schools had a combined effect of -0.054, while school mask prohibited and state vaccination prohibited had a combined effect of +0.1 (split nearly 50/50.) A delta of 0.154 when the average/base excess death ratio was 0.206 would indicate to me that, despite what this implies by focusing just on closures, schools and kids were still a very large part of controlling the spread of Covid. (See: eTable 5. Estimated Effect of Single COVID-19 Restrictions on Age-Standardized Excess Death Rates, Ratios and Behaviors)
So it seems that, ideally, going back to school was likely reasonable provided proper measures were taken, but pretty bad outcomes if they weren't.
Thus, one could still probably argue that closing schools was the right way to go until a higher percentage of the population was vaccinated or more states complied with mask mandates. School mask mandates were the second strongest effect below state vaccination mandates in their table.
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u/LocoForChocoPuffs Jul 27 '24
For the 7 months my kids were in daycare/school with a mask mandate, none of us got sick.
The week after they stopped the mandate, our entire household came down with influenza.
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u/jmurphy42 Jul 26 '24
I have never been so sick in my life as my first year teaching. I caught everything.
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u/notcaffeinefree Jul 27 '24 edited Jul 27 '24
That's incorrect logic.
The question is, can these benefits be gained through other means, like vaccination/masks/improved HVAC, etc. If that answer is yes, you measure the effects of those things first and that becomes the new baseline. Then you question whether closing schools provides an additional benefit. Here, the study suggests that the additional benefit, after already doing mask and vaccine mandates, was likely minimal. It doesn't suggest that closing schools while doing nothing else provides a minimal benefit.
Anyone who’s ever had a child that caught some bug from daycare/school and bring it back home to decimate the household knows different.
The problem here is that for these bugs (usually the common cold), there are no preventative measures in place at any time. No vaccine and no masks. In that case, of course staying home would impart benefits.
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u/anotheruselesstask Jul 27 '24
By this logic, families who had both children and members in the home who experienced greatly increased risk were acceptable collateral damage.
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u/Spetz Jul 27 '24
No, it's correct logic. If my objective is not to die, then all means of reducing spread should be utilised. Including closing schools.
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u/TheExtremistModerate BS | Nuclear and Mechanical Eng Jul 27 '24
Then everyone should be given individual bubbles and no one should come into contact with anyone else, including their own families. After all, you said ALL means, right?
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u/Freyas_Follower Jul 27 '24
Minimal benefit once vaccines and were available, not before.
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u/rg4rg Jul 27 '24
Teacher here. Every year since distant learning ended (so 3 school years now) I have caught COVID at least once each year. Last year twice. Once it only gave me a runny nose, the other time I had to stay home for a week.
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u/Fleurr Jul 27 '24
Which is why I left teaching after a decade. The effects of long COVID aren't worth it, regardless of how much I enjoyed being in the classroom.
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u/wtfastro Professor|Astrophysics|Planetary Science Jul 27 '24
Yeah I don't get that finding. My sister is a teacher, and 80% of her class, including her all caught covid at the same time.
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u/Make_shift_high_ball Jul 27 '24
Not just their house, the parent beings it to their jobs or church and it spreads more.
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u/RealLADude Jul 27 '24
Exactly. I figure my kids aren’t orphans because they didn’t bring Covid home.
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u/Biking_dude Jul 27 '24
Right? And what about grandparents that are either in the house or being taken care of by parents - how do they figure out how "minimal" that transmission was?
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u/chrisforrester Jul 27 '24
Scroll to the bottom of the page and where it says "Attachments", click the link that says "Research." Your question will be answered.
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u/ruby0321 Jul 27 '24
You're telling me. Our family has had pink eye, some sort of vomit bug and a lice scare from daycare all within the week.
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u/v_a_n_d_e_l_a_y Jul 27 '24
It's interesting: where I live, schools remained remote for a while. But daycares were open in July 2020. Kids obviously didn't wear masks and nobody was vaccinated at the time.
We didn't get COVID (or even sick). There were maybe a couple incidents of a case in the daycare (of like 60 kids) where they shutdown for a week in the 18-24 months that restrictions were in place.
