Today is the first day of school for Columbia Public Schools which makes it a good time to review the predicament we’re all in regarding COVID-19. When this all started, it was conceivable that we could solve the problem of COVID-19 by holding back the spread long enough for a vaccine to be developed and distributed, and that would prevent it from inflicting an enormous death toll. It was always destined to be endemic, just not deadly and endemic. Unfortunately, people (conservatives, specifically) refused to go along with those behavioral controls and the different groups in power didn’t cooperate with one another quite enough to get those vaccines into people’s arms fast enough — they were more concerned with patent rights, for example. We have to now look at COVID-19 as a predicament to be mitigated instead of a problem to be solved.
Specifically, the virus won because it is evolving faster than we can get people vaccinated. In the long term, the result will be the same: an endemic virus much like the flu that kills people every year, just not a staggering number. In the short term, a lot of conservatives and people with weakened immune systems are going to die. With kids back in school, the virus will spread much faster than it did before, and we will see another big spike in cases. In the US south, where conservativism is endemic, we will see a spike in deaths because hospitals have been stretched far beyond their capacity. Even people who don’t have COVID-19 will die because when they go to the hospital, there just won’t be space or medical staff available to help them.
And remember, it isn’t that tons of children are going to become seriously ill, have long term illness, and/or die (though we don’t actually know that for sure). Rather, the bigger issue is that they’re going to bring the virus home to Mom and Dad, and then to their grandparents. Some people have a weakened immune system and don’t even know it. I guess they’re about to find out.
What we don’t know right now is whether the delta variant is more dangerous to children, specifically. There just hasn’t been enough time yet to determine that, and at the rate the virus is mutating, we might be several variants down the line before we know, so it won’t even matter from a practical perspective. Regarding mitigation of the risk to children, our institutions (including schools) seem more interested in performing specific mitigations (e.g., masking) as if they are magic charms than in actually understanding the details of the way virus droplets move in the air. A cloth mask only protects a person from COVID-19 for a maximum of 27 minutes in an indoor space with normal ventilation, so have our schools been upgraded to increased ventilation with HEPA filters to catch and dry out virus particles in the air? I don’t know, either. Will the children be 6 feet apart to maximize the amount of time those masks are effective? I’m confident that they will not — schools just don’t have that much space.
It may be that we’ve failed so completely at this point that it makes sense to end all behavioral mitigations. I’m fairly horrified at the idea of just giving up, but the logic is sound: Children are probably going to continue to be affected very little by COVID-19, and everyone else who was going to be vaccinated already is; therefore, we should let ourselves get exposed to the current and future variants of COVID-19 because that allows our immune systems to learn about those new variants gradually, as they occur. The idea is that this strategy would keep vaccinated people with normal immune systems safe without requiring continuous booster shots, while conservatives and people with weakened immune systems suffer and die. Again, I hate this idea, but at the same time, I have to agree with the logic of it because it does appear that we’ve lost the battle.
Similarly, it is too late to solve the problem of climate change. It’s already happening, and further destruction is inevitable. Yes, in the very long term (hundreds or maybe thousands of years), the issue of climate change will be over one way or another. In the near term (the next 100 years or so), however, we’re in big trouble. As with COVID-19, people want to latch on to very specific performative behaviors instead of understanding the whole problem, and they certainly don’t want to make the sacrifices necessary for the best outcome. For example, recycling doesn’t really affect climate change at all, and it turns out that most material sent to be recycled ends up in a landfill. The difference is that where COVID-19 wasn’t ever going to kill more than 1% of the population, climate change now has the potential to kill everyone.
With COVID-19, we’re sacrificing conservatives, people with weakened immune systems, and people in nations with less money who were not able to get vaccines because the west bought them all up and refused to freely give away intellectual property that would have allowed those nations to manufacture their own vaccine. Who are we sacrificing with climate change? Right now, it appears that the intent is to sacrifice the poor and especially people in nations with less money, but it may well end up being everyone.
How do we talk to children about all these unsolvable problems? I would hate for kids to think that it is their fault that people are getting sick and dying (especially people they care about), so I guess I would tell them the truth — that certain people were too selfish and misinformed and that’s why this plague couldn’t be stopped, and that it isn’t the fault of any child when adults make bad decisions. Similarly, regarding climate change, I recommend telling them the truth. It’s a horrible truth, but also an extremely important one. If you are not gradually educating your children about every important feature of their world, you are doing them an intense disservice and, by fostering their ignorance, sabotaging the future of all humanity. It’s your children who are going to have to let their peers in on an important secret — that there is no cabal of Satanic lizard people running the world, just a bunch of selfish humans, including the dumbasses that raised them.