Anyone else find it strange that a country that has often fallen in line with "think of the children" arguments for hypothetical dangers appears to be completely uncaring about very real dangers of social isolation that are impacting our youth?
They were balancing it against what they saw in Italy: allowing the virus to get out of hand and overwhelm the hospital system and your death rate from covid jumps into the double digits. Kids would be pretty depressed being surrounded by a 8 digit body count in the US too.
Kids would be pretty depressed being surrounded by a 8 digit body count in the US too.
Kudos for expressing an unpopular opinion.
I'll express another one: I think the whole thing about "ZOMG! Suicide rates through the roof!!!elevelty!1!" is blown out of proportion, largely thanks to pseudo-news web sites trying to grab clicks on the internet.
The school district where I live put out a press release lamenting an 18% increase in student suicide in 2020. Reading to the end, you find out that the actual numeric increase was something like 2. Two dead kids isn't good in any way. But when the number of suicides reaches a meaningful fraction of the number of COVID deaths, then I'll take it seriously.
Having to stay home for a year is nothing — absolutely nothing — compared with what children had to deal with during previous social upheavals (world wars, and the like).
> I'll express another one: I think the whole thing about "ZOMG! Suicide rates through the roof!!!elevelty!1!" is blown out of proportion, largely thanks to pseudo-news web sites trying to grab clicks on the internet.
Certain news sites in my state spent 2020 lamenting about how the lockdown is causing overdose deaths to skyrocket. Well, 2021 rolls around and the 2020 overdose death statistics were calculated, and there were about a dozen more overdose deaths in 2020 than in 2019, a change that is statistically insignificant when comparing it to the tens of thousands of overdoses that occurred in the state each year in 2019 and 2020, or to the tens of thousands of people who died from COVID there in 2020.
For whatever reason, the types of people who shared such news in 2020 were not the kind of people who gave two shits about addiction and its effects on others before the pandemic. I say this as a person who has struggled with addiction in the past and has lost numerous people I care about to it. It seems to me that the overdose stats were merely a tool to be used to complain about policy that they disliked.
> For whatever reason, the types of people who shared such news in 2020 were not the kind of people who gave two shits about addiction and its effects on others before the pandemic.
You’ll find this is common with a lot of political subjects, I could name a few that come up HN seemingly weekly now. Pick up a cause when it's politically convenient, drop it afterwards. I don’t trust anyone or their intentions when it comes to these sort of things.
>2021 rolls around and the 2020 overdose death statistics were calculated, and there were about a dozen more overdose deaths in 2020 than in 2019
Do you have a citation for this? All statistics I have seen are the exact opposite, showing wildly worse OD stats for 2020 than 2019 [0]
Now some synthetic opioid OD stats could be affected by availability and popularity having little to do with COVID, so lets look at a more historically available drug...
"Overdose deaths involving cocaine also increased by 26.5 percent" [0].
How do you explain that one? And it's not that clubs and raves are finding some new popularity, they've been shut down absent a recent and limited subset of Florida towns.
Check your citation, it refers to overdose deaths nationwide between the period of June 2019 until May 2020. The vast majority of those deaths occurred before there were lock downs in the end of March and beginning of April 2020.
Your stats include about a month or two of lock downs at most.
My stats refer to the period between January 2020 and the end of December 2020 in a single state. I'm not about to dox myself, but we can use another state's data to illustrate the same point. In NJ, there were 3,021 overdose deaths in 2019, and in 2020, there were 3,046 overdoses, an increase of only 25 deaths[1], or 0.83%.
> "Overdose deaths involving cocaine also increased by 26.5 percent" [0]. How do you explain that one?
Cocaine and psychostimulants are becoming increasingly popular year-over-year. For example, the CDC reports that psychostimulant overdose deaths increased by 37% in 2017[2], and drug overdose deaths involving cocaine increased by more than 34%.
The CDC reports that from 2009 to 2018, cocaine overdose deaths nearly tripled[3], and between 2014 and 2018, the rate of drug overdose deaths involving cocaine with opioids increased at a faster pace than the rate of cocaine deaths without opioids. If you look at the compiled data[3], between 2015 and 2018, cocaine overdose deaths skyrocketed.
Part of the trend might be related to increasingly adulterated cocaine[4] with fentanyl and designer stimulants over the past few years.
Frothing covid deniers/lockdown protestors will cling on to anything that lets them win arguments with people on the internet. Assuming these people and the news outlets they frequent are communicating in good faith is a fools errand.
> I'll express another one: I think the whole thing about "ZOMG! Suicide rates through the roof!!!elevelty!1!" is blown out of proportion
Tacky childish mocking of valid concern over the mental health of children, some of whom are truly not doing well, is a garbage take. There are kids crying on a daily basis because of this Zoom shit and the expectations placed on them. While they will (likely) survive, it’s not good for them. I’ve seen kids test scores decline, parents enduring outright mutiny and violence from their children. I’ve seen single parents trying to work from home while their kids, who were already struggling when they had someone to pay attention to them, are screaming at the top of their lungs and breaking things.
Mental health issues can persist even in privileged circumstances, and deserves our concern. The existence of worse suffering doesn’t make current circumstances magically better. In a way, your take feels like the mental health counterpart to ‘it’s just the flu’ style arguments.
I also believe that, during wartime, a lot of children were able to go outside and play with other children.
> Tacky childish mocking of valid concern over the mental health of children, some of whom are truly not doing well, is a garbage take. There are kids crying on a daily basis because of this Zoom shit and the expectations placed on them. While they will (likely) survive, it’s not good for them. I’ve seen kids test scores decline, parents enduring outright mutiny and violence from their children. I’ve seen single parents trying to work from home while their kids, who were already struggling when they had someone to pay attention to them, are screaming at the top of their lungs and breaking things.
Could this be a cultural or geographical thing? Having lived both in Asia and Europe and also visited USA on a number of occasion I find that kids misbehaving in front of parents is more common in EU than Asia.
That context makes it seem worse. We are making children lose an entire year of education because 0.1% of Americans died, most of which are old and fat. Should we shut down every year for obesity?
Analyzing the risk factors and suggesting a prioritization is very different than mocking people with valid concerns about children.
The "caused by the behaviour of young people" thing is a weird non-sequitur. Are you suggesting 10-year-olds share culpability for spread caused by the spring break behavior of high-school students?
I was briefly a pandemic student last fall, and am closely connected with a relatively large network of current students who I communicate with regularly (aka my friends).
This is incredibly frustrating to read. Among students, the relevance of this topic - mental health issues spiking do to online curriculum - is painfully obvious. And yes, we are balancing this against the realized danger/negative health consequences of the pandemic.
I understand that this is anecdotal, but it seems that large, robust data sets are not convincing for you.
From what perspective are you writing? Do you have children in school? Do you feel that rising suicidality correlates with a broader issue that suggests some amount of increased suffering in the larger population?
> compared to what children had to deal with during previous social upheavals
Are you saying that we can't aspire to manage crises better than some historical bar? Why does this comparison appear here?
I am genuinely curious, and I hope you understand that my questions are genuine. I just rarely come across a comment that so confidently disagrees with things that are extremely obvious to me. Cheers
Sounds to me they likely don't have children. Even one week at home for my kid is damaging let alone a year. The kids weren't spreading covid to teachers. Teachers could have worn respirators and been fine.
Governments should have kept covid out but harming children in this way to make up for disastrous decisions and behaviours of adults is unacceptable.
You should figure out why your child's household is so toxic. My son spent about 6 months last year at home. Between daily online classes, video calls with friends/cousins and activities at home. He was missing school/outside but I don't see any lasting negative impact of it.
you're an ass. my child is a toddler. they need to be exploring and interacting with other children, in person, playing, learning and receiving stimuli, not locked at home staring at screens.
Kids should have been going outside throughout the pandemic, and seeing the small group that their family had chosen to isolate with.
Of course, most families appear to have chosen to keep their kids inside and not have any isolation partners, which is strange but hardly the fault of the schools.
Not only unpopular, but probably prematurely incorrect.
"Mental health consequences of the COVID-19 crisis including suicidal behavior are likely to be present for a long time and peak later than the actual pandemic."
I didn't argue that there wouldn't be mental health consequences or that they wouldn't continue past covid. Just that "no mental health consequences" wasn't an option on the table, and not having lockdowns leaves you with 10s millions dead on top of probably worse mental health consequences.
For what it is worth, the total COVID death count for under 18 in the US is 200. This includes children with serious risk factors eg cancer, immune disorders, etc
Not according to several studies shared by epidemiologists that are parents at my kids' school. The only place they saw spread from children was at schools in Israel early in the pandemic where kids were crammed close together when waiting.
a) There is evidence of children spreading COVID-19, "children under 15 were about half as likely as adults to be infected, and only half as likely as adults to transmit the virus to others". [1]
b) In order to have children at school, you need teachers at school. In order to have teachers at school, you need public transport. Suddenly, you have a significant amount of people moving around spreading the virus.
>I'll express another one: I think the whole thing about "ZOMG! Suicide rates through the roof!!!elevelty!1!" is blown out of proportion, largely thanks to pseudo-news web sites trying to grab clicks on the internet.
You do realize you're replying to a Reuters article about mental health results, not predictions.
Quite a hyperbolic and probably politically inclined comment.
> Having to stay home for a year is nothing — absolutely nothing — compared with what children had to deal with during previous social upheavals (world wars, and the like).
I don't think you can be this confident. Young humans deal particularly poorly with social isolation and those previous upheavals didn't have that as the main feature.
> Having to stay home for a year is nothing — absolutely nothing — compared with what children had to deal with during previous social upheavals (world wars, and the like).
Suicide rates actually dropped during the world wars. People are able to handle war much better than social isolation.
Darrell Huff - How To Lie With Statistics[0]. And the first chapter or two of David Spiegelhalter - The Art of Statistics[1] has a good example of absolute vs relative rates/probabilities with respect to medicine. Pretty basic an important issue to understand.
The false assumption here is that making kids stay home for a year saves a single life from covid.
It doesn't - the kids have a better survival rate than they do from the flu, and the people who are at risk are overwhelmingly not getting it from kids.
Do a cost-benefit analysis. Keeping kids in detention fails it every time.
Of course not, but that assumes the first outcome is as likely a result of no-lockdown as the second is of lockdown.
In reality you need to consider probabilities. What if there are thousands of times more kids in the second category than the first?
This is a pattern of thinking that I’ve seen a lot on the pro-lockdown side: reasoning from the axiom that a human being dying has infinite negative utility. While normally a good policy heuristic in practice when all else is equal, it of course can’t be strictly true. If it were, then it would be worth it for everyone in the world to experience unbounded misery if that extended the life of one person by one day.
Clearly that is absurd. So the moral calculus must be more nuanced than “if it saves lives, it must be worth it”.
I keep saying "do the cost-benefit" because you should do the cost-benefit.
One option harms every child and potentially saves some parents' lives.
The other harms practically no children and will likely lead to some more parents dying, although the data is unclear (as death rates in states with much more open schools is not consistently higher).
Harm all kids to save a few parents on the margin...potentially? Do the cost-benefit.
I have exactly zero sympathy for the children not being able to go to school in person. Schools aren't in my opinion places where we park children through the day. We have completely overloaded schools to be anything and everything children and it is ridiculous.
If there needs to be outrage, it should be against monopolies like Comcast which has said it will expand data caps to more markets this year. I for one would support life in prison for the current Comcast CEO as well as dismantling the company and making an example out of it.
"The total number of COVID-19 outbreaks statewide rose this week by 9% over last week to 645. The biggest proportion of outbreaks are tied to the K-12 school setting, Lyon-Callo said.
Children ages 10-19 now have the highest COVID-19 case rate in Michigan, a rate that "is increasing faster than that of other age groups" she said. School-related outbreaks, she explained, aren't all tied to the classroom setting. Many are linked to sports and other gatherings among students."
FWIW, public schools in my state are closed and <19s are still one of the biggest demographics for COVID cases[1]. And that's without the semi-mandatory testing that Michigan has for students.
[1]: Frustratingly, everyone uses different age buckets for reporting. So the state uses ranges like 0-17, 18-50, 50-65 etc. But looking at the individual counties that have a bit more granularity, under 19s appear to be one of the top demographics despite having some of the fewest tests. However I haven't bothered to normalize for population or anything like that
Well let's say there was one extra suicide caused by lockdowns. And we know that something like 2/3 of Covid "deaths" are occurring in nursing homes among very elderly who, statistically, might live a year or so longer had they not got Covid.
If we're comparing years of life, isn't one 16 year old worth 60-70 85 year olds in nursing homes? Maybe more because one year in the life of an 84 year old who's already experienced a full life is worth a lot less than a 16 year old going on 17. Societally wise, it's much worse to sacrifice a young person for an 80 year old who's essentially a burden on the rest.
This comparison of the value of a life is morbid, but we've been making decisions like this anyway, even if the media has refused to speak of it openly.
And of course this assumes that all these lockdowns, school closings, etc. made any difference. Again, we can debate that and both sides have data to make their case.
So yeah, maybe one or two suicides and the massive increase of unknown mental health issues weren't a good tradeoff for the unknown number of mostly elderly whose lives were extended a year or two.
even if the 80 yr old has 20 yrs of life left, it still means that a 16 yr old is worth at least 3 80 yr olds.
and the 80 yr olds do not contribute to the economy or work, and is indeed a "burden" (sad to say, but they can't really sustain themselves without external resources, as their economic value output is zero). The 16 yr old will likely contribute to society for 40 years at least.
i'm not saying the lockdowns weren't necessary - they were. I'm saying that the costs are high, and society has asked the young to make a sacrifice for the elderly, and yet has not gotten much in return. At least some token appreciation for them is the least that can be done. After all, we praise the servicemen/women for their war efforts, well into their years, and i don't see this as being that different.
The long term damage to those who catch it seems high in many cases including the young. The majority of people getting covid are young so the impact is not understood and not nil.
I'm not sure the young are making anywhere near same sacrifice compared to the war effort in terms of lives and limbs and post war mental effects.
The really young are the future. Anyone in there late teens and 20s is past that point. The work from home training/conditioning the younger generation received will payoff when they reach 20. While your generation may struggle with the isolation by preparing the next generation those issues will disappear reaping larger economic benefits.
In terms of praise, remember all age groups are staying home. Appreciation should first be given to the soldiers (nurses,people who put themselves in danger) but appreciation should be given to everyone who stayed at home, everyone who convinced someone stop doing something that would spread this and everyone who did all they could to stop the spread.
> The long term damage to those who catch it seems high in many cases including the young.
> While your generation may struggle with the isolation by preparing the next generation those issues will disappear reaping larger economic benefits.
It feels inconsistent that you're dismissing the long term effects of one potential problem (isolation) while using the potential harm of another (undemonstrated, theoretical long term damage to young people from COVID infection) to argue your point.