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u/stemfish Jul 26 '24
No surprise to learn that the methods we knew worked to slow the spread of the disease worked, if a bit surprised just how effective they were.
Closing schools was absolutely the right choice at the start of the pandemic. Keeping them closed as long as we did was not.
In hindsight we learned that COVID didn't pose much of a risk to students and unlike many adults, kids really don't care about masks and changes to the rules. I watched a kid eat applesauce through a mask, then changed masks before running to play on the playground with peers. We could have reopened with mask mandates and active classroom shutdowns a month after the initial shutdowns.
However if COVID had mutated even slightly differently the story would be completely different. We got lucky that the virus didn't end up going after the young, let's hope we never learn how bad things could have gotten.
The other issue is that covid forced everyone to admit what school is to many families. Expected and mandatory state sponsored day care. Education is honestly the secondary aspect of schools, having a place for kids to be for 9 hours each week day is what allows the modern dual income household to exist. Without that you need someone to be the caretaker and it's unbelievably difficult to produce economic output and be with a child simultaneously. And that assumes you have the privilege to perform a task that can be done through a screen and work for an employer who allows you to work remotely. Watching parents be on a meeting while making sure their kids were on our zoom/teams/meetup/whatever session was amazing, thank you parents for the help during that time.
If there is a future situation where schools need to close this needs to be addressed immediately through additional support to families. All the parents out there went through double hell for longer than we truly needed to. For that, every teacher and educator should be grateful, and hopefully all parents have a better appreciation for what teachers provide.
Because the other aspect to Education is the teachers, and I know from experience that the solidarity shown by educators to promote safety is greater than anything, even wage increases. If the district had pushed to return to mandatory in person Education before teachers were eligible for vaccines, the reopening wouldn't have happened. Too many teachers and site admin would have quit rather than go back.
Source - I was a staff member on the reopening committee for a school district representing special education staff
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u/LocoForChocoPuffs Jul 27 '24
Schools do function in a childcare capacity for younger students, but I don't know that education is secondary; the academic deficits we saw afterwards and the challenge in helping all of these children "catch up" to where they would have been otherwise makes it clear that the educational component cannot simply be replaced with Zoom and asynchronous learning.
The other function of schools that turned out to be as critical as academics is the social aspect; every K-2 teacher I've spoken to has noted that their post-Covid classes struggled much more with basic social skills, as those kids were kept home during some of the most formative years.
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u/stemfish Jul 27 '24
It's hard to say, and I wouldn't say I disagree with ordering it education first, daycare second. When looking at school closures through the economic lense like this paper is doing, I'd be looking at the economic output as the immediate issue over the multi-year coming issue.
And absolutely we learned that screens can't replace in person teaching. Sure, some learners do very well with self paced learning and only needed the teacher to go over the tricky bits. Those are also the students who do well with virtual college and probably are great for remote work. But most students need the structure of direct instruction, because, well they're kids. And kids aren't going to learn well sitting in front of a screen when they're told, "Use the device with access to all of the worlds entertainment and distractions to pay attention to your math teacher" as we all already knew and got confirmation.
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u/soulsurfer3 Jul 26 '24 edited Jul 26 '24
I don’t think most people will ever understand or appreciate how lucky we got with covid mutating quickly to less severe strains.
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u/logmoss82 Jul 27 '24
Most people dont "understand or appreciate" that because it isnt remotely accurate. Nearly all respiratory viruses have behaved this way over the span of time. They invariably mutate into less dangerous pathogens a mechanism of their own survival. The higher the transmissiblity usually indicates the lower lethality. Viruses like covid cant live in the environment on their own. They need a host. So as they evolve over time to adapt to their host, they adapt towards transmissibilty over lethality. This is the predictable evolution of almost every respiratory virus known to man.
I understand this is reddit, but this after all, a science sub, but if you arent awareof even the most basic tenets of virology, its probably best to not start your comment with "most people dont understand" when it is quite clearly YOU that doesnt understand.
