> Dumb people are going to want to go to covid parties
When I was a child, parents would inform other parents when a child had chickenpox; so they could have a sleepover. That was normal practice in the portion of the USA I grew up in. As a result, nearly everyone my age has natural immunity to chickenpox.
I share that anecdote to point out that the idea of an "infection party" is a really old idea that was practiced at scale. It's not unreasonable to assume people will treat this the same way based on that type of past behavior. Whether it's "dumb" or not remains to be seen.
Edit: I wanted to add for younger persons a blurb about WHY you want to get chickenpox as a kid. Children experience mild symptoms from chickenpox - it's a non-event other than missing some school and having a few sores. Adult cases of chicken pox however are fatal by a large majority.
Adult cases are not fatal by a large majority. The highest number I could find said that adults were 25 times more likely to die from chickenpox than children.
I found a death rate of 21 per 100000 adult cases. That's not a majority. [0]
Also, it's better to never get chickenpox at all, as shingles is very painful. Shingles is the reactivation of the chickenpox virus. If you've ever had chickenpox, you are at risk of shingles.
There's still kids eating and playing in the dirt and there's still outside of school interactions going on. Plenty of kids not washing hands.
Wearing masks in school reduces the severity of an outbreak so that hospitals do not get overwhelmed. After all kids can get vaccinated that will help reduce hospitalizations too.
Right - but now there's a chickenpox vaccine, so you don't need to subject kids to the misery that is an actual case of chickenpox or to the rare outcomes where it's fatal or permanently disfiguring.
How fortunate are we now that within two years of Covid emerging, we have a similar vaccine that can prevent nearly all the suffering?
> Covid has a death rate of .5% (higher for older people, lower for younger)
That is a very bold statement, given that mild cases are less likely to be recorded in official data sets, affecting the denominator much more for younger people than older people.
What we do know is that a total of 412 people between the ages 0-17 are known to have died from Covid19 in the U.S. since January 1, 2020. Total deaths from all causes in that age group was 55,352 for the same period and the total number of Covid19 deaths in the U.S. for the same period was 643,858. Out of that 502,863 were among those older than 65 years of age.
If we take your claimed death rate of 0.5% at face value, 412 deaths implies 82,400 infections. According to the U.S. Census Bureau[2], there are about 74 million people under the age of 18 in the U.S.
So, the assumption of 0.5% IFR implies that only 0.11% of those under the age of 18 got infected with Covid19 in the same time period.
Therefore, either the 0.5% IFR overestimates the actual IFR by about 500-600%, or Covid19 is just not that infectious among those younger than 18.
I am going to with the assumption that 0.5% IFR is way too high. In that case, it makes absolute sense not to disrupt the lives of young children to the extent we have already disrupted and allow them to gain natural immunity through each wave.
> I specifically wrote the rate is lower for younger people.
Exactly. The question is how much lower. If, as it seems, it is low enough compared to all the other things that might harm a child, it would be rational to introduce them to the actual virus early and often.
When I was a child, parents would inform other parents when a child had chickenpox; so they could have a sleepover. That was normal practice in the portion of the USA I grew up in. As a result, nearly everyone my age has natural immunity to chickenpox.
I share that anecdote to point out that the idea of an "infection party" is a really old idea that was practiced at scale. It's not unreasonable to assume people will treat this the same way based on that type of past behavior. Whether it's "dumb" or not remains to be seen.
Edit: I wanted to add for younger persons a blurb about WHY you want to get chickenpox as a kid. Children experience mild symptoms from chickenpox - it's a non-event other than missing some school and having a few sores. Adult cases of chicken pox however are fatal by a large majority.