This is good context, but the "kids are fine" people & the "protect the kids" people are talking past each other. What I hear from parents is less "I'm terrified my kid will die" and more "I'm terrified my kid will get a novel disease & I have no idea what that means long term."
https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1432711348903989251
Some parents are afraid their kid will die. But mostly, the actual fears of parents are not being met with "very few kids die of Covid." No one knows the long-term costs of this virus. Parents are making decisions for their most beloved people without sufficient information.
I'm not a parent. But I've had a hard enough time making decisions for myself during this pandemic. I cannot imagine having a child and navigating this, but I can imagine "don't worry, most kids don't die" wouldn't actually address my most pressing concerns.
How do you assess risk if you don't actually know what the risks are? How do you decide whether it's worth it to do X activity (send your kid to school, put them on a sports team, put them in daycare) without knowing what the long-term effects of Covid are on children?
There's a lot of politicized paranoia about Covid and I'm watching a lot of adults use the pandemic to justify various maladaptive behaviors, so I do also hear the urgency of the "look at the evidence, kids don't die" people. Lots of good reasons to reopen schools, for example.
But there are also lots of good reasons why parents are fearful, because the truth is that there simply is a black hole of information, and parents are having to make decisions that could impact the rest of their children's lives -- and they don't have all the information.
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