How different would the world's response to COVID-19 have been if it affected children the same?

[tabris]

So Canada is going through a bit of a reckoning right now due to the discovery of Indigenous peoples children's graves from the Residential School system that the Canadian government and Catholic Church ran for the longest time up until the 90s. It seems to have really spurred some dialogue again on how poorly First Nations / Indigenous peoples are treated in Canada (we'll see what action comes out of it, hopefully something soon past the increased funding), and the usual racists are a lot more quiet right now due to even them realizing they can't be saying things when children are involved.

It made me think about the poor response, especially countries with populist leaders like the US and Brazil, had against the COVID-19 pandemic. I wonder if children had the same level of response as older adults, what the response would have been. A lot of (shitty) people were OK with letting older people die "for their freedoms" but I don't think that would have been the case for children. I think it would have been political suicide to make comments about herd immunity or not willing to make sacrifices if there were a large number of children that may die.

I feel except for the true psychopaths, that's the one line most people can't step past.

What do you guys think? Do you think we handled COVID-19 poorly due to the ages of people being affected? Would the response had changed it affected the younger the same?

 

[skeezx]

it would be different but not a whole lot. if anything people would probably jump through crazier mental hula hoops trying to discredit it

 

[The Albatross]

I think it'd be pretty different. At least things like schools and daycares would not have considered opening, which would have prevented even partial reopening in most places.

If it was as dangerous to children as SARS, h1n1, etc, and still just as contagious and deadly to the same degree difference with covid19, then I think most schools would not have entertained reopening at all. That would have a very significant effect. Even if you live in a place where your schools didn't reopen, a lot of the supply line required for more normal life.depend on children being at school so parents can work. So even if your city and towns still had closed schools (ours didn't reopen until early April 2021), life would have been disrupted more significantly.

 

[Lari]

Children schools put a lot of pressure to reopen early on in the pandemic here (I live in the south of Brazil), so that might have changed.
But honestly I don't see much else being different. Most people here wouldn't even have stopped their regular life if it weren't for the (however lax) orientations from government and health professionals.

 

[ultracal31]

Honestly? Don't think much would change in the US anyway

Sandy hook showed me that no amount of dead children would be enough to change minds

 

[Perfect Chaos]

It would have slowed down school reopenings I think, but ultimately I can't imagine it would have been too different. If anything we'd have all sorts of conservative wackos yelling out how it's a big conspiracy to leverage children to step on our freedoms, how the numbers are made up, and how, actually, a few kids dying is a-okay and natural!

 

[Cenauru]

Not a whole lot past a few initiatives here and there. Lots of the "but think about the children" crowd are just using children as a shield to push their shitty views. It's pretty despicable.

 

[Tygre]

It would have been a lot worse, and a lot more children would be dead.

I'm not convinced the broad response would have been much different or much better.

 

[Wrexis]

I'm creeping myself out when I say this, but I don't think it would have.
You'd have politicians saying that destroying children's development for two years (ie keeping schools shut) is worse than a few children dying.

 

[Nazo]

Absolutely nothing would have changed. Schools would have reopened as early as they did and Trump administration and the GOP would say the mass death of children was a Antifa psy-op or some shit.

 

[jwk94]

Honestly? Don't think much would change in the US anyway

Sandy hook showed me that no amount of dead children would be enough to change minds

Click to shrink...

This.

 

[Bulletzen]

I work in social care including elderly and have been affected by Covid personally through my work and through friends and family. Several people have died, 2 friends included.. Yes, if it affected children as it did the elderly it would have been a lot different. All you needed was footage of a pile of children's coffins and weeping parents, to perhaps change general attitudes. Can you imagine
as a nurse holding a tablet to a child as they facetime their mother and father, scared and in pain to their parents as they lie gasping for air and just wanting a hug, and as the nurse knowing that the next time their parents see their child it will be in an urn?

It happened to the elderly. They were just as scared. I was there, and it was horrific. But I carried on. If it was children? I think that would break me.

 

[Vector]

Not much at all - right wing types love to say they want to keep kids safe but they have no problem with kids getting gunned down. Also, humans are so adverse to anything impacting their comfort negatively that they would still protest against restrictions even if kids were in immediate danger.

The sad truth is society at large doesn't give much of a shit about children.