I think the return you get from saving the elderly is the example that is shown to the young. The example shows the young that life when you're elderly isn't miserable and people WILL care for you. Society doesn't take care of the elderly solely for the elderly's sake. The bigger benefit is the example it makes to the younger generations who will be elderly themselves in due time. I can imagine in a society where I see the elderly treated badly, I probably won't have much hope for when id get to that state.
It's like saying "when you're older, we will treat you like shit" and people going back to society and saying "if you're gonna treat me like shit, I'm not going to be a productive member of society like you want me to"
I'm not sure where to start on this comment other than to say this is the most ghoulish thing I've read on hacker news in a long time.
I hope, that if my "economic output" is zero I don't get ground up into protein so I can have a contribution to society.
A token of appreciation from previous generations is the infrastructure built to benefit from. Like say planting a tree, whose economic output might be zero but you can enjoy it long after the person who planted it died. Not everyone that went before you has mortgaged the future to buy a yacht, maybe show some perspective?
I find it repugnant to define the 'worth' of an individual solely in terms of 'economic output.' The elderly have much to offer society. I think of my own parents, now into their 80s. They planned well, are not an economic burden to their children, and continue to contribute in meaningful ways to their family and their community. Any 'burden' they may be in my life is far outweighed by what they sacrificed and provided for me throughout my life so far.
New Zealand is an island (two islands) that never had massive community spread. Once you cross into community spread you can't go back to being in a place like New Zealand. In most countries, there was wide community spread before anyone was even thinking about lockdowns.
The parent comment specified elderly in nursing homes, which is statistically correct. The 80 year old with 30 years of nursing home life ahead of them is a wealthy anomaly.
And the fact that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are people with very few quality-adjusted life years remaining is almost entirely missed by the media coverage.
There's about a 3% death rate[1] when hospitals aren't flooded with sick people, and the death rate hits double digits when the healthcare system is DDOS'd by sick patients, as we've seen in Italy. The hospitalization rate is about 10%.
If everyone in the US got COVID, and 1% of them died, that would be 3.3 million people dead and over 30 million hospitalized. If the death rate is 3%, 9.85 million would die. I don't think there are 30 million hospital beds in the US, so that figure could reach over 10 million, which is 8 digits.
However, while you're busy focusing on digits, you're missing the overall point.
I'm fairly certain that the "only" 6 digit death rate we've currently had has had a negative impact on the families and friends of the affected.
If you have been left untouched by it, then good for you, but you shouldn't be assuming that that applies to everyone.
The mortality rate in the US is 1.8%. That is 542k dead out of 29.8 million cases.
That's nearly 30 million cases with all the lockdowns, mask rules, etc.
Even with that minor amount of 9% infected, LA hospitals ran out of capacity, morgues overflowed, etc. Try to imagine if we didn't try to limit the spread - by among other things closing schools.
NZs recent outbreak started from a couple of kids in a school of only 13-1500 students, and with lockdowns that dwarf anything the US did they only just managed to control it, getting to something like 100 positive cases because they didn't want to lock down completely.
Your numbers are incorrect. The case numbers are meaningless because there have been so many infections that were never officially counted as cases. Antibody seroprevalence studies have shown that the true number of cases is 2 or 3 times higher.
Schools in Florida have been open for months and they aren't overwhelmed.
What I can tell you is that the CDC now provides an “infection fatality rate” parameter in it’s planning scenarios. They range the IFR from 0.5% in their best-case scenario to 0.8% in the worst-case scenario.
A new study conducted by researchers at Imperial College London found the COVID-19 infection fatality ratio is about 1.15% of infected people in high-income nations and 0.23% in low-income nations.
The new study confirms that the coronavirus is deadlier for older people, with the risk of death doubling for every eight years of aging and ranging from 0.1% for people under 40 and 5% among people over 80 years old. The disparity between high and low-income nations is due largely to facts that high-income nations tend to have larger number of elderly in their populations whereas low-income nations’ population tend to skew youngers.
At this point we have enough data. The CDC gives an approximate IFR of 0.7% in the US. That would translate to low 7 digits. Also, it's very heavily weighted to the 70+ population.
Strictly speaking from a kid's perspective, it would mostly be the experience of losing a grandparent early. It would be sad (as death almost always is) but probably not life-changing.
> At this point we have enough data. The CDC gives an approximate IFR of 0.7% in the US. That would translate to low 7 digits. Also, it's very heavily weighted to the 70+ population.
..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity.
> Strictly speaking from a kid's perspective, it would mostly be the experience of losing a grandparent early. It would be sad (as death almost always is) but probably not life-changing.
And teachers, and looking at how the breakdown of Italian hospitals meant a huge spike in deaths in the 40+ crowd that would have been just fine if they instead had capacity, a ton of dead parents, aunts and uncles to deal with too.
> ..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity.
My understanding is that lockdowns didn't really change things significantly, so the "with lockdowns in effect" is not really relevant. See California (extreme lockdowns from the top) vs Florida (a bit of lockdown from the top) and their associated infection rate per 100k, which is nearly the same.
So do you think Florida is lying and underestimating the number of COVID deaths to greater extent than California is, or the California is exaggerating the number of COVID deaths, or maybe that there's a difference in behavior between Floridians and Californians (maybe California had stricter laws but Floridians act more responsibly in terms of disease prevention).
If you don't have such an explanation, and California, with some of the most stringent measures in the US, had similar outcomes to Florida, with a much laxer approach, I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that California's approach was "very good".
There was no actual lockdown in any state in the USA, including California. There were instead these totally unenforced stay at home “orders” and mask “mandates” which people ignored with no consequences. It’s no surprise that the disease spread rampantly through all 50 states. I live in California and there was nothing stringent about the measures—while many people voluntarily followed them, they were routinely ignored by enough people to make them worthless.
Alright, so after seeing what government interventions, at least in the US, looked like in practice, would you agree with the statement "Government interventions like lockdowns and school closings were a very good response."?
Because that is the comment I was responding to, which was itself a response to a comment comparing the outcomes of Florida and California. "Nowhere in the US, and very few western countries, had a sufficient response" is a valid position, and probably accurate (with the caveat that I'm not confident that a sufficient response was even possible in the US), but it wasn't really the point under discussion.
I’m saying that government interventions were tragically insufficient in all 50 states. The difference between CA’s and FL’s responses was the difference between doing next to nothing and doing nothing. It’s not a surprise that the virus spread similarly out of control in both states.
Because lockdowns only work if you actually lockdown.
That and yes, FL clearly lied and has fired people for indicating correct numbers. This is not helped by many US states that try to record CV19 deaths as being due to "underlying conditions" instead of covid.
If you go to hospital due to covid, and then die, whatever other conditions you have aren't relevant, covid is what killed you.
I think it is clear we still don’t understand fully the driving risk and safety factors across different regional areas, let alone continents and hemispheres. I don’t know how we ever could at this time or what we could do about it.
People who claim the Florida state government is lying are no different from QAnon conspiracy theorists. Where is your hard data? What are the real numbers? Where are they hiding the bodies?
That paper is obviously data mined and using extremely sketchy statistical methodology. They’re fitting 100+ parameter model on a dataset of a few dozen countries.
> ..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity.
Lockdowns likely wouldn't affect IFR. It's a measure of fatality, not of infection rate, unless you think lifting the lockdown would cause a dramatic shift in infections to more vulnerable populations.
> The CDC gives an approximate IFR of 0.7% in the US
The IFR isn't a static figure. If the actual incidence goes up to the point hospitals are overwhelmed, so does the IFR, by an enormous amount (so does the fatality rate of unrelated conditions, because resource exhaustion hits all conditions for which the same resources are used, not just COVID.)
Do your numbers account for all the indirect consequences? Hospitals overwhelmed means people with some issues refusing to get that exam that would diagnose early cancer / small heart attack / some other underlying condition. Regular checks hugely postponed or cancelled. People with existing mental issues are a story on its own.
From what I recall, I've read some interviews with heads of cancer clinics in Czech republic which is hit pretty hard, and they reported that they don't see many new patients in early stages of cancer anymore, people who come to them are mostly late stage which manifests hard, and they often go straight to palliative care. Is this some peer-reviewed study published in Nature with nice numbers and graphs? Of course not, we'll get to those numbers maybe 10 years after covid is under control, maybe. But its real people dying out there, mostly quietly without much media attention.
Pregnancy is a serious situation with covid, it can lead to many complications, abortion, and in case of serious complications for the mother, doctors at least here in Switzerland either perform abortion / force early delivery depending on age, since mother can't manage to breath on support enough for both of them (my wife is pregnant right now and senior doctor and we both got covid some 2 months ago, so this is something we checked on pretty intensively... luckily so far so good).
There is no win, we all take a heavy mental toll in confinement / job uncertainty or loss. But the risks are real on the other side too and its not so clearly cut for everyone. I don't have a clear answer on this myself.
EDIT: related to original topic - we caught covid from our little son going to kindergarden. In semi/hard lockdown, small kids going to schools is by probably the strongest infection vector. They can't keep the discipline as well as adults can. Heck, most adults can't keep up the discipline 1+ year consistently.
It's pretty incredible how easily hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, each of which is a full human life, becomes a statistic to some people let alone the millions. Don't we teach students in history classes about how easily people allow themselves to justify mass death when it is convenient?
If you actually stop and think about the value of a life in a real sense instead of from an abstract or monetary perspective, you're either absolutely horrified by all of this and your path is clear, or you're a monster.
For the past year I just look at my wife and look at my kid and imagine what it would be like to lose them. I would do _anything_ to protect them. I know what losing other family members to COVID feels like. I've seen first hand what it does to people (friends and family).
Almost every one of those five hundred and fifty thousand people (in the US alone) that have died from COVID meant just as much to someone. I want to afford them the same respect and put in at least a minimal effort to protect their family just the same.
To me, any argument based around what essentially amounts to an inconvenience being too much to ask to prevent those deaths just makes me disgusted. Dressing it up in some rationality by demanding absolute and incontrovertible scientific proof of efficacy is nothing but a flimsy excuse.
Approaching all of this with some empathy makes it easier on yourself and leads to better outcomes for everyone. I'm not stuck at home in the face of statistics and arguments about how I should be able to do whatever I want and damn everyone else paying the consequences. I'm at home because I don't want people to suffer.
It sucks some days, but it's easy to keep going when I know it could be the reason _my own child_ doesn't grown up without a father. It's easy to keep going when it could be the reason someone else doesn't have to go through that either.
So I lost a year of hanging out with friends and had to cut my hair in the utility sink instead of going to the hair dresser. That's such a small fucking price to pay relative to what this could cost someone it's not even a fucking question.
I would recommend you subscribe to your own advice and approach the disastrous side effects of these lockdowns with empathy instead of just chalking it up to an "inconvenience". There are people dying due to these policies and lockdowns and others will suffer long term negative effects. It's not just an inconvenience. People with preexisting conditions (depression, suicidal thoughts, addiction, violent/murderous) make up a significant percentage of the population. These policies will be a major factors in some percentage of them dying. They will also be a major factor in increasing the number of people with these conditions (more people will become depressed, suicidal, form addictions). Others will face years of mental and physical suffering due to economic effects.
It's essentially the same argument you are trying to make in favor of the lockdowns. Without the lockdowns, families will have to bury their loved ones and grow up without grandma/grandpa around. Other people will have long term health effects from catching this virus. With the lockdowns, some people will have to bury their (usually much younger) loved ones and grow up without brother/sister/son/daughter/friend around. Others will have long term mental health effects.
My cousin overdosed in May 2020. He had battled with addictions for a while before lockdowns but nothing to the point that we thought it would kill him. He went off the rails being forced to isolation and is now dead. His family had to bury him with no one else allowed to be present. In the same way that it's easy to overlook the impact of the virus if it has not severely impacted your family, its easy to overlook the lockdown effects if you and your family have not been severely impacted.
Stopping to think about the value of a life in a real sense should horrify you by all of the deaths and suffering caused by the virus but it should also horrify you to think of the value of the lives taken/affected by these sudden policy implementations. It does not make you a monster to consider both sides.
As for the clear path in terms of policies, both sides of the coin should be considered to the degree of certainty we know the risks to be. Unfortunately, this usually does require you put abstract/monetary/years-of-life-lost statistics in play.
It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback when we’ve had a year of figuring out how to treat the disease and reduction in use of ventilators, which was killing people.
Last June, my aunt in nyc was stacking bodies like cordwood in the back of trailers. They weren’t all 90 year old diabetics with copd.
It’s not even clear that the hospitalization rate for COVID cases is over 10%, let alone the case-fatality-rate. In fact, it’s pretty clear that it’s not.
The death rate in April was high because we didn’t understand how to treat Covid. The primary issue is that almost every hospitalized person was being put on a ventilator. But since then, we’ve learned that ventilators were actually iatrogenic and leading to much higher death rates.
Where can I find a source for this? This is new information to me, and searching "covid ventilator" is just bringing up the same studies about how patients who get ventilated have higher mortality, which isn't saying the same thing.
Blood oxygen levels were falling into "should be dead" levels never really seen before (even though they were otherwise alert and fine and had no other hypoxia indicators), which caused doctors to panic about pneumonia and not being able to breathe, and put people on ventilators prematurely. However, it wasn't really having an effect, so the ventilators kept getting turned up to their maximum setting, which puts too much pressure on the lungs and causes additional permanent damage. In most people this caused a turn for the worse instead of recovery.
Just anecdotally, since I am close with a doctor, they stopped rushing to vent and now they treat with Remdesivir and steroids. Looking at the graphs for my state, we have about half the critical care rate at similar or greater detected cases than the spring, so better treatment seems to be a 2xish improvement for hospitalized patients?
They vent at the same point as before, based on breathing. But they were telling people not to come in until they were having difficulty breathing, because they didn't have any early treatment or any space.
Having access to remdesivir/steroids would mean people should come in for treatment early, but it only helps if given very early. But if infection numbers were large enough then we probably wouldn't manage to treat everyone early enough, so it would cut the rate of severe cases by an unknown amount.
Is Remdesivir still in wide use? I know it was given emergency approval in the US, but I thought wider trials were now thought to show a lack of demonstrable results.
Yes, after a year of treating the illness now each patient takes less hospital resources. They were able to get the death rate from 900/day during a time with 5000 new infections per day, down to about the same daily death rate with 25,000 new infections per day.
You don’t know anything about the amount of infections in March other than that it was more than 5000 per day, because there was a shortage of testing kits, which is my point.
Their hospitals are overrun every second winter, dude. They had as much a medical system problem as they had a COVID-19 problem. Check this article from 2018.
> Their hospitals are overrun every second winter, dude
No, they aren't. Your article is talking about the 2017-2018 flu season, which was an anomaly when it came to hospitalizations and deaths. Both hospitalizations and deaths that season were about double what they normally are[1]. About 61k people died in the US during that flu season, where about 20k-35k normally die. There were 810k hospitalizations, while hospitalizations usually fluctuate between 250k-500k.