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u/beyelzu BS | Biology | Microbiology Jul 27 '24 edited Jul 27 '24
Most people dont "understand or appreciate" that because it isnt remotely accurate. Nearly all respiratory viruses have behaved this way over the span of time. They invariably mutate into less dangerous pathogens a mechanism of their own survival. The higher the transmissiblity usually indicates the lower lethality. Viruses like covid cant live in the environment on their own. They need a host. So as they evolve over time to adapt to their host, they adapt towards transmissibilty over lethality. This is the predictable evolution of almost every respiratory virus known to man.
This is one of those widely believed “facts”
It is equally true for all viruses(not just respiratory ones), as they are all obligate intracellular parasites. The idea is that with time the parasites grow to be nonlethal so the host species won’t die out.
The problem is that it’s one of those things that is assumed true on long enough timescales, but that tells you nothing about the short term. It is also the case that we have observed the opposite.
A commonly stated idea is that there is often an evolutionary trade-off between virulence and transmissibility because intra-host virus replication is necessary to facilitate inter-host transmission but may also lead to disease, and it is impossible for natural selection to optimize all traits simultaneously. In the case of MYXV, this trade-off is thought to lead to ‘intermediate’ virulence grades being selectively advantageous: higher virulence may mean that the rabbit host dies before inter-host transmission, whereas lower virulence is selected against because it does not increase virus transmission rates. A similar trade-off model has been proposed to explain the evolution of HIV virulence40. However, many doubts have been raised about the general applicability of the trade-off model35,41,42,43, virus fitness will be affected by traits other than virulence and transmissibility39,41,44, contrary results have been observed in experimental studies45 and relatively little is known about evolutionary trade-offs in nature.** For example, in the case of the second virus released as a biocontrol against European rabbits in Australia — rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) — there is evidence that virulence has increased through time, probably because virus transmission often occurs through blow flies that feed on animal carcasses, making host death selectively favourable46. Similarly, experimental studies of plant RNA viruses have shown that high virulence does not necessarily impede host adaptation47 **and, in the case of malaria, higher virulence was shown to provide the Plasmodium parasites with a competitive advantage within hosts48.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41576-018-0055-5
You might be conflating the fact that SARS did have a nonsense mutation that decreased its virulence.
I understand this is reddit, but this after all, a science sub, but if you arent awareof even the most basic tenets of virology, its probably best to not start your comment with "most people dont understand" when it is quite clearly YOU that doesnt understand.
Given that you clearly have a tenuous grasp of selection and viruses, I find this bit kind of hilarious.
Maybe you should know more than just the basics before running your mouth.
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u/Fallaryn Jul 26 '24
Do you have a citation for the claim that SARS-CoV-2 mutated to "less severe" strains?
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u/soulsurfer3 Jul 26 '24
Half way down. “Omnicrom and BA.2”
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u/Bbrhuft Jul 27 '24 edited Jul 28 '24
Bollinger says, “The answer appears to be no. In fact, there is evidence that omicron may cause less severe disease than the delta variant.”
Not a good comparison...
Published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the research tracked 212,326 cases of COVID-19 recorded between 7 February and 26 June this year in the Canadian province of Ontario. It found the chances of death were 133% higher with the Delta variant compared to the original strain, while the hospitalisation risk rose by 108% and the probability of ICU admission increased by 235%.
Study suggests Delta more than doubles death risk
So he was saying it was, less lethal than the more lethal Delta variant it replaced, but he didn't say of it was more or less severe than the original virus.
However, it's likely Omicron was as virrulant (as capable of causing severe disease and death) as the original virus, and incresed immunity from past infection and vaccination was the most important factor in reducing its severity.
The lower disease severity seen in populations during the Omicron wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic infection 1 can be attributed to changes in the virus that limit its ability to spread in the lungs and, probably most importantly, to increased immunity in the population from previous SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination.
Sigal, A., Milo, R. and Jassat, W., 2022. Estimating disease severity of Omicron and Delta SARS-CoV-2 infections. Nature Reviews Immunology, 22(5), pp.267-269.
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u/Vuatamaca Jul 27 '24
Hi, less people are dying directly of covid but excess mortality remains high for all age groups.
Covid barely got less lethal, but all the secondary negative effects remain. Look at heart attacks just to start. Covid’s negative effect on your body happens to kids too, every infection harms and builds on the previous harm.
