Anyone Feel Guilty for Isolating Their Kids due to COVID???

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically. Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please. If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low. Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health. Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context. Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!). I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.

OMG please not Emily Oster... she is not respected among economists, let alone public health folks. Her early work had some serious issues with data and she was a spousal hire at Brown who later went on to write popular books on the mommy wars. She has no business weighing in on COVID.

She has business sharing frameworks for how to think about decisions, which is what I read her for on this issue. She had the idea of a COVID risk budget, for example, that I found really helpful (and all of our family's risk budget was spent on giving our kids opportunities to socialize). The idea that you can't do 10 "low-risk" activities is useful, as is the idea to balance one or two low risk (but high reward) activities. No one's suggesting the OP should have enrolled her daughter in 10 activities, but one or two? Even one family?

It's all about contextualizing risk, and many people on here and IRL have done a piss-poor job of that, with a ton of mental health stigma to go with it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically. Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please. If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low. Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health. Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context. Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!). I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.

OMG please not Emily Oster... she is not respected among economists, let alone public health folks. Her early work had some serious issues with data and she was a spousal hire at Brown who later went on to write popular books on the mommy wars. She has no business weighing in on COVID.

She has business sharing frameworks for how to think about decisions, which is what I read her for on this issue. She had the idea of a COVID risk budget, for example, that I found really helpful (and all of our family's risk budget was spent on giving our kids opportunities to socialize). The idea that you can't do 10 "low-risk" activities is useful, as is the idea to balance one or two low risk (but high reward) activities. No one's suggesting the OP should have enrolled her daughter in 10 activities, but one or two? Even one family?

It's all about contextualizing risk, and many people on here and IRL have done a piss-poor job of that, with a ton of mental health stigma to go with it.

If each person individually optimized their personal risk profile then the pandemic would have overwhelmed hospitals. The total cost to our GDP would have exceeded the $16 trillion lost due to people saying, “well, I’m not high risk so I don’t have to wear a mask and can indoor dine.” We would have been overwhelmed by more virulent variants. More long haul cases would have crippled adults and children. Economists like her with no public health background have zero role in informing the public about how to deal with a systemic issue like a pandemic. She was trying to figure out whether her children could attend summer camp in Maine... I mean, come on. Talk about out of touch with how most people experienced the pandemic, not to mention the disproportionate effects on the homeless, incarcerated, and people of color.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nope. Not a bit. Having living parents was a much higher priority than anything he missed.

Are you fat or over 80?

Stop being a fool, PP. My trim 35 year old neighbor died from covid.

You still upset about trump losing so badly?

I voted for Biden. But I will be voting for DeSantis in 2024 if schools are not open 5 days per week and kids are still masked in the fall.

What underlying condition did your neighbor have. You are absolutely leaving out something important.

Absolutely no underlying condition. And you’re too stupid to have voted for Biden if you think the President controls school districts.

But the kids will be masked in the fall - no question. As they should.

The president is influenced by special interest groups. You are a fool if you think schools were closed in part because Trump said they should be open.

I absolutely voted for Biden. In fact, I voted a straight blue ticket.

No one cares who you any of you voted for. Take it to the politics forum.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically. Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please. If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low. Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health. Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context. Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!). I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.

OMG please not Emily Oster... she is not respected among economists, let alone public health folks. Her early work had some serious issues with data and she was a spousal hire at Brown who later went on to write popular books on the mommy wars. She has no business weighing in on COVID.

She has business sharing frameworks for how to think about decisions, which is what I read her for on this issue. She had the idea of a COVID risk budget, for example, that I found really helpful (and all of our family's risk budget was spent on giving our kids opportunities to socialize). The idea that you can't do 10 "low-risk" activities is useful, as is the idea to balance one or two low risk (but high reward) activities. No one's suggesting the OP should have enrolled her daughter in 10 activities, but one or two? Even one family?

It's all about contextualizing risk, and many people on here and IRL have done a piss-poor job of that, with a ton of mental health stigma to go with it.

I also didn’t see a lot of daylight between what Emily Oster was saying and her colleague Ashish Jha over at the Brown School of Public Health. But maybe the Earlier poster is one of the folks that was referenced in The Atlantic as accusing her of “genocide encouragement” for saying families can take trips to see relatives this summer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically. Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please. If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low. Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health. Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context. Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!). I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.