That doesn't affect my point. They're a case study not in the sense of "look how easy it is for hospitals to be overrun", but instead "look what an absolute tragedy it is when hospital are overrun". Of course the country predisposed to hospital overruns hit that issue first.
The death rate in Italy was in the double digits during the period of their hospitals being overrun last spring. Then they initiated heavy lockdowns, and got their death rate back under control.
Early on, like in March of last year when Italy hit their double digit death rate, CFR was very meaningful. It's only when the breakdown was so bad that they couldn't meaningfully trace anymore that CFR stopped mattering.
Italy stopped having meaningful Covid tracing well before their first detected Covid-related death in February last year. They'd reported zero cases in the weeks leading up to it and there are a whole bunch of reasons to suspect that was a massive, massive underestimate. (I think they also imposed measures like school closures pretty soon after this. It didn't seem to help much.)
Writing from Spain. Schools are open since September, with measures such as masks, isolated groups that don't mix during recreation time, etc. It has been shown that schools are not a major vector of propagation and that kids can safely go to school. Here what has an impact in the propagation of the virus is opening bars and restaurants and allowing people to move between counties (comarca) or regions.
There's pretty much no evidence for that. Kids are asymptomatic and the virus is so out of control that it's difficult to track down the graph of infections from kids is all.
Additionally teachers and school staff tilt pretty heavily to high risk groups. Watching so many of the adults die in their life would absolutely give kids depression too.
Maybe it's a pet peeve of mine but the onus is not on public health institutions to prove or disprove a negative. Saying "There's not evidence of the virus _not_ spreading in Cohort X" is an almost impossible position. If you have evidence to show it's spreading, then present it, and make public policy decisions based on said evidence. If you don't have evidence, then you should not be making policy.
If you read between the lines the study makes quite a few points consistent with my argument:
> Primary schools may be generally less affected than secondary schools (20, 25–28), perhaps partly because children under the age of 12 are less susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 (29).
The study also goes on to state, in a profound bit of self-awareness:
> Our approach cannot distinguish direct effects on transmission in schools and universities from indirect effects, such as the general population behaving more cautiously after school closures signaled the gravity of the pandemic. Additionally, because school and university closures were implemented on the same day or in close succession in most of the countries we studied, our approach cannot distinguish their individual effects
And:
> (iii) Our results cannot be used without qualification to predict the effect of lifting NPIs. For example, closing schools and universities in conjunction seems to have greatly reduced transmission, but this does not mean that reopening them will necessarily cause infections to soar.
Like stated above, this doesn't prove or disprove a negative. If someone comes out with a direct, causative relationship between re-opening schools and increased infections, and that is reproducible, sure, make policy decisions based on that information. But otherwise, if we are blindly making decisions that can affect the health and development of children, we better have data to back up those decisions.
The clear solution is to test. Look for a suitable district that wants to open up the schools, open them up for a bit and do a rapid lockdown if it instigates an outbreak.
Thats not true when it comes to public health, often it is better policy to act as though the worst case scenario is true, because the consequences of overreacting are far less bad than the consequences of underreacting
A better description of Florida would be "perfectly average". In deaths per capita they are right in the middle of US states. Obviously Florida could have done better, but many other states have done far worse.
There's less difference than their public policies might suggest. Reportedly lots of senior citizens in Florida voluntarily social-distanced themselves from everybody. The press reported on square dancing and packed beaches, but the anecdotes I heard were that vulnerable individuals were taking things very seriously (despite the lack of restrictions) and self-quarantining away from everyone else.
Meanwhile, in SoCal, basically nobody followed the mask mandates and social distancing restrictions. The rules were more like guidelines, and guidelines that were ignored. They also have a lot more problems with overcrowding, with immigrant populations that need to work, etc. So in terms of what people were actually doing, SoCal was actually engaging in significantly riskier behavior than Florida.
If you compare Bay Area, where people largely did follow the mask & social distancing guidelines, with Florida or SoCal, the death rates are not the same. SF and San Mateo counties had approximately 1/3 as many deaths/1M as the U.S. (and Florida) average; Santa Clara had about 1/2 as many.
The vulnerable voluntarily self-isolating, while the less vulnerable live more normal lives, is a very desireable outcome, and much better than a blanket lockdown, which imposes restrictions on large subsections of the population which are not vulnerable.
Depends on your threat model. If you're worried about old people dying from COVID directly, then yes, it makes sense. If you're worried about the hospitals being overwhelmed and then people dying from car crashes and heart attacks, then targeted self-isolation of vulnerable people isn't going to help as much.
As a healthy 30-something, my chance of dying from COVID is about 1:3000, about 300x better than an 80-year-old. However, my chance of being hospitalized from COVID is about 3%, which is only about 7x better than the 80-year-old. The hospitals were overwhelmed, here (Bay Area) and in many other cities. Even now (2 months after the Christmas/January surge) Santa Clara County still has 21% of its ICU beds taken up by COVID patients.
U.S. life expectancy dropped by a full year during COVID. We were concerned about the 0.1 year declines in 2016-2018 from the opioid epidemic (which did affect young people), and this was 10x that. It'll be interesting to see how all-cause mortality has varied among different states in 2020-2021.
One thing I'd add is that the loss of education and economic wealth from the lockdown is going to impact life expectancy for years to come, so that also needs to be taken into account.
> Meanwhile, in SoCal, basically nobody followed the mask mandates and social distancing restrictions.
Huh? I’m from SoCal and almost everyone wears masks here all the time, all shops require masks on entrances, so I’m not sure where this narrative comes from?
I've had multiple friends in LA say (around November-January) that people were basically ignoring the mask mandate and having a bunch of parties anyway. Perhaps it's different now; this is before the huge outbreak and lockdown.
Indeed, San Francisco has dramatically better Covid outcomes than almost all large US cities.
The thing SF screwed up worst was opening indoor restaurants/bars for a couple months in the Autumn, which alongside holiday gatherings/winter weather resulted in a more than 10x increase in cases during that time (thankfully starting from a very low baseline). I would guess that mistake is responsible for more than half of all Covid deaths in the city, as both before and after that period (after suitably offsetting the data by a couple weeks to account for delay between action and visible outcomes) case rates were steadily declining.
SF also did a poor job, especially early on, at getting targeted testing and outreach to working class neighborhoods.
The ones above Florida are either the dense area of the NY extended metro that got hit early and had trouble getting it back under control, or states ideologically aligned with Florida.
Just because they're in the middle doesn't make it a good response.
It also doesn't necessarily make it a bad response. But when you factor in more than simply one detail (COVID vs COVID+economy+mental health), it starts to look like a good response.
Indeed, a 1 in 1000 chance of dying isn’t worth upending civilization over. You get fewer than 100 years on this earth regardless, to put it in perspective.
Thinking back to other periods of world history I learned about in school, I can easily see how people managed to rationalize away hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths in the name of convenience.
The US federal gov’t spends about 3x as much on those over the age of 65 than it does those under the age of 18 (including transfer payments to parents of those children)[0].
Personally, I think that should be flipped, but kid’s don’t vote.
That dynamic is actually one of the reasons I think Corey Booker's "baby bonds" idea is so clever. If a child enters adulthood with some amount that has grown in a way that matches up with the economic growth at large, then maybe they won't be locked out of housing ownership.
There is not enough housing. The solution to rising prices isn't giving people more money to further bid up the price, but to increase the supply of housing which would lower (or at the very least, slow the growth of) housing prices.
I'm assuming you mean the US spends 33% as much on those under 18 as it does on those over 65 (otherwise your comment about voting makes no sense)? If so, it seem sensible for the government to spend more on the elderly, simply because they cost most and there is nobody else to pay for it. People under 18 typically have one or two parents to care for them. Older people don't have parents and don't necessarily have family to pay for their housing, food, etc. Then you also have to factor in that healthcare costs for the elderly are necessarily more expensive.
Not saying kids don't deserve to be well-cared for. I was a welfare kid and I'm glad there were welfare programs. Just saying I think we'll all be glad we can also get some help when we're over 65, especially if we can't count on our family (I have no siblings and may not have children).
I feel like the comment about voting makes perfect sense? They’re saying that children don’t vote, but old people do, so of course it’s the latter group that gets the most resources - they vote, so they have power over politicians, so politicians cater to them.
That said, I think you have a good point with the rest of your comment.
Edit: Oh I think I see the confusion now. Did the grandparent change their comment? At any rate, my understanding is that they’re saying that for each dollar the government spends on a child, it’s spending three dollars on a person over 65.
If you throw money at a black hole, and put the expenditures under the "education" column, that's where it will be counted. You should see the inane &#@* they buy, and the volumes of it they purchase.
The overwhelming majority of that spending is social security and other retirement programs which are earned (and often paid-for) benefits from a lifetime of work. The next largest (by far) category is Medicare which was largely, but not entirely, paid for by a lifetime of work.
Take just the retirement program figures out and the figures are much closer to what you prefer. Take out the half of Medicare that was paid for by seniors and it’s even closer.
And by "earned" you're evoking a moral argument, not a financial or legal one, because in the 40s and 50s Congress rejected the fully-funded model of social security. Just because you paid in doesn't mean anything will remain to take out.
In addition to a moral one, I’m invoking a mathematical and practical argument, in that you earn credits by contributing to social security and your payments are scaled by those credits.
I LOVE that West Wing episode. A group of kids get shuffled around the white house, not important, ignored. The leader of his school group gets to ask a question to President Bartlet after impressing a staffer.
"Do you think the budget deficit is especially unfair to younger Americans?" -> " a follow up, do you think we'd have such a large deficit if children were allowed to vote?" Such a good use of debate.
I think it's worth debating whether to give teens the right to vote. In my mind at least to 13 and up - but it's capricious / hard to draw the line or come up with 'tests' that aren't flat out repeating our disgusting past treatment of Black Americans.
The West Wing episode [clip below] spells out some of the argument:
I miss the West Wing universe. Would be awesome to see a reboot optimistic show about getting things accomplished, showing a vision for how it's possible to tackle climate change and our other ailments. But move the show past today's progress (it does not treat women well/give them voice, stance on gay marriage etc).
An A or B in highschool level Social Studies (how your government works) sounds like a good baseline; but that course would have to be moved down to middle-school.
That was my first thought but there are so many potential pitfalls & problems.
What about learning disabled, disadvantaged, just having no access or poor school/lack of opportunity etc.
And what if you fail!? we can't deny the right to vote because you can't pass a test. That's what we did to black Americans.
though to be honest I'm the type that judge people who don't vote. I get mad when people say 'but it doesn't do anything' but they don't vote!!!
I think it should be mandatory it's the least you can do for our country. You don't have to vote for anyone can always write sponge bob or black it out as an F you to the system. Or better yet, work to elect people & pass measures that change the system!
You could just give them all the right to vote and rely on the fact that young people tend not to vote. It’s about the closest thing to a law of sociology that there is.
I'm totally into this. Picking the age line is hard. 13 year olds can have very different maturity. But I don't think that matters. Many adults have similar maturity haha ;)
I'm not so sure on vote rate. I hope we might be surprised! Even if not 20% would make a difference in policy. If it was part of curriculum and we tried to give students more confidence in their own power it could have generational change. A lot of social change has happened this way.
I work in politics and it very much disturbs me how often you hear that 'my vote doesn't have any power so why bother' it's self enforcing BS.
I think you flipped the numbers my dude. The federal government spent "about $615 billion—on transfer payments and services for people age 65 or older" in 2000, and "Federal spending on children in 2000 will total about $148 billion, or $175 billion if payments to the children’s parents are included"
The young have little/no independent earning capacity. The investment we put in the young has a much longer time to accrue positive personal, social and economic benefits. Positive interventions in youth poverty and social stability reduce lifelong skill and mental health deficits that promote adult health, wellness and independence.
You aren't the only one to suggest in this thread that "think of the children" is usually disingenuous. It is definitely an end goal for a lot of people (otherwise the argument would have no power to manipulate people).
I think people make many choices that are harmful to children because they are trying to protect them and/or work to ensure their children's success.
“think of the children” has always been a lie, though. Or at best a surface level truth. When the rubber hits the road (i.e. when it comes to spending money) the US as a country doesn’t care about things like early childhood education all that much.
In many ways the pandemic response was in line with the norm: rich kids do just fine, poorer kids are mostly ignored.
> When the rubber hits the road (i.e. when it comes to spending money) the US as a country doesn’t care about things like early childhood education all that much.
What countries fund education better per capita than the US? Can you give numbers?
According to various sources, for example https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp , US per-student K-12 education funding is only behind four OECD countries: Switzerland, Austria, and Norway (and far behind Luxembourg, which is an outlier).
The US is ahead of highly developed peer countries like Ireland and Belgium, and *way* ahead of the OECD average.
Meta-point: It irritates me when people assume the problem with US education is low spending, because the US education system is obviously so bad that that must be true, when in reality the problem is much more complex.
In my experience the people who believe this never have numbers at hand; they are just shooting from the hip.
US Averages for school funding are completely worthless because schools are funded with property taxes; i.e. wealthy areas have amazingly well funded schools while poor areas have underfunded, overcrowded nightmares.
No that’s not true. Only 50% of school funding comes from property taxes. The rest comes from federal and state sources that make up the gaps in property tax revenues. More states have progressive school funding (poor areas get more) than the opposite. (In the vast majority it’s +/- 5%.)
This is why liberal think tanks have shifted the goal posts to “equitable funding”: https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-progressive-is-school... (“ Someone expecting to find widespread evidence of “savage inequalities” will be pleasantly surprised to learn that, on average, poor students attend schools that are at least as well-funded as their more advantaged peers... But there are good reasons to believe that it is more expensive to provide the same quality of education to disadvantaged children—in other words, funding that is equal may not be equitable.“).
Which, to be fair, I don’t think is a flawed idea. If everyone can acknowledge that there isn’t a funding gap, we can have the conversation that poor kids actually need more money to even out inequalities.
The states and feds pour money into the "bad" districts. But they never get better for a lot of the same reasons real mechanics don't work at jiffy lube and real chiropractors don't work for borderline insurance billing scams.
Good teachers are and administrators are only in for a few years before they're up and out and there's all sorts of perverse incentives to just do the minimum while punching the clock.
Spending in general is not a universal or meaningful metric to measure quality of education, details matter. Huge sums spent on school security/meals/transportation do nothing to increase quality of schooling compared to countries where all those measures are unnecessary (safe urban environments with parents able to feed kids by themselves)
I can't be bothered to break out Excel to tally up the numbers, but here's a link to a typical suburban school district budget if you want to run the numbers yourself:
To me, this fact makes it even more shocking how bad the US public education system is. How can it so effectively continue to fail to provide social mobility at scale? Where is all this money being spent? Not at least on teachers' salaries, I guess?