 

[Dis]

Depends on the country rather than the world I guess.....the usa sadly would probably have been basically the same......at least for the maga crowds and GOP run areas who already gave 0 fucks about covid the last year. They didn't care when a bunch of kids got murdered by a madman with a gun and they continue to not care for the kids killed by guns and police every day. This is also a party that wanted to use child health insurance and meals provided by the government to poor children as a bargaining chip to get their bullshit and didn't even hide the fact about it. I very much doubt they'd care because a virus was doing shit to kids either if it meant having to buckle under the pressure of a population needing "socialism" to survive.

 

[nihilence]

In America, the same? We have school shootings and nothing changed.

 

[rsfour]

Wouldn't change a single thing in the US

 

[IDreamOfHime]

There'd be no difference other than new excuses to defend their bullshit.

 

[fluffydelusions]

In the US? Not a thing. It's like asking what would happen to gun laws if a bunch of kids got killed.

 

[Atraveller]

Have people not learned from Sandy Hook?

 

[Deleted member 17092]

I think if it was as deadly as it is to older folk to children the actual response wouldn't be much different, you'd just have less bitching about schools going remote and such.

Response wise I guess remote might have gone on longer in red states, and would probably continue into next year for the most part in blue states but not red states.

 

[mbpm]

"Your kids aren't my problem" -In America

 

[hydrophilic attack]

public health policy decisions are made on the basis of maximizing years lived multiplied by the quality of life during those years. (this is why cars are not banned despite the huge number of people killed in traffic or by emissions from vehicles.) obviously, if the people at high risk of dying were people with their whole life ahead of them, that would change the maths of such a calculation considerably

 

[The Lord of Cereal]

At least in the US it would have been exactly the same if not much worse. Schools would have still rushed to re-open, Republicans would still be arguing for the sake of the economy, Covid denial would have been much worse and vaccine refusal would be just as bad. Maybe a few schools here and there, but school districts that reopened were already doing so with calculations about how many students and teachers would die, and the school districts certainly didn't seem to care about traumatizing their kids by having teachers and other school staff die

But we'll see, considering the Delta variant supposedly affects children as well. But I doubt anything will change

 

[TheXbox]

Have people not learned from Sandy Hook?

Click to shrink...

thank you. Can't speak for other countries but America doesn't give a fuck about kids. If anything the foaming at the mouth rabid conspiracy garbage would be heightened once the Facebook moms realize their children are threatened by the illuminati bill gates china virus. But they would take no steps to actually protect them.

 

[tim1138]

In the US nothing would have changed except for a bunch of dead kids. Folks are fine with kids being murdered in school shootings, why the hell would they have cared about a disease that a lot of people here still think is fake?

 

[KtotheRoc]

A lot more dead people.

 

[bytesized]

Conspiracy theorists would've gone even crazier

 

[JJH]

USA:

 

[CMP]

It would've fueled more conspiracy theories

 

[The Lord of Cereal]

Also another thought I had is that we'll probably find out in a few years when the next pandemic hits honestly. We're due for another bird flu and looking at the poultry industry it'll probably happen within a decade or two

 

[Mirado]

Honestly? Don't think much would change in the US anyway

Sandy hook showed me that no amount of dead children would be enough to change minds

Click to shrink...

I was going to post exactly this. Once things are made political in the US, all common sense is removed.

 

[Friskykillface]

Nothing changes much about gatherings and opening up/mask usage, most people don't care about anyone else and this pandemic showed it.
A lot more deaths because kids don't wash their hands and if it effected babies then game over
Kids definitely got lucky covid didn't effect them to bad

 

[Transistor]

Honestly? Don't think much would change in the US anyway

Sandy hook showed me that no amount of dead children would be enough to change minds

Click to shrink...

Exactly what I came to say

 

[Solomon Grundy]

In the UK they vaccinated in age order, with some older people being vaccinated 6 months earlier then people 30s and below.

If it was affecting children I think the age presumption would have been flipped completely.

 

[Deleted member 13101]

It takes a far lower number of child cases to be considered "alarming" for children, and we've already reached that threshold with msi-c, and right now in countries like Brazil. With so much focus on the elderly, we may have undercounted child cases everywhere.

It should already be a top-line concern, but the vax rates from 12-18 year olds aren't as high as they should be, and kids can't get vaccinated without a parent's consent. Yeah.

And it's not like children aren't still being orphaned by the pandemic we have, they are. But that doesn't get factored into what we think of how children may be harmed even if they don't get sick.

The thing about having child cases like the elderly is that we already took them out of school at the start. If they then died at hundreds and hundreds of thousands, at home, it would have been likely deadlier for other people as well.

