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).
And an 8 digit body count would be impossible in the US for a disease with a >99% survival rate. So quit the hyperbole.
Surely with so many similar cases the processes could be streamlined?
Obviously this "8 digit body count" concept is a load of that which makes the grass grow green.
Personally, I think that should be flipped, but kid’s don’t vote.
[0]https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/23x...
The most interesting place I've seen this type of argument made it along these lines:
- US policy is for housing to appreciate in cost over time
- Housing is demanded by young people starting new households, and freed up by old people dying or moving into group housing.
- Housing policy is thus a massive ongoing transfer of wealth from incipient households to long-established ones.
- This is no way for a non-dysfunctional society to operate
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).
It's just that high absolute amount of medicare spending throws off the comparison.
https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF1_2_Public_expenditure_educat...
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.
"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).
The whole point of social security is a government retirement program based on you putting money into it.
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.
In many ways the pandemic response was in line with the norm: rich kids do just fine, poorer kids are mostly ignored.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
We chose the less harmful option, it's not that complicated. There's no conspiracy here.
Ron DeSantis would agree.
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.
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.
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.
Getting money out of politics and the church out of education are the two most effective things we can do to advance our civilization.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My parents’ solution was to take me to a Christian consular who didn’t really help the situation.
All of my symptoms of being bipolar were explained as my deliberate choice to be a unrepentant, sinful child.
I didn’t see a proper psychiatrist until I was 33. My mom figured something was wrong because my uncle was bipolar and it’s genetic. Didn’t tell me that until I was diagnosed.
Probably because my dad thinks my bipolar uncle is demon-possessed.
Many other people in my support group have similar stories. If anything, I was one of the lucky ones since my parents were otherwise very supportive.
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
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.
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.
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?
A trolley is running towards a single 80-year old. If you do pull a trigger, it will instead kill an unknown number of people, including children.
If you don't, you're a monster.
I thought the problem was kids were an infection vector and could spread COVID-19 to older folks at home?
Very few people come out looking good in this, except the scientists and regulators who pushed the vaccine forward.
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.
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).
Also having leadership which denies anything is bad until a major sports league (NBA) takes action doesn't help.
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.
This will have a lot of subtle consequences down the line.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
But with everyone talking about health, the virus and the pandemic, it seems obvious that more people become aware about their own health.
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.
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.
There has been zero leadership here.
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.
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 :(
[1] The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
edit: I found this: Nutrition crisis looms as more than 39 billion in-school meals missed since start of pandemic https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/nutrition-crisis-looms... - so distribution of hardship is distributed unevenly and not in favor of already vulnerable groups.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately that doesn’t work because once you decide to close them, you also need to decide to bite the bullet and open them again.
And if it turns out it doesn’t work (or ‘doesn’t work enough’) and cases remain high, that’s a tough decision.
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.
https://www.savethechildren.net/news/almost-10-million-child...
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.
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.
That's just my two cents 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.
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?
Probably most kids. Socializing is one of the most important things you learn in school.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Not only my kid was able to go to real live class but was more social and not isolated.
Is it worth it?
Well I have 40K in Debt.
My values are that it is worth.
Now working 2-3 jobs to pay it all.
School is from 8:00 to 15:00 with breaks.
I deliver and pick up him everyday.
We don't have the luxury of not "doing" nothing or having "free/cheap" social events.
We just moved and have no social/familiar network. The other option is to be isolated in a apartment watching tv. Both parents need to work.
I DO understand parents that were afraid and did not send their kids to the school. But in my case the isolation would be worse.
Kids are *very* social they *need* it.
There is no "perfect" solution only what is best at moment.
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.
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.
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.
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
150 Million pushed into Extreme Poverty by 2021 https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/c...
168k child hunger deaths predicted in Africa https://apnews.com/article/africa-hunger-study-coronavirus-c...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcAYObnlehE&t=2623s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnKke19Ow8Q
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.
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.
But multiplication is hard.
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.
> 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.
Things are going to get worse unless there is a huge reversal with education, nutrition and the idea of success in life.
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.)
Seymour Papert must be whirling in his grave.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/why-black-paren...
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%).