I've always found the statement "how bad the US public education system is" and ones like it to be far too simplistic. It's a country of 350 million people, with perhaps the most staggering differences in educational outcomes of any developed nation on Earth.
Where I grew up in New England and in many of the surrounding areas, public education was incredibly well funded, teachers were paid very, very well relative to cost of living (75k+ USD) and supplies were never lacking. Spectacular outcomes for most students provided a stable home environment (92% of students going on to college).
The US public educational system isn't bad, it isn't good, it's nonexistant. It's a conglomeration of dozens of educational systems receiving some amount of money from the Federal government but more or less operating on their own. Given that, what we should be asking is what are we failing to provide our students outside of classrooms.
My observations are mostly from CPS in Chicago-land so take that into consideration. The issue, and a glaring one at that, is that no one with money will let their kid go to public school if they can help it regardless of official political positions they hold, which tells you something.
To me that says that for those schools, education is not the goal.
Naturally, it is not all their fault. There are sorts of issues that are socio-economic in nature ( how much time a parent can devote to reading aloud to a child? can they hire a tutor? ).
I don't think I completely agree that we should focus on external factors only ( although we should look into them ). I am saying we should understand where that money disappears into. My house taxes are ridiculous and the statement I get suggests its mostly for schools. Where exactly is it going if it is not having appropriate results?
Dozens? More like thousands. School districts tend to fall along city or county lines, and there are around 3000 local government units in the US. Cut that in half to guesstimate the number of school districts, and you’re still in the thousands order of magnitude.
I was referring to states when I chose the word dozens because states have unified educational attainment standards. You're right of course, it's even more complicated than that.
>It's a country of 350 million people, with perhaps the most staggering differences in educational outcomes of any developed nation on Earth.
Economy depends on productivity and innovation. Who would've thought that the people like Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg and Ellison would create so much wealth and so many jobs without college degree. Robust US economy enabled them bringing their innovation to fruition but I'm afraid if they lived in another country they wouldn't be able to do that. Of course every country depends on higher education but sometimes creativity can outperform formal education.
I think public vs private is irrelevant because if you are productive as a worker or innovative as a entrepreneur result is the only thing that counts.
Ellison is the only one who had something even close to a typical public education; they dropped out of college after making it through all of the typical educational filters and did so to start companies.
Gates: Private Prep school, Harvard
Zuckerberg: Philips Exeter Academy, Harvard
Ellison: South Shore HS (Publicly funded, selective enrollment), UIUC
So you're saying that the largest source of funding for primary and secondary public schools is the local government (state? county?), as opposed to the federal government? And that as such your place of living is the deciding factor for the quality of public education available to you?
Areas with poor people in them also gather less tax money, meaning they can't provide the residents with quality education, meaning those areas perpetuate poverty.
Not exactly so simple. For one, like another commenter mentioned, funds are provided by the federal government specifically to level these differences out, but that's all it is, money. The administration of those funds is carried out at the lowest levels of government, with little to no accountability standards from higher up (obviously we've had reform attempts on this like NCLB).
The differences arising from living in a poorer district vs a richer district have more to do with factors outside of school, like I said. It has to do with the home environments provided by parents who are often much poorer and thus less able to provide care and tutoring outside of school. Less access to role models that can guide the way to getting to college and upward mobility. As our country's economy becomes increasingly competitive, these disadvantages ossify socioeconomic statuses for people and their offspring.
Obviously, more oversight of funds is a good thing, but it really isn't a lack of money that leads to these problems (for the most part).
Edit: Also, a poorer district usually has lower cost of living to weigh against lower property taxes.
No. Even though school governance Halle s mostly at the local level, half of school funding comes from state and federal sources, to even out disparities in funding. This is the typical model pretty much in every federal country.
It often doesn't really work that way though, especially if you contrast suburban and urban school systems. It's not at all uncommon for urban systems with poor educational outcomes on average to outspend on a per-student basis middle-class suburbs. So it's not as simple as throwing money at the problem.
Thank you. This makes it so much easier to understand more about the US public school system and how it is sometimes portrayed as piss poor (season four of The Wire pops to mind).
Is this something that is being discussed on a wider policy level? I believe it's a universally agreed upon fact that the quality of primary education is the single most important factor in helping people escape poverty. This should work equally well in rural Nigeria, suburban Oslo and West Baltimore.
> How can it so effectively continue to fail to provide social mobility at scale?
School funding comes from property taxes, so the wealthier the area, the better the schools. Schools also do not address the myriad of other issues that arise from what class a child is born into in the US.
Wealthy parents can afford childcare, or to stay home with the child, and can afford tutors if their kids have trouble in school, etc. Wealthy parents can afford to pay for their children's college education, give their kids' good credit by making them authorized users of the parents' credit cards before they're 18, pay their rent or buy them homes, and pay their bills or give them money should they decide to start their own businesses, make investments, or pursue new careers or the arts.
Poor parents aren't at home to send their kids to school in the morning or to be there when they get back because they're working, and they can't afford tutors if their kids are struggling. Kids often have to work jobs in high school and give the money they earn to their parents to pay for housing and expenses, and they are on their own when it comes to college, moving out, or pursuing a career. Even when they're out of the house, they may still have to help financially support their parents, siblings and extended family.
There are also the issues of food and housing insecurity that stem from poverty, and they have an impact on children's ability to learn, cope and move up from their station in life.
I think one thing the US does well is provide education and support for mentally disabled children, and children from foreign countries who need remedial ESL instruction. To speak in generalities, in many schools it makes up ~25% of personnel spend, while the proportion of children may only be ~5% of the population.
It really is more egalitarian then you might think over here.
The US spends almost as much (per capita) on medicare and medicaid together as the French government spends on their healthcare system. The Education system seems par-for-the-course.
It's not quite a lie, just a very narrow scope. The implied context of "think of the children" is usually something like, "Think of how horrible it would be if the children were exposed to temptations like sex and drugs." Other aspects of children's welfare don't figure as highly in the calculus of those who espouse this slogan.
Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking with "surface level truth". I think if you asked the majority of the US population if they cared about children they'd say yes and I don't think they would be lying. But there's an ignorance of the bigger picture.
I think that's still not the right way to look at it. Calling it "ignorance" is unnecessarily pejorative. It's a difference in quality metric. Some people attach a lot of value to avoiding (what they believe to be) moral transgressions because they believe it imperils their soul in the afterlife or something like that. You may vehemently disagree with this goal, but if you accept that as a goal then this narrowly focused "think of the children" actually makes logical sense because the afterlife lasts a lot longer than this one does.
> but if you accept that as a goal then this narrowly focused "think of the children" actually makes logical sense because the afterlife lasts a lot longer than this one does.
The afterlife may last for a few minutes for all we know.
While I do agree with you that not everything neccesarily needs to be looked at and judged quantitatively, the deep dive into esoteric ideas such as the afterlife is misplaced.
You have missed the point. This is not about whether or not there is an afterlife. This is about getting to the root of the disagreement, which is not the sincerity or disingenuousness of the slogan "think of the children". It's about the weight people place on avoiding certain kinds of moral transgressions, and the fact that whose who do believe in an afterlife almost universally believe it is eternal.
Rich kids and poor kids alike were ignored by the school districts.
The vast difference is that rich kids had many other avenues for learning and some may even have progressed more quickly freed from the tyrannically slow pace of in-person schooling.
Rich kids have access to private schools, which aren't subject to teacher's unions and political battles like the confusing one you had in New York between the Governor and the Mayor of NYC. They were contradicting each other on policy predictions and did a big disservice.
In California, apparently teacher's unions have been blocking school opening plans. That's what I read and it could just be false or misleading news.
Again, rich people afford private schools, tutors, etc.
In contrast, in France they just went under lockdown in the north this weekend, yet for many months now they had schools open. In the US we're opening up but schools stay closed in many places. Who's being scientific and who's being political?
Nothing makes much sense! We must question authority and special interest groups, constantly. Take nothing for granted, even if a politician claims to be on the side of science.
I think the idea of "rich kids can go to private schools" is not actually the what is the largest driver inequality of outcomes for children. Roughly 10% of K12 pupils attend private school in the US. I was unable to find anything that pointed towards a definitive increase in private school enrollment; though that doesn't mean that it isn't there.
Sure, the "rich" families can afford private school tuition; but even just well-off families are better able to handle the at home school situation. They are more likely to have flexible schedules or work from home arrangements that allow them to properly supervise their children's learning - which I hypothesize that this better being able to supervise remote learning, is a much bigger driver of divergent outcomes than the fairly small number of private school pupils.
Between "rich" and "poor" there's an ever-shrinking, but still a quite large layer of middle-class kids, who cannot afford private schools, tutors and summer camps abroad, but still manage to somehow get educated.
I dont know, US seems to me to ve obsessed with early childhood education. The expectations on when the kid should read and what not seem to be pushes to very low ages.
It’s weird. Kids are either expected to be little geniuses or are left to the wolves.
In the suburban district my nephews attend, parents double down on sports and refuse to let kids take standardized tests to make them look as good as possible. It’s monsterous.
In the US early childhood education programs describe services from birth to kindergarten such as preschool, preK and screening services for autism, learning disabilities etc...
Or, it’s like education is a state and local issue and there is a US military sized budget line item called state and local education spending that’s not included in OP’s calculation of federal spending.
As opposed to what? All countries use the same argument to push popular programs, even if it makes little sense.
I don’t see the US using the argument more than Spain for instance. We’ve had a new “educational reform” every ~8 years with every government change, because “think of the children”, when everyone knew the reasons had nothing to do with the children.
When push comes to shove, children can't vote, but 70-80 year old geezers can. And many politicians are in their age bracket too. Forcing kids to give up a year of their childhood just to (in the best case, assuming school closures are effective) provide old people with a month or so extra average lifespan is unjust and incredibly cruel.
I don't understand - are you implying that the act of deciding to have a long lockdown necessitates that the decision makers do not care about children, or are there specifics you are leaving unsaid?
> are you implying that the act of deciding to have a long lockdown necessitates that the decision makers do not care about children
I do get this impression from watching interviews with some of the public-health experts advising governments. As an academic, I can recognize my fellow academics who are obsessively focused on their own field and passionate about it, but they might not realize that people outside the field don’t have the same investment. For some of these public-health experts, reducing transmission to zero and avoiding every potential death is paramount, and the societal and political consequences are only at the margins of their consciousness at best. However, the general public is broadly ready to accept some level of morbidity and disease spread in order to live with fewer restrictions, there is only a debate about how much.
> I don't think we've done a poll asking that question.
You don't have to, it is common sense. Would a country be willing to go into social distancing, schools and restaurants closed, etc. in order to save one elderly person somewhere? Of course not. How about two? That is where the debate starts, but that debate is foreign to people (whether public-health academics interested in pushing numbers to zero, or health ministers whose job performance is judged only on looking proactive) whose main concern is avoiding death.
Even in a representative democracy you don't have to expect leaders to trust the experts if those experts go beyond the pale. Among the scientific advisors to governments, a handful have suggested maintaining strict social distancing and masks even after COVID to have a shot at eradicating flu, etc., and from an expert public-health viewpoint they may be perfectly right, but would the public expect their elected officials to heed that advice?
We tolerate cars, fast food, alcohol, and tobacco. It’s a fair bet that we tolerate those things, despite knowing the health harms that come inextricably linked to them. Our representatives presumably trust the experts there as well.
Many decisions about what precisely needs to be locked down seem to have been made without much concern for the needs and interests of children. In the summer, for example, quite a few areas opened stores before playgrounds and restaurants before schools.
> are you implying that the act of deciding to have a long lockdown necessitates that the decision makers do not care about children
Not quite... I'm referring to the fact that society has often gotten quite worked up over "think of the children" arguments for perceived dangers, but when faced with a real threat to child welfare, the response has been rather mild in comparison.
The length of lockdowns is the problem, here in Germany at least. An even harder lockdown limited in length would have most likely achieved better control of the pandemic than the on-going half-measures and we would have been out of it earlier as well.
The interdependence of humans means that no lockdown could be hard or long enough and the independence of humans means that nobody would actually live under such a hypothetical regime anyway (starting at the top especially). As it stands the worst of both worlds was erected, a lockdown too soft to effectively “eradicate” the virus and too hard to prevent the economic and psychological ills that have predictably presented themselves. The bright spot is that the anticipated deaths due to over utilization of healthcare resources seen in northern Italy has been mostly avoided. Maybe the worst of both worlds has been the least bad option.
It already worked fine during the first lockdown last year. At the end we were down to numbers at which tracing contacts and quarantining them worked quite fine for a while. This would have been an acceptable level where people would have been able to do quite a lot of things but not everything. A lot of people overdid it though. Parties, weddings, ... if nothing had ever happened. Unfortunately the response was slow and weak. Now we still deal with the consequences.
The problem with a harder lockdown limited in length is that Germany is a member of Schengen, so even if Germany largely eradicated COVID within its borders, it could then be reimported from another EU country that hadn’t been as locked down.
You might advocate for Germany closing its borders earlier and for longer, and forcing police registration of fellow Europeans, but personally I think that is horrible. I see restrictions on free movement in Schengen and challenges to European integration as much more of a problem in the long term than COVID morbidity.
I am as pro-European as they get but what should we do when things go downhill as they did in e.g. Belgium or Czechia? We have no influence on preventive measures there. All we can do is to deal with it and to be as little affected by it as possible. Beside that, a more fine-grained control than national borders would be preferrable anyways in that case, so it would be not only be about locking fellow Europeans out but fellow Germans as well. There is no base in law for that though and attempts to limit visits between federal states have therefore been anulled by courts. Can we agree that it is not an easy situation?
It is always about he teachers unions using students and children to accomplish a political goal. If you do not raise teacher pay, you are hurting children. Do not fund education in the next funding round, hurting the children.
The second the teachers needed to be brave and show what bravery was, they buckled, hid, and showed that it was all bluster.
Well the decision is to either send them to school and risk them all getting infected with and becoming superspreaders of a novel, fast-spreading virus that we don't fully understand yet, or keep them home and risk mental health issues from social isolation.
We chose the less harmful option, it's not that complicated. There's no conspiracy here.
> Anyone else find it strange that a country that has often fallen in line with "think of the children" arguments for hypothetical dangers appears to be completely uncaring about very real dangers of social isolation that are impacting our youth?
No, because (1) it hasn't fallen in line with “think of the children” so much as invoked it as a post-hoc rationalization, and (2) isn't indifferent to the danger here; both the left side (who has been arguing the need to apply the resources for safe reopening of schools) and the right side (who has been opposing those expenditures but pushing reopening anyway) are in agreement that it is a serious concern.
>about very real dangers of social isolation that are impacting our youth?