 

[linkboy]

The same people who bitched about it now, would bitch about it then.

Kids were murdered in a school and those knuckle breathing trogolodytes cared more about their guns.

The US was doomed no matter what.

 

[Surakian]

Very little would have changed here in the states. We apparently let our children die by armed gunmen without trying to fix the problem. What's a deadly virus compared to that? :/

 

[Z-Beat]

Children being weaponized for anyivax causes like they are for 5G

 

[netprints]

I asked this question to my wife. We would never leave the house with our kids. I am not sure much would change. The same people would act the exact same and discredit it.

 

[Ignacious]

Not any different at all. We may already be dooming a whole generation of kids with long COVID and not even most parents give a shit. Most parents are happy to risk giving their kids COVIDs in order to get back to normal. They don't care at all that long COVID may never go completely away in sufferers and that there may be irreparable brain damage. Most non-parents don't even know kids exist. So no, I don't think death and hospitalizations would've made much difference in this mentality.

 

[thewienke]

I work in social care including elderly and have been affected by Covid personally through my work and through friends and family. Several people have died, 2 friends included.. Yes, if it affected children as it did the elderly it would have been a lot different. All you needed was footage of a pile of children's coffins and weeping parents, to perhaps change general attitudes. Can you imagine
as a nurse holding a tablet to a child as they facetime their mother and father, scared and in pain to their parents as they lie gasping for air and just wanting a hug, and as the nurse knowing that the next time their parents see their child it will be in an urn?

It happened to the elderly. They were just as scared. I was there, and it was horrific. But I carried on. If it was children? I think that would break me.

Click to shrink...

I think this is the right take and I'm not really on board with the Sandy Hook takes. Sandy Hook could be rationalized away as this nebulous one time tragic thing that happened in some blue state far from America's heartland. Connecticut might as well be in Canada or Europe for a poorly traveled red state voter in Nebraska, Alabama, or Texas.

That kids, teens, and most college aged folks could live their lives hanging out with each other and never really catching severe cases of it probably fueled the conspiracy theorists more than anything. Also when 90 year olds die of Covid that's viewed as something that just happens to someone that age anyway.

Having Covid have a 10-20% mortality rate (or whatever it was for the elderly) for children across the entire nation would have created even more chaos and mass panic. When otherwise healthy children start dying en masse in red states - that becomes a lot harder to ignore.

Edit: I'll actually go one step further and say that you haven't begun to see crazy until people start losing their children in large numbers. I don't know if the response would be grounded in science but it certainly wouldn't be met with callous apathy.

 

[JABEE]

People bringing up school shootings realize the number of deaths from CoVID vs school shootings? 600k+ people have died in the USA.

I think the response would have been different. Workplaces would have stayed open, but there probably would have been a lot more violence and acts of desperation. Children dying on the scale of the elderly would be different I think

 

[TripleBee]

Wouldn't have changed much - but if it was hitting everybody equally you'd probably reverse the vaccination age order - and start with young and work your way up.

 

[SpaceBridge]

The real question should be: imagine if covid had been more effective and deadly to white men between the ages of 25-50. Totally different world I imagine.

 

[BassForever]

If thousands of children were dying at schools that tried to open or remained open, most schools would have stayed remote through the 2020-2021 school year. That's the biggest change that would have happened.

 

[Tbm24]

I don't think much would change honestly. I've seen far far far too many people play fast and loose with children being sick and would just not believe it's serious until it's probably much too late.

 

[Malleymal]

Trump's messaging is what brought us to where we are….. as soon as he saw that black and brown people were dying it was operation unmask.

 

[CDX]

A lot of children would have needlessly died. Schools in some areas might still be remote.

But Trump still would have responded mostly the same and his followers would still be influenced by him.

So it's sad to say but at least in the US I think it'd be mostly the same with just more dead kids.

 

[Fiction]

Most of the people being asshiles about it were antivax and dumb anyhow so they already don't give a shit about kids.

 

[Dekuman]

Pretty different. A huge amount of apathy towards COVID19 came from young people who just wanted to party last year and constantly chafed against restrictions.

I'd also imagine the 'karen' and wholistic medicine type crowd of parents might have taken it more seriously if it was their precious kids who may die. The anti-vaxx crowd is obviously beyond reach but a lot of gray area there where people aren't fully into anti-vaxx but were swayed by it since it didn't directly impact them.

Era is a bubble.