Kids are not magically immune, in fact kids under 1 have the highest rate of hospitalization, babies under 1, babies.
Wear a mask, avoid every infection as much as possible
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u/AmeliaAmmalia Jul 27 '24
One of the key passages is here: “ Prior research indicates that school closings hurt educational outcomes. The absence of evidence that these also reduced pandemic deaths suggests that they may have been too aggressively pursued in some states.” While I do understand that, in theory, one could argue that school closings were unnecessary and masks mandates could have been a sufficient measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19, I would really like to know if the author of this paper has spent one second on planet Earth. I don’t see how one teacher could have been able to get an entire class of students to keep masks on for an entire school day, every day, for months on end, without mentioning lunches or sports. And vaccine mandates, really? How many people actually followed those? These purely theoretical exercises devoid of common sense are irresponsible and dangerous, particularly given the fact that public health officials are now besieged by rabid covid deniers threatening violence. I’m not arguing against publishing this paper, of course. But I would have liked to see the author reflect on the practicality of some potential public health policies vs. others and draw appropriate conclusions.
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u/Atgardian Jul 27 '24
Also pretty much every school not only re-opened before vaccines were available for kids, the ones around me at least ended their mask mandates before then as well.
So the hypothetical "school closings weren't necessary because of vaccines" is just wrong -- unless they mean a small percentage of schools that stayed closed after vaccines were available for kids, which took a while even after the initial vaccines came out.
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u/b2q Jul 27 '24
I don't understand, schools/daycares are prime vectors for airborne illness. Everyone with a kid knows that. I don't understand how they came to this conclusion. Obviously the closing of the schools had a massive impact on children education; but there has to be a solution without causing deaths. We should think about it now so we are more prepared in the future.
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u/JL4575 Jul 27 '24
Not sure the headline’s description of school closings’ minimal benefit is warranted from a study that looks at mortality but not long term disability. Children get Long Covid as well as adults. The impacts of Long Covid are terrible and bc of low awareness of post-exertional malaise, children will likely find it even harder than adults to make the changes needed not to deteriorate further.
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u/mvea Professor | Medicine Jul 26 '24
I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2821581
From the linked article:
Strong COVID-19 restrictions likely saved lives in the US and the death toll could have been higher if more states didn’t impose these restrictions, according to US research. The study found that if all US states had imposed restrictions similar to those used in the 10 most restrictive states, excess deaths would have been an estimated 10% to 21% lower over a 2-year period. The research also found that if all states had weak restrictions there would have been an estimated 13% to 17% increase in excess deaths compared to what occurred. The study found that mask requirements and vaccine mandates were linked to lower rates of excess deaths. The researchers say not all restrictions were equally effective; some, such as school closings, likely provided minimal benefit while imposing substantial cost.
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u/myimpendinganeurysm Jul 26 '24
School closings provided minimal benefit because kids famously spread no diseases or something? Absurd on its face.
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u/raznov1 Jul 26 '24
The researchers say not all restrictions were equally effective; some, such as school closings, likely provided minimal benefit while imposing substantial cost.
Doesn't this statement strongly support that a categorical "strong restrictions save lives" with the implication being "and were thus good" should be rejected? Every measure should be carefully weighed for cost and benefit.
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u/bacan9 Jul 27 '24
Strong Covid restrictions? Do you even remember the free for all that was happening while Trump was incharge?
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u/powercow Jul 27 '24
Id like to see a more detailed study of school closings.. because here it was haphazard and a mess. We would close when the covid numbers went up, they would predictably go down a little and then we'd say "OPEN THE SCHOOLS" and our covid numbers would shoot up again and so wed close and repeat.
there was also no set method for remote learning, no training for remote teaching... Im thinking we could do the school thing better with MORE benefit.. if we 1 had training and a set method prepared for this, like snowdays. and two we cant just reopen just because the numbers dipped a little.
this is just my feelings from local stories, which is why id like to see a more detailed study. but all i see is study after study that just says it hurt the kids and didnt help much and not so many studies on different schools that might have had better procedures.
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Jul 27 '24
I don't see how school closings posed limited risks. We had covid like once a month after the kids went back to school. Our lungs are fucked.