Can you imagine if this happened when there was no Internet, Mobile phones, Long Distance still existed, no Satellite TV, etc? I grew up like that (Rural Farm) and there were periods of months during the summer I just read books, and wandered around outside and didn't see another kid for what seemed an eternity. If I complained my parents would find me some work to do. My wife thinks I'm normal so I guess it turned out ok, didn't need any mental therapy or anything.
if US really cared about children they would ended the humanitarian crisis in Yemen... so far 85 000+ children under 5 starved to death and they saying 400,000 are going to if this blockade doesn't end.
> Meanwhile, aid agencies say the embargo imposed by the U.S. (and UK-backed) Arab coalition has had dramatic effect with about 80% of population in urgent need of vital resources such as food, water and medical supplies. Saudi Arabia, reportedly relying on U.S. intelligence reports and surveillance images for target selection, began airstrikes, some of which were against weapons and aircraft. The U.S. has dispatched warships in the region after Houthi missiles targeted the UAE-operated HSV-2 Swift, which some critics interpreted as the U.S. reinforcing the coalition blockade. According to Iranian sources, it has refueled Saudi planes, sent the Saudi military targeting intelligence, and resupplied them with tens of billions of dollars worth of bombs. The U.S. (and the UK) support the effort through arms sales and technical assistance. Amnesty International urged the U.S. and the UK to stop supplying arms to Saudi Arabia and to the Saudi-led coalition. It has been reported that U.S. is regarded as an indirect partner for Saudi Arabia in the war and blockade on Yemen.
Well, it is for the good of children as the worst thing a child can get is "implicit racism" that can't be cleansed.
As teacher's union repeatedly said, reopening schools even in this December is "a recipe for propagating structural racism". See? what's bigger than racism? Nothing is bigger than racisms, be it truths, problems, issues, or challenges in the US.
So, if you dare to mention reopening the school again, you're a racist. If you dare to discuss education reform, you're a damn racist. If you dare to challenge teachers union, you're a racist. Case closed.
I mean the "education reform movement" was started by segregationists after brown v board of ed, and many southern counties privatized schools to avoid complying
"think of the children" is only about keeping them free from sin, not actually educating them because well educated children are likely to become atheist adults.
Getting money out of politics and the church out of education are the two most effective things we can do to advance our civilization.
The way I understand it, GP's thesis was that "think of the children" has always been mostly just a slogan for Christian moralists to prevent "sin" and hasn't involved really thinking about what's best for the children, so there is no contradiction now with this slogan and not caring about the children much during the pandemic, as the OP suggested.
I am convinced social isolation is a convenient excuse to blame for preexisting mental health problems once the primary coping mechanisms are removed. Nonsense like very real danger of social isolation ignores valid problems that were previously discarded out of inconvenience.
No weirder than “prolife” folks often intersecting heavily with “pro war” and “anti lockdown” folks.
US lives in a weird bubble where they ignore the very successful policies around the world and create these weird internal narratives that they all follow relatively blindly
Problem is US leaders are elected based on populism rather than merit and whether theyre actually competent, let alone qualified.
The result is a political system that rewards morally bankrupt, sociopathic behavior that prioritizes self interest and profits over people.
Many will say it has worked considering how wealthy the US is and how it facilitates innovation. However, this is only made possible by the fact US, as global reserve currency of the world, is able to print $$$ w/impunity while exporting much of the resulting inflation which rest of the world has to bare -- essentially subsidizing US wealth.
The issue with covid is now the mutants. England did not lock down the schools this past winter and the B117 spread thru the schools into the wider population.
Brazil and its variant seems to be even worse and they basically let the virus rip from day 1.
These new variants are more lethal and more transmissible. So now we are really screwed unless the vaccine proves effective enough with masks to slow the spread. And that’s not guaranteed. And then we have the rest of the world to deal with.
I don’t expect covid to go away for at least 5 years and that includes boosters and masking. And lots of covid tests.
It’s largely the propagation of fear from the media and the teachers unions who don’t want to work (and the politicians trying to push large stimulus checks to the unions).
For instance, Florida never shut down schools. In contrast, Chicago and SF teachers unions are/were pushing to keep schools closed.
The “science” (note: much of it is not peer reviewed) thus far indicates it’s safe to open schools and there’s little to no risk. at this point most at risk individuals have been vaccinated and estimates were that 40-70% of people already had covid19 (so even less risk of spread). Children have reduced risk of spreading disease as well.
Anybody else find it strange that having students out of school for another few months for their teachers to be vaccinated is being painted as the most important thing in the world when they've already been out of school for a year?
It's fine to mourn the damage that's been done from kids being locked up for a year. To act like the marginal damage from adding a few more months to that year is murder, that's political. To act like the risk to teachers and the families they care for is obviously less important without doing the math is just hatred for working people.
edit: how about this - you're allowed to send your kids back to school if you're willing to stand in a room filled with 30 different people from 30 different households for 8 hours a day, unvaccinated.
My daughter has been doing exactly that all year as a teacher in a private school. My son has been attending full day class in a private school long before vaccinations were available. This has been true for private schools all around the country (fortunately w we don't have teachers unions who think they deserve extra special protection, more than everyone else in society). And guess what? No problems. Wash your hands, stay home when you're sick and it's amazing how there are no dreaded COVID "superspreader" events.
I have been out on the front lines as a first responder since the beginning w/o a vaccination. And I would gladly be anywhere without vaccinations and masks, because I know the stats and probabilities, and I don't cower in the face of risk, as lockdown and mask proponents are.
People get sick. People die (2.8M in the US, per the CDC) It's happened since the beginning of humans, and it will always be that way. In past pandemics we never were paranoid cowards like this (smallpox, asian flu, etc), but somehow all of that wisdom was trashed last year because people are so afraid of risk and think they can actually "control" a virus. Good luck with that.
We need to accept that 3 million Americans will die this year and we can't keep everyone alive forever no matter how hard we try - And that our bizarre fixation on making every decision as if Covid19 deaths are the only societal outcome that matters is profoundly wrong.
If that bothers you, replace it with "Having one or both parents spend the rest of their children's lives in graves isn't exactly great for kids either."
> frankly, made-up thing
The CDC disagrees with your opinion. From the CDC's "Long-Term Effects of COVID-19" article[1]:
> The most commonly reported long-term symptoms include:
> Fatigue, Shortness of breath, Cough, Joint pain, Chest pain
> Other reported long-term symptoms include:
> Difficulty with thinking and concentration (sometimes referred to as “brain fog”), Depression, Muscle pain, Headache, Intermittent fever, Fast-beating or pounding heart (also known as heart palpitations)
> More serious long-term complications appear to be less common but have been reported. These have been noted to affect different organ systems in the body. These include:
> Cardiovascular: inflammation of the heart muscle
> Respiratory: lung function abnormalities
> Renal: acute kidney injury
> Dermatologic: rash, hair loss
> Neurological: smell and taste problems, sleep issues, difficulty with concentration, memory problems
> Psychiatric: depression, anxiety, changes in mood
Much like it is literally impossible to prove antibodies for COVID-19 last for greater than a year, because the illness has not been around long enough to prove such a thing, it is also impossible to prove COVID-19 symptoms can last greater than a year.
It's horrifying how we've allowed politicians to inflict collective punishment on our children for over a year. The data is clear that COVID-19 is less dangerous to children than seasonal influenza.
Yes, and? Educating children is more important than keeping elderly people alive. You know this to be true if you do a utilitarian analysis as objectively as possible rather than ceding to emotion.
You can still educate children via remote work - as a personal anecdote, mine have done better with a hybrid school approach - and a utilitarian analysis must still take into account emotional effects on children of losing a relative.
Quite a few grandparents are the caregivers for their grandchildren, as well.
> Some 2.6 million grandparents are raising their grandchildren, either because of a temporary change in circumstance for the parents, such as military deployment or joblessness, or something more lasting and terrible: mental illness, divorce, incarceration, death, or, as in Barb and Fran’s case, substance abuse.
There is little or no evidence that children frequently transmit the virus to adults. And even if there was, it wouldn't be ethical to collectively punish all children just to marginally reduce the risk to a minority of vulnerable people.
> Researchers in South Korea have found that children between the ages of 10 and 19 can transmit Covid-19 within a household just as much as adults, according to new research published in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention journal Emerging Infectious Diseases
I don't know if you live in the US but for anyone who doesn't I think this mainly boils down to this: the average US citizen does not believe metal health issues are real. In high school I've met people who were clearly suicidal and I've seen the advice given to them: "Just go outside more" or "you don't have anything to be sad about".
One of my friends was depressed and suicidal through high school. He often acted out and got sent to a out-of-school suspension program. There he told people what he was depressed and had thoughts of self harm. What did the advisors of this program say? They didn't believe he was depressed! They said "If you want to kill yourself then why don't you go to the train down the block and jump in front of it".
This is all anacdata but it's my guess that the HN-bubble likely selects for people who don't think like this so it might not seem like this on the internet.
The country has been heavily banking on discouraging the rank-and-file class from having children, and replacing them through immigration. And the ones that are already in the system are very heavily discouraged against the path to independent success and self-esteem. So the recent events are just another step in the same direction.
P.S. I don't think it's a carefully engineered master plan to eliminate independent thinkers, but rather what the society converges into when you eliminate the need for regular people to solve the problems on a daily basis. Medieval feudalism over again.
Or children living a care free life shocked to learn there really are invisible monsters?
Being socially isolated wasn’t the only new reality they had to assimilate.
As someone who grew up rural, DIY, ending up further left than Sanders, the one size fits all assembly line model of education we push kids through doesn’t really seem like it’s thinking of the children.
It seems more like it’s “think of the past greatness these behaviors brought to the motherland!”
As usual the real outcome is forcing intense logistical effort on the masses to manage all this for diminishing returns in their paycheck and increase in stress.
It’s hard for me to see it as truth instead of hand me down narrative.
The Greeks taught math and physics before we had bachelors and PhDs. Our educational system looks back to medieval France, where pretentious ranking for political reasons took hold, when the top down hierarchy knew best!
If we want to think of the children stop forcing them to fellate grandpas old wives tales
So if I'm reading this right, Reuters sent survey's to an unknown number of school districts. Of those sent, 74 replied, and of those 55 answered "yes, we saw an increase in this metric" to at least two questions on the survey.
How many would answer yes to at least two in most years? How many schools saw a decrease in metrics? And how many surveys weren't completed, as a district having issues seems more likely to respond?
I don't doubt there have been issues, but without the full survey details I don't trust any of this article's conclusions.
Nor do I, and especially the youngest students might be suffering, but at the same time there seems to be an concerted effort from the established "brick-and-mortar" education establishment to discourage from further experiments in the remote learning field, something which seriously threatens the way education has been executed hitherto, being potentially both much cheaper and more individually targeted.
That's at least the conclusion that I draw from the fact that there are multiple reports of this supposed mental health hazard that comes with remote learning, but the evidence is notoriously anecdotal. The only reliable real statistic I have seen (from Sweden) is that the quality of learning and grades on average have gone up, if anything.
It is really nothing particular about schools. In Spain the first day schools were closed children started playing on the streets, or playing basketball and soccer(you can play soccer anywhere). They were quite happy doing that.
Then the authorities said: No, no no! Kids must stay in house all day, closed all public spaces, something contranature for kids.
It was the get "in house", secluded, don't do anything socially. Too many don'ts with no does.
I can stay indoors playing guitar or piano. Reading books,or HN, or cooking. Even then I need to get out from time to time. It is not realistic to expect children doing the same.
Most of those activities were not really dangerous with some restrictions.
You can go in a bus or car with mask if people don't talk and introduce air from the outside.
You can play different basketball or football games with little risk. You can jump rope. But bureaucrats decided they were little monks. They are not.
School is not the necessary thing here. It is playing socially and exercising what children need like water and air.
> You can go in a bus or car with mask if people don't talk and introduce air from the outside.
Don't talk don't breathe wear two masks don't leave the house we're all gonna die.
In reality kids are not an at-risk group and there used to be a healthcare maxim "first, do no harm". When did it become OK to hurt one group (young healthy people) in exchange for hypothetical benefits to another group?
Sure, but the entire point of closing the schools is to force the kids to stay home (or at least stay isolated from others) so just accept the terms mean basically the same thing.
Having 30-ish (or more) children crammed inside a classroom is not the same as having smaller groups of children play together outside in terms of potential transmission.
This is really unfortunate second order effect of lockdowns. You see the SAT scores go down as well and some groups don't want to admit the negative effects of in a shift to in home learning, especially among the most vulnerable groups. And we're not even honest about it and just retreat to the idea of getting rid of standardized tests altogether to mask over the achievement gap.
We also should have prioritized epidemiology studies involving schools --- there seems to be a growing consensus that K-8 schools aren't significant spreaders. The HVAC concerns about schools are apparently easily addressed with basic, portable air filters and box fans. There's a lot we could have done differently here.
> there seems to be a growing consensus that K-8 schools aren't significant spreaders
There's almost no evidence for that. It boils down to the virus is absolutely out of control here, and kids are way more likely to be asymptomatic, meaning that it's way harder to nail down that a child to adult transmission occurred outside of the household.
"Conclusions In contrast to wave 1, evidence existed of increased risk of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection and covid-19 outcomes among adults living with children during wave 2. However, this did not translate into a materially increased risk of covid-19 mortality, and absolute increases in risk were small."
"Living with children aged 0-11 was associated with reduced risk of death from both covid-19 and non-covid-19 causes in both waves;"
The consensus is more that younger children seldom have symptoms that's why they get less tested, that's why the real number of infected is highly unknown.
Otherwise studies have shiown school closing are ver effective
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338
Growing consensus? The only thing I've ever seen said about it -- which was said quite early on -- was "we have never seen an instance of children spreading the disease to adults".
I don't understand these half assed measures. The original goal was to shut everything down to explicitly flatten the curve and not swamp hospitals. That was the fear, the exponential curve of millions on millions dead in a few weeks time if this wasn't contained, but as we have seen, this is simply not happening. Yes, this virus is bad, it is highly contagious, it kills people and deserves a serious response to control, but the lockdowns, at best, were to slow the spread and a stop gap to larger secondary effects.
This is the third rail of Covid discussions. But you are correct. The area under the curve was exactly the same in all the "flatten the curve" vs zero mitigation models. The rationale behind flattening the curve was never to decrease the absolute number of infections.
But somewhere along the way, the goalposts were implicitly switched from "flatten the curve" to "wait for the vaccine"
Because everyone realized that compliance beyond lockdowns is piss poor. Mask wearing is political and people can't preform simple hygiene to avoid spreading. Once the curve was flattened it was abundantly clear that any reopening was going to follow with an explosion of cases, which it did.
So, for context, France tried that. Badly, like the rest of our handling of Covid, but we did close restaurants, bars, and everything else, keeping schools open. Not really for the well being of the children, but rather that their parents could not work if they had to handle children.
