My friend saw a student athlete commit suicide last Friday because the student's primary goal in life was to become a professional athlete.

COVID interventions may reduce COVID risks of elderly by increasing risks in the young.

Is this ethical? Did the student consent?

It's extremely tenuous ethical terrain to risk harming one patient in order to help another. Organ donations are an example where risk is shared, but only with informed consent.

Many did not consent to have their livelihoods disrupted by government-imposed risk displacement.

We should reevaluate our interventions in the context of consent, participation, and accommodation of diverse views in public health interventions.

This is especially important for schools that hold the future and hopes & dreams of students in their hands.

If a college chooses to sacrifice the students in order to protect the teachers, without giving students consent in this decision, I'm of the opinion that the school is violating the agreement with students to provide them the education they signed up for when they paid tuition.

I would gladly testify to this effect - schools are making decisions that put the burden of COVID management onto students who locked into contracts with schools as customers seeking a means to advance their own lives.

I believe many COVID policies harm students.

My friend saw someone take his life with a shotgun and every day this friend has to deal with the domestic & mental health crises caused not by the virus but by our reaction to it.

In addition to considering competing risks, we need to consider the ethics of consent.

The older one gets, the more influence they have on our society's decisions, from 70+ year old presidents to the median 55 year-old professor.

This imbalance of power plays out in paternalistic policy that undervalues young voices in policy managing age-based risks.

The good side of paternalistic policy is the provision of resources for kids - "they'll thank us when they're older" kind of stuff.

The bad side is when age-based risks produce policy that sacrifices the young who are without power and consent.

When I'm old, I hope to carry more burdens to help the young and not saddle the young with my own, to take my own risks if it can help others in need.

RIP, kid.

Sincerely,
the guy who wanted perf. arts, athletics & more open in schools + more mental health support for kids.

We need to recenter our discussion around people who haven't had a voice in COVID policy debates so far.

Nowhere in the Zero COVID's fanciful community guidelines are acknowledgements of the competing risks of policy recommendations. https://zerocovidalliance.org/community-actions

What do they say to the people who lost jobs in communities that can't subsidize labor, to the students whose dreams are put on hold, to the people outside our community (e.g. starving people in Africa) affected by us not considering costs beyond our border?

As of mid-January 2020, we lost our ability to contain SARS-CoV-2 with primarily one-country (China) bearing the cost of a lockdown.

Since then, we've chosen to displace risk from those COVID risks to those facing risks from our policies. I feel this is unethical absent consent.

What if there were a disease where giving old people a kid's lungs could save the old? We clearly would not force kids to enlist as lung donors.

So why do we make kids postpone their lives and donate their hopes & dreams to protect the elderly with Zero COVID approaches?

SARS-CoV-2 exists, that is not a choice.

Our policies are choices that not everyone agrees to.

Perspective helps us accept things we can't choose. Ethics helps us navigate choices and their very real costs.

We need to revisit both our perspective & our ethics in COVID policy.

These are not questions an infectious disease epidemiologist can answer alone.

These are discussions in which we need to seek out the voices of everyone and achieve consensus, not "get everyone on board" policies decided by the powerful.

That's not CBPR, it's propaganda.