OMG please not Emily Oster... she is not respected among economists, let alone public health folks. Her early work had some serious issues with data and she was a spousal hire at Brown who later went on to write popular books on the mommy wars. She has no business weighing in on COVID.

She has business sharing frameworks for how to think about decisions, which is what I read her for on this issue. She had the idea of a COVID risk budget, for example, that I found really helpful (and all of our family's risk budget was spent on giving our kids opportunities to socialize). The idea that you can't do 10 "low-risk" activities is useful, as is the idea to balance one or two low risk (but high reward) activities. No one's suggesting the OP should have enrolled her daughter in 10 activities, but one or two? Even one family?

It's all about contextualizing risk, and many people on here and IRL have done a piss-poor job of that, with a ton of mental health stigma to go with it.

I also didn’t see a lot of daylight between what Emily Oster was saying and her colleague Ashish Jha over at the Brown School of Public Health. But maybe the Earlier poster is one of the folks that was referenced in The Atlantic as accusing her of “genocide encouragement” for saying families can take trips to see relatives this summer.

The earlier poster has lots of family and friends working in ICUs and ERs over the summer. The earlier poster heard a lot of their heartbreak and horror stories. The earlier poster heard enough stories of people dying from those trips and those family dinners, surrounded in their ICU rooms with pictures of those final family reunions, to know that those ideas were a nice way to salve the conscience of people who were mostly doing what they wanted regardless of CDC guidance. And the earlier poster has a lot of friends in public health who worked tiredlessly through the pandemic, in a fog of misinformation and outright attacks driven by foreign agents on our social media platforms. So yes, the earlier poster is done with you and the other deniers of the severity of this situation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically. Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please. If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low. Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health. Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context. Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!). I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.

OMG please not Emily Oster... she is not respected among economists, let alone public health folks. Her early work had some serious issues with data and she was a spousal hire at Brown who later went on to write popular books on the mommy wars. She has no business weighing in on COVID.

She has business sharing frameworks for how to think about decisions, which is what I read her for on this issue. She had the idea of a COVID risk budget, for example, that I found really helpful (and all of our family's risk budget was spent on giving our kids opportunities to socialize). The idea that you can't do 10 "low-risk" activities is useful, as is the idea to balance one or two low risk (but high reward) activities. No one's suggesting the OP should have enrolled her daughter in 10 activities, but one or two? Even one family?

It's all about contextualizing risk, and many people on here and IRL have done a piss-poor job of that, with a ton of mental health stigma to go with it.

I also didn’t see a lot of daylight between what Emily Oster was saying and her colleague Ashish Jha over at the Brown School of Public Health. But maybe the Earlier poster is one of the folks that was referenced in The Atlantic as accusing her of “genocide encouragement” for saying families can take trips to see relatives this summer.

The earlier poster has lots of family and friends working in ICUs and ERs over the summer. The earlier poster heard a lot of their heartbreak and horror stories. The earlier poster heard enough stories of people dying from those trips and those family dinners, surrounded in their ICU rooms with pictures of those final family reunions, to know that those ideas were a nice way to salve the conscience of people who were mostly doing what they wanted regardless of CDC guidance. And the earlier poster has a lot of friends in public health who worked tiredlessly through the pandemic, in a fog of misinformation and outright attacks driven by foreign agents on our social media platforms. So yes, the earlier poster is done with you and the other deniers of the severity of this situation.

I think the earlier poster needs to get some socially distanced fresh air. Oster wasn’t saying gatherings of any size last summer were fine. And even Dr. Fauci has seen his family since March 2020. Risk tolerance is a spectrum. Only leaving the house to get vaccinated and then heading straight back to isolation is one end of that spectrum. But it doesn’t mean anything less than that means you are a denier.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically. Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please. If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low. Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health. Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context. Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!). I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.

OMG please not Emily Oster... she is not respected among economists, let alone public health folks. Her early work had some serious issues with data and she was a spousal hire at Brown who later went on to write popular books on the mommy wars. She has no business weighing in on COVID.