Depressions are still through the roof, grades are low.
Because you get depressed if you are isolated and you get depressed if you have to fear to get infected.
There is no undepressing way to handle the pandemic, only ways with less infections and deaths.
The way to solve it was to accelerate vaccines even more than we did. A couple trillion dollars to accelerate vaccine production and rollout (and approval) to cut 6 months off the pandemic. Avoided the big wave in December. We already did better than some feared with vaccine roll out, but we could have done even more.
Also, a harder (but shorter) shut down and a firmer masking requirement and really good test and trace and quarantine protocol were additional ways, but apparently not feasible due to having to heard so many cats. Vaccines were more under federal control and could have been accelerated.
> in the actual United States of America, it’s Congress that can write huge checks; it’s mostly states who write rules for restaurants; and schools are a local responsibility — often run by special purpose school boards that have no other governing powers. Given that Congress did not appropriate funds for a bar and restaurant bailout, I don’t think it’s crazy that governors mostly decided they had to reopen their restaurants. And given that this decision ensured continued community spread all through the summer and fall, I don’t think it’s crazy that teachers lobbied to keep schools closed.
> D.C. eventually got a leg up thanks to our unusual governance. We are a “mayoral control” city (i.e., the schools are run by a political appointee rather than by a separately elected board), and our city government also performs the functions of a state government. So the mayor, in her capacity as essentially a governor, gave teachers vaccine priority, and then in her capacity as the head of the school system said they had to reopen. I think it’s clear that San Francisco mayor London Breed would do that if she could, but she doesn’t control California vaccination rules and she doesn’t control the San Francisco public schools, so she can’t.
Because any raise of taxes would accelerate the conversations happening at every tech company in CA as to whether or not they really need to be there now that they worked remote. Unless Tim Cook's taxes can personally pay for it (since Apple's staying because of their big new building), this isn't a good time to be raising taxes.
Because the US system has evolved to one which structurally depends on federal government deficit spending to rapidly meet economic emergencies since the feds have structural advantages in borrowing independent of self-imposed limits (borrowing in a currency you control is a massive advantage) and states tend to have (self-imposed, but inflexible in the short term, since they are usually matters of state constitution) budget rules which require balanced operating budgets and, where they allow debt-financed deficit spending, have slow processes (often something like a legislative vote followed by a public election) to approve it.
(Why it's counterproductive to raise taxes, instead of deficit spending, in the middle of a literally once-in-a-century economic downturn to pay for bailouts should be obvious.)
> Given that Congress did not appropriate funds for a bar and restaurant bailout, I don’t think it’s crazy that governors mostly decided they had to reopen their restaurants.
What you are talking about? There were multiple rounds of several federal bailouts for small businesses affected by COVID-19:
What's more, state governments are getting many billions of dollars from the federal government as well, which they can use to support for state bailouts of any businesses which fall through the cracks of those federal programs.
Re-opening the business where you have to take off masks and distancing is impractical is a good way to overwhelm hospitals, which costs a lot more money than keeping bars closed. Restaurants also have the option of switching to takeout-only to keep operating with no additional risk of infection.
The fallout of all of this will take years to unravel, and it all likely points to overkill. Was it justified given uncertainty (i.e. prepare for the p90 or p95 outcome)? Possibly. But what I saw from the leadership class the last year was a complete disregard for the concerns of the little people and their livelihoods. Once things got politicized re: Trump, the most polarizing american political figure of my lifetime, it became even worse in multiple directions.
Very few people come out looking good in this, except the scientists and regulators who pushed the vaccine forward.
Gen Z today are becoming increasingly more isolated; the long-term effects of this are yet to be known and could be serious. But it angers me that this is often an issue that's overlooked, especially when it's such a prevalent one.
It's truly disturbing to think of the little regard there is for the mental health of young people, especially in an age fraught with enough social isolation as it is. Gen Z will be forever known as The Lonely Generation if something won't be done to help.
Recently, RTE News in Ireland did a segment covering short films that young people made about their experiences in lockdown (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jZWm6tzpQ), and it was truly harrowing to hear what they had to say and the short films that resulted.
If social isolation were a real concern for people they would get off their damn phones and drastically reduce their access to social media. Blaming this entirely on the pandemic is sorely misplaced and not a solution.
I agree, it isn't. But since real social interaction is currently not available in too many cases, limiting children's access to the closest substitute is not a good idea.
Terrifyingly, this isolation makes it easier to manipulate and polarize the population. Paired with capitalistic engagement-hungry algorithms, I see a dark future.
My greatest fear in this whole thing is precedent. It's easy to sell a new "Once-In-A-Century Event" every couple of years. If we burnt the whole world's goodwill on this disease, and a more devastating one comes along, what are we going to do?
How about here in Australia? I think our outcomes look pretty good. We went hard and early, locked down, and now we basically have no restrictions internally (apart from not being able to travel internationally except to New Zealand (travel bubble should be starting in two or three weeks), and having to quarantine on entry coming from anywhere but NZ for two weeks and with two negative tests on I think the 10th and 13th days).
We have cinemas, sporting events, music concerts, etc. all open, you don't have to wear masks, you don't have to sit with empty seats between you and others. Schools have been mostly normal this year (save for a 3 day lockdown in QLD and a one week lockdown in Victoria and Western Australia). Lots of people are still choosing to work from home but offices are back to normal, domestic travel has been back on all this year an a decent part of last year... All with basically zero community transmission.
All this with about an eight week lockdown where I live (unfortunately Victoria had another outbreak so had to have another three months later on but got that back down to zero community transmission). So the lesson should be that it actually was perfectly possible to eliminate the virus locally and open up again fairly quickly. We could have done it even quicker if our incompetent Federal Government had acted more quickly, but luckily for us the State Governments all did mostly all the right things apart from a few issues (letting in a cruise ship with dozens of infected people with no quarantine or testing early on in New South Wales being a big one, and some issues with hotel quarantine later on).
It helped that states in Australia could close their borders internally. The US justification for having different legal systems in each state, experimentation, doesn't apply when states basically aren't allowed to close their borders.
I do recall talk about "overkill" at the beginning - that if we were doing enough, it would look like overkill by the time it was done. Likewise, if it did not look like overkill, we could have done better and saved more lives.
> The fallout of all of this will take years to unravel, and it all likely points to overkill.
No, the biggest problem was the vast underkill at the start. After that, everybody was screwed.
For starters, a whole bunch of things needed funding. Mask manufacturers should have been given contracts so they would switch to 24/7 production--didn't happen. Unemployment needed to be funded so people could stay home when states burned through their funds--didn't happen. Schools needed money for A/V equipment, training, and internet connections for students--didn't happen.
Things needed to shut down fast at the beginning. Mardi Gras happened because the feds buried information. SXSW went down to the wire before being cancelled. International flights took forever before even they were finally cancelled.
I can go on and on and on ... this ain't what "overkill" looks like. This is what "malicious incompetence" looks like, and I won't let you rewrite that history.
Before delving into accusations of maliciousness, might I suggest you first review the annual budgets of the relevant public health agencies? At least a hundred billion dollars have been spent by my government during my lifetime on public health. Some of this spending was overseen by the very same officials you see on TV condemning others for their poor performance. The budgets they were given feel to me like more than enough money to be prepared for a foreseeable respiratory pandemic.
I am neither in the U.S. nor a student, not even an extrovert - and I still feel the effects of our local lockdown on my mental stability. So does my wife, who is usually more resilient than I am.
This will have a lot of subtle consequences down the line.
Speaking for myself: the biggest consequence for me, in terms of mental health, has been the total erosion of my belief that most people were basically good, and decent, and cared about the welfare of others. It was a choice I made years ago; I wanted to be the sort of person that believed those things, even when there was occasional evidence to the contrary.
But 2020 brought a trifecta of social stress that laid bare some festering social diseases. Both national and global politics, the response to Black Lives Matter, and the pandemic, all in the same year.
I don't know quite how to describe it. It's the loss of an ideal? I don't know. But, I feel it, viscerally. Whereas depression is more of an internally-focused feeling, this is externally-focused.
In the before times, I loved road trips, especially through smaller towns. It was a part of my identity. I've traveled through most of what's west of the Mississippi. I always knew that I had political differences with many of the people in the places I visited, but it rarely mattered. It wouldn't come up in casual conversation. Everyone was friendly. I won't ever be able to see people in those places the same way again.
I happily spent money in small towns as I went. Gas, food, lodging, services, the occasional trinket. I can't do that anymore, either.
I've been fortunate throughout the last 12 months in a lot of ways, and it's still left a big long-term impact on me.
> the total erosion of my belief that most people were basically good, and decent, and cared about the welfare of others
Oh my god, this. When the pandemic is over, I’ll be left with the knowledge that a significant fraction of the people around me at any given moment wouldn’t lift a finger for someone else if it meant even the slightest inconvenience or discomfort for them. I don’t know how to recover from that.
In the past, people went off to war and some of them literally died for their country. Today, people won’t even so much as wear a little piece of cloth on their face while shopping for their khakis. We are doomed if the next COVID is 20x deadlier.
I've heard the semi-joke that if this generation was the one involved in WWII, Americans (and many others in Europe and Asia) would be speaking deutsch or nihongo today.
You are drastically minimizing the cost of lockdowns. Demanding that nobody have any physical contact with anyone they don't live with is far more than a slight inconvenience, especially for children, single people, and those with existing mental health issues. It is entirely reasonable to consider whether the benefits are worth the costs, and people who come to different conclusions than you are probably not evil cartoon villains.
I'm not talking about the lockdowns. I'm talking about wearing a mask when in public. Just yesterday I saw a man screaming for being asked to leave a Home Depot because he wouldn't put on a mask. And before you ask, no, his objection was neither medical nor scientific.
Are things really that different than they were before though? I still chat with my neighbors, doctors etc etc... everyone is just as friendly as before. I think it’s just our main connection to the outside world has been doomscrolling... I don’t think the people in this world are that different. They are good, caring, loving... despite what some would have us believe.
It's different in the sense that there was a forced reckoning of idealism vs. ground truth. We learned a great deal more about our family, friends, and neighbors. Sure, they may still be as outwardly friendly as before, but many of them, far too many, aggressively support some really heinous things.
I don't want to venture into off-topic political stuff here. And, let's just acknowledge that everything about the pandemic has sucked pretty much whoever you are; the number of dead people, the even greater number of people who have suffered in some other way, whether through illness or isolation or the loss of employment or business or time at school with friends and classmates. You can pick pretty much any aspect of the pandemic and have valid criticisms for how it was handled.
But the worst part of it all was how people reacted to it. That public health and safety were perverted into political identities. That so many people became so aggressively opposed to the welfare of others.
It wasn't a small, isolated thing, and I don't think people should be described as good, and caring, and loving, while they identify with and support so many terrible things.
It wasn't a small, isolated thing, and I don't think people should be described as good, and caring, and loving, while they identify with and support so many terrible things.
Both supporters and opponents of lockdowns could read this and agree 100%.
I don't know of anyone that was enthusiastic about lockdowns or wanted them to happen just because it would ruin somebody else's day.
At best they were a necessary evil to prevent an even more catastrophic loss of life. Nobody likes them and there's nothing wrong with being frustrated or upset by them, and as the article points out, they're going to have far-ranging repercussions for a long time.
I too, feel the most significant way my mental health has been negatively affected was not due to the lack of in-person face-to-face social interaction, but rather the destruction of my faith in humanity. I will add a caveat that some countries, societies, or even enclaves, have done a lot better job than others.
It’s not prejudging at all. It’s judging the real (in)actions of people. Things that people have been doing and not doing for the past year. This is not “I think you might...”, it’s “I know you did.”
The pandemic made me lose hope that we will adequately deal with something as abstract as the climate crisis when people cannot even act appropriately when the effect of their combined actions can be seen in the numbers just two weeks later.
I felt the same way. I live in San Francisco which has overwhelmingly supported liberal policies for many years. The young progressives, who have the most free time and money to “fight” for their fellow human beings, were the ones buying up all the meat, eggs and toilet paper when this thing started.
I work on vaccine scheduling for a large health system. We are now dealing with a large influx of young people lying about having a chronic illness to jump the vaccine line (the requirement for verification was recently lifted).
I’ve grown pretty disillusioned and can now see there is major hypocrisy on both sides.
Thats something I realized on myself. Since the start of the first lockdown I am much more concerned about my own health. That combined with the social isolation and the stress I experience at work and university is a really bad combination.
But with everyone talking about health, the virus and the pandemic, it seems obvious that more people become aware about their own health.
Because young and healthy only lowers the probability of dying and not the probability of long term effects. "COVID-19 patients also suffer kidney and lung damage at above-average rates, with kidney failure occurring in more than a third of those who become severely ill. In a few cases, the virus has even been found in spinal fluid. This can trigger an immediate infection in the brain known in medical terms as meningoencephalitis. This can also have long-term consequences, such as permanent cognitive problems and memory impairments."
> Because young and healthy only lowers the probability of dying and not the probability of long term effects.
Young and healthy lowers the probability not just of dying, but also of a severe course of the disease. Long-term COVID symptoms largely correlate with how severe the course of the disease was. This is something that tends to be emphasized by the actual research, but left out of mass-media reporting, perhaps for the sake of sensationalism.
I know otherwise healthy people in their 40s who died from it, leaving behind children without a mother or father. Can you imagine being one of those kids? If so then you can imagine why it would be the latter.
What would it have been like if the schools had not been closed?
If millions had been infected in a short time and the hospitals had been overloaded so that in addition to the deaths from Corona, the deaths from lack of capacity would have been added?
How traumatic would that be for the children?
Are there any studies on this from New York or Italy?
Can the consequences of the lockdown be so cleanly separated from the consequences of the pandemic?
Couldn't it also be that the lockdown simply makes people more aware of the threat of the pandemic because it has a tangible impact on their personal lives?
It's nice that schools that follow the hygiene rules have fewer COVID cases, but what percentage of schools have the space for it and actually implement it?
Why else have studies shown that school closures are one of the top 3 measures against the spread of infection, after closing down restaurants and limiting contacts to 5 people?
Likely nothing. Look at Florida for a decent example of what’d happen at scale if we left schools open. It’s been fully open, 5 days a week in person, since the start of the most recent school year last September. The state as a whole has done better at dealing with the virus than other similar sized large states. It also has a wide range from dense urban to light rural populations.
It’s not that you don’t have any mitigations. It’s that you tailor them to the problem. Florida did have lockdowns for senior centers and that likely lowered the overall death rate given the skewed mortality stats.
So why did they open, but not CA or NY? I’m sure cozying up to the teacher’s unions at the very least factored into those states’ Governor’s decisions.
COVID does worse in warmer climates; it would be useful to see data adjusted for factors such as ventilation, climate, baseline prevalence, viral variants, etc.
No one AFAIK has attempted to do any of this work. All I've seen are unsubstantiated claims for each side's agenda.
