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).
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death...
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.
[1] https://whyy.org/articles/n-j-saw-a-slight-uptick-in-drug-ov...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/otherdrugs.html
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db384.htm
[4] https://khn.org/news/not-yesterdays-cocaine-death-toll-risin...
There's been a resurgence in underground raves.
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.
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.
A proportion of which are directly and indirectly caused by the behaviour of young people.
So yes mental health of children is important but for many people not as important as staggering numbers of people dying.
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?
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
Governments should have kept covid out but harming children in this way to make up for disastrous decisions and behaviours of adults is unacceptable.
What do you do during school vacations, and summer?
"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."
This was a "trolly problem" situation. The least worse option had to be selected.
You also need to know whether children spread the disease.
You do realize you're replying to a Reuters article about mental health results, not predictions.
Quite a hyperbolic and probably politically inclined comment.
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.
Wow what a brave thing to do, arguing with a straw man.
Suicide rates actually dropped during the world wars. People are able to handle war much better than social isolation.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51291.How_to_Lie_with_St... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43722897-the-art-of-stat...
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.
"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."
[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
You could say that for all of covid. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogen...
> Kudos for expressing an unpopular opinion.
Here's a real unpopular opinion - "Epstein did nothing wrong"
Here's a popular opinion people hide behind saying it's unpopular - "Epstein didn't kill himself"
"unpopular opinion" <==> "I know I'll be downvoted"
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.
An 80 year old has a lot of life in them. Some may have a year or two but others will have 20 or 30 years left.
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.
Also, the average length of stay in a nursing home is under a year. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45950714_Length_of_...
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.