She has business sharing frameworks for how to think about decisions, which is what I read her for on this issue. She had the idea of a COVID risk budget, for example, that I found really helpful (and all of our family's risk budget was spent on giving our kids opportunities to socialize). The idea that you can't do 10 "low-risk" activities is useful, as is the idea to balance one or two low risk (but high reward) activities. No one's suggesting the OP should have enrolled her daughter in 10 activities, but one or two? Even one family?

It's all about contextualizing risk, and many people on here and IRL have done a piss-poor job of that, with a ton of mental health stigma to go with it.

If each person individually optimized their personal risk profile then the pandemic would have overwhelmed hospitals. The total cost to our GDP would have exceeded the $16 trillion lost due to people saying, “well, I’m not high risk so I don’t have to wear a mask and can indoor dine.” We would have been overwhelmed by more virulent variants. More long haul cases would have crippled adults and children. Economists like her with no public health background have zero role in informing the public about how to deal with a systemic issue like a pandemic. She was trying to figure out whether her children could attend summer camp in Maine... I mean, come on. Talk about out of touch with how most people experienced the pandemic, not to mention the disproportionate effects on the homeless, incarcerated, and people of color.

Since you mentioned summer camps, you may want to check out this piece that was in CDC's MMWR last September. "During the 2020 summer camp season, four Maine overnight camps with 1,022 attendees from 41 states and international locations implemented a multilayered prevention and mitigation strategy that was successful in identifying and isolating three asymptomatic COVID-19 cases and preventing secondary transmission."

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6935e1.htm

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically. Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please. If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low. Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health. Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context. Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!). I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.

OMG please not Emily Oster... she is not respected among economists, let alone public health folks. Her early work had some serious issues with data and she was a spousal hire at Brown who later went on to write popular books on the mommy wars. She has no business weighing in on COVID.

She has business sharing frameworks for how to think about decisions, which is what I read her for on this issue. She had the idea of a COVID risk budget, for example, that I found really helpful (and all of our family's risk budget was spent on giving our kids opportunities to socialize). The idea that you can't do 10 "low-risk" activities is useful, as is the idea to balance one or two low risk (but high reward) activities. No one's suggesting the OP should have enrolled her daughter in 10 activities, but one or two? Even one family?

It's all about contextualizing risk, and many people on here and IRL have done a piss-poor job of that, with a ton of mental health stigma to go with it.

I also didn’t see a lot of daylight between what Emily Oster was saying and her colleague Ashish Jha over at the Brown School of Public Health. But maybe the Earlier poster is one of the folks that was referenced in The Atlantic as accusing her of “genocide encouragement” for saying families can take trips to see relatives this summer.

The earlier poster has lots of family and friends working in ICUs and ERs over the summer. The earlier poster heard a lot of their heartbreak and horror stories. The earlier poster heard enough stories of people dying from those trips and those family dinners, surrounded in their ICU rooms with pictures of those final family reunions, to know that those ideas were a nice way to salve the conscience of people who were mostly doing what they wanted regardless of CDC guidance. And the earlier poster has a lot of friends in public health who worked tiredlessly through the pandemic, in a fog of misinformation and outright attacks driven by foreign agents on our social media platforms. So yes, the earlier poster is done with you and the other deniers of the severity of this situation.

I think the earlier poster needs to get some socially distanced fresh air. Oster wasn’t saying gatherings of any size last summer were fine. And even Dr. Fauci has seen his family since March 2020. Risk tolerance is a spectrum. Only leaving the house to get vaccinated and then heading straight back to isolation is one end of that spectrum. But it doesn’t mean anything less than that means you are a denier.

Don’t worry, we’ve gotten plenty of socially distanced fresh air. But we don’t follow Emily Oster for health advice. She has made her career off of telling pregnant woman it’s fine to have a glass of wine, and she seems to think that translates to COVID expertise.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically. Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please. If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low. Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health. Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context. Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!). I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.

OMG please not Emily Oster... she is not respected among economists, let alone public health folks. Her early work had some serious issues with data and she was a spousal hire at Brown who later went on to write popular books on the mommy wars. She has no business weighing in on COVID.

She has business sharing frameworks for how to think about decisions, which is what I read her for on this issue. She had the idea of a COVID risk budget, for example, that I found really helpful (and all of our family's risk budget was spent on giving our kids opportunities to socialize). The idea that you can't do 10 "low-risk" activities is useful, as is the idea to balance one or two low risk (but high reward) activities. No one's suggesting the OP should have enrolled her daughter in 10 activities, but one or two? Even one family?