We need to know what hard conditions guarantee an R0 small enough to prevent disease transmission in schools.
Is that really substantiated or has it just been theorized? California and Texas have been doing poorly compared to Florida so heat itself doesn’t seem to be the differing factor if it is a factor at all.
> California and Texas have been doing poorly compared to Florida so heat itself doesn’t seem to be the differing factor if it is a factor at all.
California is much colder than Florida, if you weight it by population and not land area.
Wouldn't be surprised if that is also true of Texas. Both have large tracts of sparsely populated arid, very hot land that contributes to popular image but isn't where most people live.
Also, California has not been doing poorly compared to Florida, but there are a whole lot of non-climatic differences.
Technically, it's based around the fact the virus spreads slower in summer (warm, humid) than winter (cold, dry). Though I suppose California and Texas are more (warm, dry) so maybe the union factor is dry. Or something else like population density or time spent indoors.
Note that this is Florida's official death rate which we know underestimates the real rate. The governor stepped in and made all numbers go through a special department which does things like throw out any deaths from non-residents (snowbirds and visitors).
Based on excess death counts, the real number for Florida maybe 25-100% higher. See:
Florida is currently facing a $2-$3 billion tax shortfall (numbers vary depending on the time of projection [0]) and California is facing a budget surplus [1]. There are details around this like one-off capital gains and tax rates and budget cuts, but the overall story is that FL had a slightly higher death rate than CA in exchange for an overall economy that isn't doing so well. Some of this is due to the fact that FL's economy is tourism-driven and my personal response to that is: as a tourist I was very tempted to (safely) visit FL this winter, but the whole "our state doesn't believe in basic COVID restrictions" thing made that much too scary.
They're not the same, Florida is higher. But overall Florida seems to be an outlier among the "low restriction" states and California seems to be an outlier among the "high restriction" states. A better approach would be to average the groups of states that took different approaches, and maybe also try to normalize by other confounders like population density. This is probably a better approach because there might be other pandemics in the future that are way deadlier, and we should actually know what works and what doesn't.
You wrote "to bail out California" and yet the headline says "robust budget." Do you have evidence that California was bailed out?
How much money does California give the federal government compared to that $26 billion that it got back? How much does California give vs. other states?
>"It’s been fully open, 5 days a week in person, since the start of the most recent school year last September."
Not true. The largest county in Florida, Miami-Dade, has had my child do school at home since March 2020. Only a tiny percentage of students are allowed in person even now.
I wonder what the Covid infection and death rate for teachers is compared to CA and NY. It’s easy for you to say they should’ve come back to school when you’re not the one getting exposed to 30+ families at once every day.
Why are you making absurd claims like " fully open, 5 days a week in person, since the start of the most recent school year last September", that trivial to refute with a simple web search?
The largest county in Florida, Miami-Dade, has had my child do school at home since March 2020.
I've been trying since September to get him back in person but they don't allow it, so it's misleading to say they're open for in person. Only a tiny percentage of students are allowed in person.
Comparing regions where schools opened earlier or were open for longer doesn’t support this extreme claim that “additional millions would have been infected in a short time”
> Can the consequences of the lockdown be so cleanly separated from the consequences of the pandemic?
The consequences of the pandemic with all it's effects will be difficult to predict. But we do have data of how isolation/lockdown effects people[1]. Although no studies (I know of) that deal with the effects on children. The below linked study is worth reading beyond the abstract. I'd imagine it will be more severe than how it affects adults :(
edit: I found this: Nutrition crisis looms as more than 39 billion in-school meals missed since start of pandemichttps://www.unicef.org/press-releases/nutrition-crisis-looms... - so distribution of hardship is distributed unevenly and not in favor of already vulnerable groups.
Lots of European countries kept schools open during most of the pandemic so the answer is quit simple not much. I don’t know what studies you are referencing but they don’t seem to be backed by the experience in European countries.
> Lots of European countries kept schools open during most of the pandemic
More like "SOME European countries kept schools open during SOME of the pandemic". And look at the state of Covid in the EU now, with infection rates climbing yet again.
France has had school open for much of the last year—when infections were increasing and decreasing. It doesn’t appear that schools are driving the infections.
Sure but locking down again is not going to change that significantly and even the WHO who I don’t trust at all has consistently been saying that lockdowns should be avoided at all costs.
What were the infection numbers when those European schools were open? Most of Europe did an actual lockdown and so was able to open schools at times when the numbers are down.
Spain’s been open school wise since the first lockdown and it’s not been a main driver of infections. Sure every week or so a class gets sent home for quarantine due to a case but each class is in a bubble so it’s not stopped school from happening and the kids are better for it. People got to stop panicking about it like it’s the Black Death it’s not helping anyone and it undermines my the argument because people push back at fear mongering. Vaccines will curb it as it seems it’s doing in the uk or Israel.
The claim that a lack of lockdown means the healthcare system being overloaded with COVID victims, leading to no capacity for sufferers of other illnesses, depends on a major assumption: that hospitals would have to treat patients coming in with COVID symptoms. Another approach could be to triage COVID patients away from intensive care, providing them only with palliative, end-of-life care, and letting those beds remain available to the bulk of the population. That might sound pretty harsh, but it is actually how things have played out in some regions of the world.
I suggest you might be seeing things too linearly. Consider all the evolved variants.
By letting it run wild you would a) just accelerate viral evolution and b) eventually and unpredictably find yourself in a situation where the mortality rate might spiral out of control across all kinds of demographics.
You would then do the same thing as now: lockdown measures to curb mortality.
I guess the question of lockdown is not if but when: After many more deaths and mutations which render costly vaccines ineffective or early, vaccinate as much as possible as fast as possible and get done with the virus.
All that being said: Do you have a source for your claim that certain countries triage patients with COVID to end of life care? I’d be genuinely interested in reading up on that.
All viruses either die out or become endemic. They mutate continuously while reproducing in your body because copies are not perfect. Most mutations do nothing. Sars2 is already well adapted to humans and none of the new mutations have significantly changed anything about the virus no matter what the media says so it looks like vaccines will end the pandemic soon.
I think Sweden got accused of letting infected seniors just die. I remember it being a scandal last year.
HIV anyone? Neither died out, neither endemic. How about ebola?
Define significant change. The UK strain B 1.1.7 is 40% more infectious and 60% deadlier.
The South African strain renders the AstraZeneca vaccine nearly useless.
Well... sure, the million dollar question is though how many die before that happens in the case of Sars2 isn't it? Can't really run a school without teachers or a factory without workers. What's your take away from this obvious fact?
> ...and none of the new mutations have significantly changed anything about the virus no matter what the media says...
That is a bold opinion. I guess the media pretty much does say nothing, but rather conveys scientific results? Several [0, 1, 2] scientific publications and studies done suggest something very different. There also seems to be a NY variant which seems to be markedly less affected by vaccines. [3] Quote Dr. Fauci: "Work done by David Ho has shown that we have to really keep an eye on that for its ability to evade both monoclonal antibody and, to a certain extent, the vaccine-induced antibodies. So it’s something we take very, very seriously."
It sure seems like we're on a good track to pushing COVID towards one of the two outcomes, but to me it seems that the path to reaching said outcomes is not yet as trivial and safe as you make it sound.
I live in a part of North America that kept its schools open during most of the pandemic. Children are learning and playing together. The games they play are pretty much the games they would have played a bit over a year ago. The adults in their lives don't transfer the stress that they are feeling to children whenever two kids get the urge to hug each other. It is almost as though the pandemic does not exist.
For the most part, it does not exist in our small corner of the continent because adults behaved responsibly. This means that most of the measures we take happen behind the scenes: the children have a few more rules to comply with, adults calmly correct them when those rules are broken, and (most important) the focus is on teaching them good habits and sheltering them from the burden of the emotional stresses of this exceptional time.
If we have another outbreak, I am all for shutting down the schools as a part of a swift and hopefully short response. Just as keeping children home for months on end is not good for their mental health, exposing them to a twisted version of the classroom environment for an extended period of time is not good for their mental health.
I am not going to claim that it will always work, but it did work the one time our schools were shut down.
That being said, we have kept numbers very low. This means the response can be targeted since tracing the source of an infection is more realistic. When it looked like schools would be affected, they were temporarily shut down. Since it came during the Christmas break, only seven days were lost for students and two for staff. The most recent increase did not affect schools, so the response was directed towards the most common causes of spread. Now that new cases are due to travel and direct contact with someone who has travelled, those targeted restrictions are being lifted.
Is this approach going to be effective in the long run? Probably not. Remaining on guard for an extended duration is stressful and the virus will eventually catch us off guard. On the other hand, our children are still enjoying their childhood and the burden is not so heavy on adults.
On the other side, 10 million kids may never go back to school in the developing countries after pandemic. Probably good for the underground textile shops dressing up the ones who can work from home.
Recalling back to my student days, I and my friends would be ecstatic about not going to school for whatever reason. Granted, the most extended no-school period would be the 3 months of summer break. I don't recall any kid ever actually wanting to go to school.
Maybe I'm thinking of this all wrong, but I feel it kind of hard to believe kids aren't liking not having to go to school.
Did school suddenly turn into a utopia of fun and excitement since the decade+ I was last in a classroom?
What I can believe though, is that some kids might be having a hard time not meeting and playing with their friends. But only a small handful of parents seem to be forbidding their kids from doing so anyways, so this still doesn't compute for me.
I finished my senior year of high school right when Coronavirus was starting to spread (and graduated in a mask), and I've got mixed thoughts about how this has gone down. On the one hand, I love online school. Zoom calls give me a lot of flexibility to create a better learning environment (listening to music, burning candles, being isolated), but it also takes the urgency out of it all. Last semester I failed 2 classes because the teachers didn't distribute a clear timeline of our work, which made it really difficult to figure out what was due, and when.
Ultimately, (surprise surprise) I think it comes down to an issue with our education system as a whole. Teachers are trained to get their students to "jump through the hoop", and when they fail they blame either the system or the student. The United States has an incredible opportunity to reassess what matters to students, and what the modern workforce is looking for. Our rhetoric around education is stuck in the last century, and we're in the middle of the largest paradigm shift the working world has ever seen.
Another tangential (but important) thing I've noticed is the disparity between our social messaging and teaching methods. Having spent the last 12 years of my life in a 21st century classroom, the emphasis is still on busywork (with an increasing amount of it automated or digitized. I empathize with the teachers who want to keep their workload to a minimum, but it's entirely at-odds with our social goals to make the next generation of students creative and leaders. In my Junior year, I took an AP Language+Composition class that handed out a grading rubric on the first day of class. Overall, the homework load was weighted as 15% of the total grade, so I simply didn't do it for the first trimester. When my teacher found out, he called me in for a discussion about "home life" and other vaguely patronizing things, but he seemed shocked when I told him that I saw his busywork as an opportunity cost. I felt pretty guilty for the next two trimesters, because at some point he just stopped handing me homework assignments with a defeated look. We shouldn't victimize students for thinking critically, and ideally we shouldn't even put them in positions where they have to choose between extracurriculars and practicing their times-tables.
My teacher said that without doing the homework or exams, if you got a 5 on the AP test then you could get an A, a 4 got you a B and a 3 or less got you a C. Homework and exams allowed you to get a + and could possibly push you from a B to an A even if you got a 4.
A day off and a year off aren't really comparable, though.
They're also still largely in school, just remotely. My middle school aged children have Zoom calls, remote band/orchestra lessons, classwork, etc. on their remote days - it's not the same as a snowday.
I've got two kids in middle/high school, in a 100%-closed-from-beginning school district (still closed).
The worst part of the experience has been the monotony of sitting at their desks all day experiencing communication solely via Teams/Zoom meetings. Combined with the monotony of most extra-curricular activities shut down, and a lot of friends lost to sheltering parents, it's increased the number of spontaneous breakdowns in our house...they're doing okay; they're mostly just disappointed. A big chunk of their childhood has been taken away from them, unnecessarily in some of our opinions.
What will suffer hugely into the future, though, is participation in sports, music, and other common activities. With a lot of them, like playing an instrument, once you break the chain, people usually don't go back. If we had maybe 40% of kids that age before that had no hobbies or interests to fill their time with before, we're going to have more like 70% now. What will they fill their time with?
I went to high school in the 90s and I would have killed for Zoom school. It would have vastly improved my mental health. Not having to get up at 7AM for a half hour bus ride full of tormentors, not getting shoved into lockers, not getting my lunch stolen, not getting gum stuck in my hair or having people putting out their cigarettes on my back. It would have been wonderful.
They were happy at first, unhappy two weeks later. The home school is strictly inferior - more boring, less discussion, less contact with other kids and teacher.
Then, holidays normally means a lot of activities. Travelling, camps, other kids to play outside with, parents not working and doing activities with you.
Meanwhile, lockdown without school means that you sit in your room day after day while parents work.
How much of this is caused by remote learning? Kids tend to spend long periods out of school with no ill effects during holidays. They even do a lot of homework without a severe mental health crisis (we presume). The difference could be that they have control over their time. The remote learning experience seems to be needlessly regimented. My own children have repurposed tools for remote learning to keep in touch with their friends: they probably socialize more now than they did pre-pandemic.
He would scream and cry multiple times per hour on Zoom,” she said. “It was all really scary and not in keeping with his personality.
The fact that children are being tethered to Zoom for hours in regimented routines is really disturbing. Adults can push back, kids don’t have the authority to do so. Our boss tried a group “good morning” routine as a sly way to do a roll-call when we went remote-first, but a limited number of people took the bait, and she quickly learned to trust us.
My eldest started kindergarten this year at our local parochial school. We’re so happy they did “in-person”. It was a great success
Effect on my kid:
1. My kid was getting really weird by the end o August, after not seeing other peers since March. Her mental well being changed completely.
2. English is not her native tongue, and KG have her a great opportunity to catch up before starting 1st. grade
The role of the school:
1. The school has had three cases of COVID all year (k-Gr8. Maybe about 320 kids?). There was no spread of COVID to others.
2. The school implemented a strict regiment to ensure safety. They had strict rules, and trusted the parents to respect them.
3. Only once were we asked to go “online” for two weeks because one of the three cases was a faculty member that worked in our class. That person had gottenCOVID elsewhere and was quickly identified due to periodic testing.
4. Parents were (are) offered virtual learning. No one I know took it except a women who gave birth in January; she pulled her kid once the baby was born.
Overall the gratitude my family has of our parochial school is immense. Tuition is very cheap (much cheaper than day care), and it’d be free if we couldn’t afford it.
I'm not a child (uni student) but I've spent the last year sitting at a computer in my childhood bedroom for 14 hours a day and I'm fucking miserable. My life feels fake since nothing I'm working towards exists in the offline world.