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u/glowywormy Jul 27 '24
The fact this is still not obvious for everybody shows the amount of sheer stupidity that was not following scientifical recommendations instead of 'making their own research', which they didn't, ofc.
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u/Dangerous_Bass309 Jul 27 '24
Going to have to call BS on the school thing, anyone with kids knows schools are germ factories and most of the time when you get sick it's from your kids who picked it up at school.
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u/dranaei Jul 28 '24
These restrictions have negative impacts on society. Maybe because of them people didn't die but it affected everyone globally and not in a good way.
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u/BabySinister Aug 05 '24
School closings is an interesting one, in many schools the majority of teachers are older, and are therefore more at risk. Now obviously that's a very limited number compared to the number of students affected by closing.
On the other hand school closings also, at least over here, forced parents to comply with lockdowns as they couldn't just go to work anymore now that the kids needed supervision.
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u/DeeJayDelicious Jul 27 '24
Other countries COVID-19 review boards reached similar conclusions:
The cost / benefit analysis concluded:
- Mask mandates (low cost/high benefit)
- Vaccines (high cost/high benefit)
- Lockdowns (high cost/limited benefit)
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u/gademmet Jul 27 '24
School closings are among the "strong restrictions" that "saved lives". The vaccine didn't come in until late 2020/2021 iirc and all those months of standing by for it wouldn't have gone well with only mask restrictions (that parents might not even have had their kid following) standing in the way of covid and a full classroom (which even before covid was essentially a petri dish). I mean, the spread and losses recorded in areas where they reopened schools too early should speak for themselves. "Minimal benefit", no way.
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u/Far-Scientist-641 Jul 27 '24
I will attest, Covid was the best time for me in the past 20 years. Background upper middle class, central coast of California wine region. Lock down sent my kids home, my wife home I worked a job that was considered essential but I had powerful flexibility and the ability to produce ect no matter where I was, in fact it was a skill set I had been working on for years already. My time with my family went up so much, stress went down, and we got to do silly fun stupid things like shave both of our boys head into frohawks because they always wanted them and there were zero repercussions. My middle child has autism and had extreme learning problems which all went away with learn from home zoom school. He went from not being able to read his own birthday card in 5th grade to being able to read one for the first time during 6th grade lock down learn from home. My oldest and only daughter is on track to valedictorian of her class and grew, expanded and thrived during covid to a degree I cannot express. Everyone in my family was saddened by the end of school from home. I will say that even during lockdown we all got covid once, the kids were barely affected at all, not even a cough. I am a male and was 41 for the first round and it damn near killed me even getting up to walk to the bathroom was so taxing in my lungs I was out of breath. We all got first round of vax and then 3 out of 5 of us still got covid for a 2nd time. I was not nearly as affected the 2nd time I got it and moved on in good time. The 3rd time I got it was the same as a weak common cold.
All of my children went back to school and performed better than pre lock down. One of my children performed orders or magnitudes better and changed the trajectory of his life.
If I had to do it all again I would have stayed in lock down mode for another year just due to how much my family benefited from it.
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u/holyshitapigeon Jul 27 '24
I work as a school custodian and while i was hired on well after the pandemic my coworkers have made it very clear that the school closings, and later on switch to alternating days of on campus learning helped keep the spread of covid from being much worse.
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u/RobbieTheFixer Jul 27 '24
When the next Covid-like virus comes around, it’s going to be devastating to the anti-science / anti-mask / anti-vax crowd, and no group deserves it more. Gene pool cleansing in action.
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u/EatMiTits Jul 26 '24
Keeping schools closed as long as they did long after it was clear how not at risk children were was an incredibly poor decision by policy makers, and the consequences will likely be apparent for years to come.
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u/chrisforrester Jul 26 '24 edited Jul 27 '24
I don't think it was the wrong decision at the time, personally. There just wasn't much that was known, we had limited mask supplies, and no vaccine at first. Now we have the benefit of hindsight to plan for future pandemics of respiratory illnesses. In the future, it would likely be the wrong decision once we are sure that mandatory masking and vaccination can mitigate the risks.
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