It's all about contextualizing risk, and many people on here and IRL have done a piss-poor job of that, with a ton of mental health stigma to go with it.

I also didn’t see a lot of daylight between what Emily Oster was saying and her colleague Ashish Jha over at the Brown School of Public Health. But maybe the Earlier poster is one of the folks that was referenced in The Atlantic as accusing her of “genocide encouragement” for saying families can take trips to see relatives this summer.

The earlier poster has lots of family and friends working in ICUs and ERs over the summer. The earlier poster heard a lot of their heartbreak and horror stories. The earlier poster heard enough stories of people dying from those trips and those family dinners, surrounded in their ICU rooms with pictures of those final family reunions, to know that those ideas were a nice way to salve the conscience of people who were mostly doing what they wanted regardless of CDC guidance. And the earlier poster has a lot of friends in public health who worked tiredlessly through the pandemic, in a fog of misinformation and outright attacks driven by foreign agents on our social media platforms. So yes, the earlier poster is done with you and the other deniers of the severity of this situation.

I think the earlier poster needs to get some socially distanced fresh air. Oster wasn’t saying gatherings of any size last summer were fine. And even Dr. Fauci has seen his family since March 2020. Risk tolerance is a spectrum. Only leaving the house to get vaccinated and then heading straight back to isolation is one end of that spectrum. But it doesn’t mean anything less than that means you are a denier.

Don’t worry, we’ve gotten plenty of socially distanced fresh air. But we don’t follow Emily Oster for health advice. She has made her career off of telling pregnant woman it’s fine to have a glass of wine, and she seems to think that translates to COVID expertise.

DP- fair enough, but just because you know some people in ICUs and public health doesn’t make you an expert either. Not going to keep my kids away from their fully vaccinated grandparents over some anecdotes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically. Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please. If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low. Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health. Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context. Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!). I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.

OMG please not Emily Oster... she is not respected among economists, let alone public health folks. Her early work had some serious issues with data and she was a spousal hire at Brown who later went on to write popular books on the mommy wars. She has no business weighing in on COVID.

She has business sharing frameworks for how to think about decisions, which is what I read her for on this issue. She had the idea of a COVID risk budget, for example, that I found really helpful (and all of our family's risk budget was spent on giving our kids opportunities to socialize). The idea that you can't do 10 "low-risk" activities is useful, as is the idea to balance one or two low risk (but high reward) activities. No one's suggesting the OP should have enrolled her daughter in 10 activities, but one or two? Even one family?

It's all about contextualizing risk, and many people on here and IRL have done a piss-poor job of that, with a ton of mental health stigma to go with it.

I also didn’t see a lot of daylight between what Emily Oster was saying and her colleague Ashish Jha over at the Brown School of Public Health. But maybe the Earlier poster is one of the folks that was referenced in The Atlantic as accusing her of “genocide encouragement” for saying families can take trips to see relatives this summer.

The earlier poster has lots of family and friends working in ICUs and ERs over the summer. The earlier poster heard a lot of their heartbreak and horror stories. The earlier poster heard enough stories of people dying from those trips and those family dinners, surrounded in their ICU rooms with pictures of those final family reunions, to know that those ideas were a nice way to salve the conscience of people who were mostly doing what they wanted regardless of CDC guidance. And the earlier poster has a lot of friends in public health who worked tiredlessly through the pandemic, in a fog of misinformation and outright attacks driven by foreign agents on our social media platforms. So yes, the earlier poster is done with you and the other deniers of the severity of this situation.

I think the earlier poster needs to get some socially distanced fresh air. Oster wasn’t saying gatherings of any size last summer were fine. And even Dr. Fauci has seen his family since March 2020. Risk tolerance is a spectrum. Only leaving the house to get vaccinated and then heading straight back to isolation is one end of that spectrum. But it doesn’t mean anything less than that means you are a denier.

Don’t worry, we’ve gotten plenty of socially distanced fresh air. But we don’t follow Emily Oster for health advice. She has made her career off of telling pregnant woman it’s fine to have a glass of wine, and she seems to think that translates to COVID expertise.