This is exactly where I am. I'm a uni student who also works at a software company (apprenticeship) and my personal learning has cratered during lockdown. I went from being the happiest I ever had (finally, I was setting out to achieve my life goals) to the complete and utter inverse.
Not only did I move back into my parents house due to loneliness, I was previous stuck for six months in a city with very few friends (as the lockdown started right as I was building up a network of people to hang out with).
I might not be suicidal, but I was teetering on the edge for a while. Spent more than half of this last year with a constant anxiety about dying. But it was not a fear of Covid, it was a fear of these lockdowns taking away time from my life that I will never get back, and how they might go on for years more, when it has hurt barely 0.01% of my age demographic. I'm at the point where I would accept even 10x the risk to get back to normal.
If I died tomorrow, I would've wasted the last year of my life. The only good thing I've gotten out of this is a bit of perspective that I won't be forgetting.
I find this strange as you probably sitting at computer watching some twitch thing for 10 hours ? young people are spending their time with computerized things for many years already ...
On a 'regular' day I would be spending 8 hours on campus or at an office for an internship. Probably 90% of the people I interacted with on a typical day would share my goals and understand my life. Now it's all online. So the problem is there's no social pressure to do anything related to my long term goals. The time spent on a computer is not really that important
You might like cake. Given the choice, you might like to eat cake every day. Maybe it would even take place of breakfast. But what happens if you're only allowed to eat cake?
I'm rather against the lockdowns, shutting of schools and businesses or gathering. As adults we should be able to judge correctly based on real data. I think people just lost touch with what makes them human. They should never have agreed to any of this for the mild security they gained. I can go into detail why but it won't convince anyone. You have to look yourself.
I agree, we only went this way because the discussion about the downsides never had a chance, but I was easy to speculate about the potential upsides (this is also why I believe a large part of the public is clinging on to the narrative that they did, because we can't / won't conceive of them being ineffectual or even detrimental, it wouldn't be "fair").
Not just never stood a chance, socially outlawed. Last year you were bigoted, racist, un-eductated etc.. if you dared to think differently than the state Science of the time.
The sun is shining, the vaccines are flowing, I can eat inside now, I am feeling optimistic today.
But on my grey days: I wonder how long the mental health trauma of all this will last. Besides school-age depression, there was a noticeable uptick in drug overdoses. (https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/16/as-pandemic-ushered-in-i...) And, anecdotally, I have several friends and acquaintances who developed severe drug issues during the various stages of lockdown. I fear there’s going to be a lot of dark matter out there, and we won’t detect it until we see the knock-on effects for years down the road.
This is not an anti-lockdown screed, I feel like I must say. My dad went into the ICU for something non-COVID in December, and the hospitals then were at the breaking point. (At least where I was.) We needed to control this virus somehow. But we will be feeling this for a long time to come.
I'm still traumatized by how difficult it was to find a job after college in the wake of the great recession. I haven't been unemployed since I started working in tech, and I'm going to make over 300k this year (half of which will go to taxes....), but I still feel like I'm constantly in danger of losing my job, that I'll never find another one afterwards, and I'll become financially insecure again and maybe even homeless.
I don't think this feeling will ever go away, even though it''s completely unfounded. I also can't bring myself to commit to a mortgage even though I can more than afford it at this point. I should have bought my first home years ago, but couldn't bring myself to do it because I always feel like the economy is on the brink of collapse.
I feel so much compassion for people who have trouble finding their first jobs, or lose their jobs during all of this, because I went through that. You feel so helpless and worthless. At least we have the stimulus checks and rent moratoriums this time around. But I feel like we're going to need them for years if we actually want to take care of those who have been affected.
Surely this is a bit of a tautology - like, 'when viruses are endemic, people will suffer from breathing dificulties, pneumonia, low oxygen count and in some cases death'. The idea is, like with COVID, we do something about it. Also no one turns to depression or drug abuse any more than they turn to being admitted to an ICU.
I definitely developed a drug issue during COVID. I wouldn't say I had no choice in it like the people admitted to the ICU. Boredom can predispose you to things, but the choice does lie with the person. Making it seem like the choice is not in your sphere of power makes it only harder to quit. What I said does not apply to depression.
Maybe it will. But depression and drug abuse can have very long-lasting effects. For example losing a job or becoming homeless. It can be very hard to recover from that.
Exactly. A cold or covid may be temporary, but the snowballing effects that happen when one falls "off the wagon" (drugs, homeless, hard to hold down a job, etc) do not magically recover when the pandemic is over.
I only wish that the US would see the huge ROI of investing in its citizens (i.e. by ensuring they are healthy, housed, and educated enough to find their path in life) and act accordingly.
Strong support for rapid testing could have gotten schools open much sooner and probably prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths.
But unfortunately this was largely overlooked by the general public, and the cheapest tests that could do the most good are still not approved by the FDA.
Have to wonder if your kid would be happier to spend more time with you, instead of you being away all the time, working extra hours to pay for the private school. Perhaps you could have organized free/cheap social events, instead of paying for them in the form of a private school.
I work in education, I'm also in school and was in school. My educator cohort has uniformly spoken about the retention issues their students have had, it seems shutdowns seriously retarded the academic growth of their students. I can corroborate that, myself: I was forced to leave my studies, and elected to take the fall off, hoping for a return to normalcy in the Spring of '21 - this was done both to ensure that work and school wouldn't conflict, and that I could observe the normal curriculum instead of a haphazard entree of online learning and recorded lectures and sans the labs that I'm paying extra money to participate in.
Having returned, things aren't back to "normal", one of my professors elected to use recorded lectures which don't have the same quality as in-person lectures. Not to mention it tries my attention sitting at a computer. I had the same class previously, and returned good grades up to the lockdown, I'm now a C student in the class where I was before an A student.
Mathematical concepts have almost entirely slipped. I seem to have forgotten all of my previous training, even simple processes like factoring were lost. I was an B student in the previous class, and had a reasonably solid grasp on the concepts, which we reviewed this year, and I found myself almost entirely lacking. I'm now a struggling C student and whats worse is the constant battery of assessment is actually doing more harm than good, requiring me to hamfistedly smash through chapters without ever studying the subject to develop understanding.
Sample size of 2 children (my 9 year old and 14 year old): neither want to go back to in-person school. In-person school can create its own set of mental health issues. My 14 year old socializes on her phone. The 9 year old is a type 1 diabetic and out of an abundance of caution we pulled him out a month before the school system decided to go remote learning last year. He loathes going back. Neither of my kids are antisocial, but they prefer not dealing with social drama that pervades school.
I don't think my kids have had their growth stunted because of our isolation. Quite the contrary, the 14 year old has had time to mature away from school without the influences of less-than-ideal schoolmates. On the other hand, they've had to learn to learn by themselves sometimes when they're stuck and can't get help (and can't wait for us to finish working.) Learning to help oneself is more valuable than anything I ever learned at school.
Our 9 year old will probably be homeschooled through June '22 because his age bracket won't be able to get a Covid-19 vaccine until early 2022. He's already asking if we can homeschool him beyond that.
It's not all black and white and there is no one-size fits all.
It is what it is. We all made sacrifices during the pandemic. This had to happen in order to save lives. The only thing that matters is what we do going forward.
>It is what it is. We all made sacrifices during the pandemic. This had to happen in order to save lives.
Saving lives isn't the be-all and end-all of public policy. Normally public policy would look at the net effect in terms of quality-of-life-adjusted-life-years, and by that metric the lockdowns have had an overwhelmingly negative effect, since the lives they saved were mostly people already on death's door, while the lives they destroyed were young and middle-aged people.
I suggest we start by not trivializing ‘depression, eating disorders, neglect and emotional, physical or sexual abuse’ as simply ‘a sacrifice that had to happen in order to save lives’.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg too. A quick summary of the lockdown harms:
missed hospital visits for heart attacks and cancer screening, cancelled childhood vaccinations, school closures, child and spousal abuse, kids growing up without seeing facial expressions on others, pain from postponed elective (including dental) procedures, food shortages in the third world (and even in developed countries), the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in the US, massive economic damage, closed gyms and sports, suicide & mental illness
The effects on developing countries are not just on poverty levels but the natural environment as well. Wildlife conservation effects in East Africa and Madagascar are funded predominantly by tourists being able to come in and look at the animals; state support is meagre. A year of no travel has meant no income and some park staff being laid off, which means opening the door to more poaching and illegal land use.
Vs traumatized from death of relatives, death from overloaded hospitals, food shortages because death of working family members.
And why are kids grow up without seeing facial expressions? They are not isolated but spend more time with their parents, what's wrong with the world if this leads to mental health problems.
Year after year it was told parents need to spend more time with their children to built up their confidence and now this?
Could it ve it's not the lockdown, that causes the mental health problems but the pandemic?
So you're telling me that in places like Brazil more people are being traumatized by deaths in overloaded hospitals compared to Westerners (who are less traumatized) thanks to a year of isolation? uhmm
That's a non question, as if you could have prevented the majority of people from dying of it, lockdowns were about "flattening the curve" they weren't even saving the majority of lives (maybe some) at an incommensurable social cost.
The average age of covid deaths was over 80. I hate to break it to you, but people over 80 don't exactly have a long time to left live. Arguably somebody who is traumatised (as opposed to just saddened) by an elderly relative dying isn't very emotionally adjusted, as dying of old age is inevitable.
What’s more traumatizing is the knowledge that so many people are willing to just throw the elderly under the bus because hey, they are going to die soon anyway. “I gotta eat my Olive Garden, so someone’s granny needs to die 10 years too soon from a preventable illness.”
To put this into concrete terms, imagine the number of breast cancer screenings that were delayed by two or three months--or more, as some people were so terrified by the pandemic that they pushed back appointments beyond that required. How many? Five hundred thousand? A million? Now how many of those might have caught cancer early? All of those are much more dangerous or even deadly than they might have been.
That's one type of preventative treatment. Now picture all the prostate exams, blood work, colonoscopies, skin cancer screenings, etc, etc, etc. Multiply it out and you have a massive scourge caused by the media's promotion of a flu-like disease.
Not only mental health, but things like basic nutrition, hygiene, and medical care, as well.
Many school districts recognized this and offered free meals, healthcare and other services throughout the pandemic. But this still requires parents motivated enough to take their kids by a meal pick-up site.
Working with some of these parents throughout the pandemic, some of them (mostly dads) did not know the correct spelling of their child's first name and/or did not know their child's birthday. This wasn't one or two people, this was many.
Except for those who put in the work, such handing out meals or providing medical care for essentially free, "Think of the children" is largely a lie in America.
Neither a parent nor an epidemiologist, so I'm going to stay out of the discussion of whether or not various lockdowns were worth it, but
> Of the 74 districts that responded, 74% reported multiple indicators of increased mental health stresses among students. More than half reported rises in mental health referrals and counseling.
Hasn't this been a trend for years pre-covid anyways? It will probably take many years to get reliable conclusions on how 2020-2021 actually affected the trajectory of young people, and I'm not convinced either way as of yet.
This sucks. Parents are setup for failure with demanding jobs and low wages. They need more time with children. Public school used to be small classes... now they are basically useless and do more harm than good for the majority.
Things are going to get worse unless there is a huge reversal with education, nutrition and the idea of success in life.
This article doesn't even attempt to show differences between mental health effects in school districts with in-person school vs those that stayed in person. It might as well be an opinion piece.
Lockdowns after the first month fail any and all cost-benefit analyses.
I'm not making political claims or favouring any political causes or parties - but the tremendous costs simply cannot be justified any longer now that they are clearer, and the "at risk" populations are much clearer.
Side note: even if you take public choice theory seriously and bake in the assumption that lockdowns will continue to happen despite being devastatingly costly, then the onus becomes vaccination - there is no reason not to approve AstraZeneca's vaccine this instant and roll it out into every arm you can find ASAP, starting with the elderly and the obese.
Even if the blood clot thing was real (which is appears not to be), you lose more people to covid than the supposed blood clots.
Roll them out, yesterday.
PPS: Every major Western country is doing wacky things on this topic, so don't take my comment as commentary on any given country (except re: approval of the AZ vaccine, which is a commentary directly on the FDA of the US).
I doubt it's the lockdown per se that's causing problems rather than making kids sit inside and play what amounts to really crappy video games all day.
I mean, that's what this quote says to me:
> “Every morning I woke up crying because it was another day of online school.”
Can you imagine the torment? It's like something out of Kafka, or "Brazil" (the movie.)
Please don't take HN into flamewar like you did in this thread. It's basically vandalism and most certainly not what this site is for. Seriously not cool.
I don't recall anybody soliciting the public opinion on action. We didn't vote, we were told. And regardless of partisan approach, I think we'd be in much the same boat. We have no control.
Yeah. Adding on to this, I don't claim to deeply understand SF city politics, but from what I can see all the partisan Democratic elected officials like Mayor London Breed have been pretty forceful in condemning the school board and union for not opening schools and focusing on things like renaming them. Breed has been advocating pretty heavily for school reopening for months, at least since September, and speaks and supports parents protesting for school reopening. City Hall recently sued the school district and it seems like they are pulling out all the stops, such as trying to bring the governor into this.
It actually seems to be the entirely nonpartisan elected officials at the school board and the teacher's union who are pushing back. A lot of the school board is former teachers (that's most of the people who run anyway), which means there's not a ton of representation for parent's interests there.
I don't think the voters should ever be blamed for "shooting themselves in the foot" and suffering regardless of who they elect, but in this case it makes even less sense. And I certainly can't take any joy from this situation that is hurting so many. I feel the same way about failures from officials impacting people with different politics than me.
You both are pathetic. Go pay off your debt, dumbass, because it sounds like you're one step away from being one of the people that this complete idiot renewiltord is referring to.
It's interesting how Mother Jones spins a fairly minor polling difference into a whole narrative about "Black Parents [Not] Joining the Push to Reopen Schools." First, they clearly are. According to the CDC study cited by the article, 46% of Black parents agreed that schools should reopen in the fall: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6949a2.htm?s_cid=mm....
The article spins out a Black-white difference on this measure because 62% of white parents think schools should reopen in the fall. That modest difference can almost certainly be explained by differences in where people live: Black people are more likely to live in urban areas, where density can feed concerns about easier spread of the disease. They are also more likely to live in Democratic jurisdictions, especially cities, where government officials have been more cautious and have urged more caution about reopening.
As a Marylander, I'm not surprised that people in a neighborhood within Baltimore City limits is skeptical about school reopening. The white people up there are also skeptical about reopening! Meanwhile here in exurban Anne Arundel county, people are much more eager about school reopening. We had protests this past summer in front of the county health office (which is by my house) urging the county to reopen high school sports. Black parents were at least as well represented at these protests as they are in the county as a whole (about 15-20%).
It’s Mother Jones, not exactly a bastion of rationalism. If there is a way to use any slight statistical difference to support the current du jour narrative (“white people are the problem” is a big one), you can count on them to do it.