DP- fair enough, but just because you know some people in ICUs and public health doesn’t make you an expert either. Not going to keep my kids away from their fully vaccinated grandparents over some anecdotes.

Who’s talking about not seeing fully vaccinated grandparents? We’ve done that as well. Point is just that last summer there was a lot less information, and people roughly interpreting a non-public health person talking about her life decisions isn’t really what’s going to bring the pandemic to an end.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically. Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please. If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low. Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health. Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context. Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!). I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.

Stares in “majority of pediatric covid deaths have been Black and Brown kids”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So what if she gets covid? Honestly. I’m sure you never kept her isolated because you feared the flu or rsv or any other childhood illness. Look at the death rates for covid vs flu. Did you know flu has all the same wonky side effects that covid does.

Freaking out over a kid getting covid is ludicrous. Let her have a life again.

Some of us never stopped having lives, which we did with masks, outdoors and/or distancing, while the rest of you screamed and sobbed and tore your garments that your children were SUFFERING and HOSTAGES because you couldn't go about life as if the pandemic didn't exist

[Anonymous]

Let's put it this way. When my daughter was in the NICU it was one of the longest two weeks of my life. I look back at that chapter 6 years out and I know that it was just a short chapter in her very joyful life.

I think we will look back at this past year and remember that it it was a hard year but it was also a wonderful year in a lot of ways. I do not feel guilty for making the decisions that I made. I was trying to make the best decisions with the limited amount of information that I had at the time

[Anonymous]

Didn’t isolate my kids at all. In fact, we made the huge decision to move to a state that was open so my kids could go to school. None of us got it, and my kids are objectively in a much better place socially and mentally than my friends’ kids who stayed in Virginia (and still aren’t in school full-time).

(aaand now cue the panic posting about how isolating kids is the morally superior thing to do, in order to justify adults’ pretty poor decisions )

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically. Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please. If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low. Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health. Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context. Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!). I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.

OMG please not Emily Oster... she is not respected among economists, let alone public health folks. Her early work had some serious issues with data and she was a spousal hire at Brown who later went on to write popular books on the mommy wars. She has no business weighing in on COVID.

She has business sharing frameworks for how to think about decisions, which is what I read her for on this issue. She had the idea of a COVID risk budget, for example, that I found really helpful (and all of our family's risk budget was spent on giving our kids opportunities to socialize). The idea that you can't do 10 "low-risk" activities is useful, as is the idea to balance one or two low risk (but high reward) activities. No one's suggesting the OP should have enrolled her daughter in 10 activities, but one or two? Even one family?

It's all about contextualizing risk, and many people on here and IRL have done a piss-poor job of that, with a ton of mental health stigma to go with it.

I also didn’t see a lot of daylight between what Emily Oster was saying and her colleague Ashish Jha over at the Brown School of Public Health. But maybe the Earlier poster is one of the folks that was referenced in The Atlantic as accusing her of “genocide encouragement” for saying families can take trips to see relatives this summer.

The earlier poster has lots of family and friends working in ICUs and ERs over the summer. The earlier poster heard a lot of their heartbreak and horror stories. The earlier poster heard enough stories of people dying from those trips and those family dinners, surrounded in their ICU rooms with pictures of those final family reunions, to know that those ideas were a nice way to salve the conscience of people who were mostly doing what they wanted regardless of CDC guidance. And the earlier poster has a lot of friends in public health who worked tiredlessly through the pandemic, in a fog of misinformation and outright attacks driven by foreign agents on our social media platforms. So yes, the earlier poster is done with you and the other deniers of the severity of this situation.

I think the earlier poster needs to get some socially distanced fresh air. Oster wasn’t saying gatherings of any size last summer were fine. And even Dr. Fauci has seen his family since March 2020. Risk tolerance is a spectrum. Only leaving the house to get vaccinated and then heading straight back to isolation is one end of that spectrum. But it doesn’t mean anything less than that means you are a denier.

Don’t worry, we’ve gotten plenty of socially distanced fresh air. But we don’t follow Emily Oster for health advice. She has made her career off of telling pregnant woman it’s fine to have a glass of wine, and she seems to think that translates to COVID expertise.

eye roll. PP, you are insufferable.