[HN Gopher] As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cra...
___________________________________________________________________
As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, Reuters
survey finds
Author : accountinhn
Score : 197 points
Date : 2021-03-21 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| fukmbas wrote:
| 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.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| 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'.
| cassalian wrote:
| 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?
| theknocker wrote:
| It's not strange at all. It's completely expected that nothing
| is real until enough liberal news outlets put it in a headline,
| preferably a polemic one.
|
| By the way, dan, I'm aware that I'm shadowbanned. It does have
| side-effects.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| mindslight wrote:
| "Collective punishment" better describes the normal state of
| the public school system.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They can still bring it home to parents, grandparents, and
| the general community. It's silly to dismiss the indirect
| effects as if they don't exist.
| umanwizard wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| Bartkusa wrote:
| https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-
| pandemic-07-...
|
| > 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
| smoldesu wrote:
| So in your eyes, it's more ethical to infect children
| with a disease that could kill their parents/grandparents
| than it is to keep them home?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Yes, it can be, depending on the probability behind that
| "could". (Anything _could_ kill anyone, so you need to be
| more specific)
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| dadjoker wrote:
| 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.
| ls612 wrote:
| It's almost like people don't actually care for the children,
| they just know of the social consequences of crossing those who
| claim they do.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| bjourne wrote:
| 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.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/23x
| ...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Why so?
| [deleted]
| germinalphrase wrote:
| 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.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| 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"
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Indeed, I did. Edited to avoid arguing against my own
| position.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| 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).
| Cederfjard wrote:
| 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.
| sillyconesally wrote:
| There is net negative value in keeping people alive in
| their retirement age.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03MZG9vK0W8 Bill is right.
| Fortunately, Covid mostly effects the elderly and is
| helping to correct this situation without uncomfortable
| "death panels". The other positive is that this will get
| everyone on board with a global digital identity registry,
| which will help with everything from climate change
| mitigation to solving global inequality.
| bko wrote:
| US spending more than average OECD country on education in
| relative terms (GDP) and even more in absolute terms due to
| higher GDP
|
| 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.
| ..
| Tossito190 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| kortilla wrote:
| That includes social security. What a stupid comparison.
|
| The whole point of social security is a government retirement
| program based on you putting money into it.
| ghaff wrote:
| And another decent chunk is federal civilian and military
| pensions which is also a benefit _earned_ by working.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Personally, I think that should be flipped, but kid's don't
| vote.
|
| 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
| sudosteph wrote:
| 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.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSDxg-bDw1A
| austincheney wrote:
| 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.
| cheald wrote:
| It's not strange at all. "Think of the children" has forever
| been an emotional ploy to gain political power, not an actual
| concern for the children.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| 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.
| orangecat wrote:
| _We chose the less harmful option, it 's not that
| complicated._
|
| Ron DeSantis would agree.
| afavour wrote:
| "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.
| mancerayder wrote:
| 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.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| 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.
| cpwright wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| sjg007 wrote:
| 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...
| lisper wrote:
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| 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.
| lisper wrote:
| 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.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| > 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.
| lisper wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > 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.
| yc-kraln wrote:
| 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| YarickR2 wrote:
| 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)
| umanwizard wrote:
| > Spending in general is not a universal or meaningful
| metric to measure quality of education
|
| Right. Are you agreeing with me? Is this not my entire
| point?
|
| > Huge sums spent on school security/meals/transportation
|
| Any numbers on what fraction of school budgets these
| typically are?
| krapht wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://www.apsva.us/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/03/FY-2022-Supe...
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| But if not spending, how else could "the country" care
| about the children?
|
| Or you're saying that no amount of money can replace a
| caring parent?
| vesinisa wrote:
| 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?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _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.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| 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.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >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.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I am willing to agree for the most part.
|
| 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?
| vesinisa wrote:
| 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Bingo. Schools in the US are usually funded by property
| taxes, which leads to all the effects you just named.
| vesinisa wrote:
| 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.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Edit: There are 3142 "counties and county equivalents" in
| the US. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countie
| s_by_U.S._state...
| kaesar14 wrote:
| 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.
| krapht wrote:
| 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.
| underseacables wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of a Modest Proposal for the covid
| age.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| 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?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| matz1 wrote:
| Isn't it obvious? The lockdown harm the children.
| croes wrote:
| So does dead parents and grandparents.
| jansan wrote:
| Won't somebody think of the over 90 year olds?
| matz1 wrote:
| Without lockdown they will die regardless, beside do they
| even want to be isolated?
| [deleted]
| _Microft wrote:
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| 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.
| _Microft wrote:
| We do not talk eradication here.
|
| 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.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| 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.
| _Microft wrote:
| 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?
| cassalian wrote:
| > 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.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > 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.
| sjg007 wrote:
| I don't think we've done a poll asking that question. At
| any rate this is a representative democracy so we expect
| our leaders to trust the experts.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > 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?
| swayvil wrote:
| To be fair, this whole covid fiasco has worked better than a
| neutron bomb. It destroyed the people while leaving the
| infrastructure standing.
|
| Obviously it is entirely intentional.
| kortilla wrote:
| "Think of the children" is a tool to manipulate people. It's
| not an end-goal in itself, especially if it costs a lot of
| money.
| emkoemko wrote:
| 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.
| jacob2484 wrote:
| It's up to the U.S. to fix every single problem?
| whatthesmack wrote:
| Not necessarily. But at least don't actively perpetuate
| problems.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| From[1]:
|
| > _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._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Yemen#United_Stat
| e...
| [deleted]
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| donovanian wrote:
| > Kids would be pretty depressed being surrounded by a 8
| digit body count in the US too.
|
| Let's make sure they're depressed when their brains are
| irreversibly stunted from missing the crucial social
| interactions necessary for development.
|
| Also, let's pile on the misery with a generation of kids with
| stunted literacy. Good luck teaching reading with a freaking
| mask on.
|
| It's indefensible.
| sillyconesally wrote:
| The technocratic left hates you and your children. It's
| that simple. This website shadow bans comments critical of
| lockdown. The technocrats want to replace you with foreign
| workers that they can exploit and they want your kids poor
| and desperately stuck working in the gig economy.
| nradov wrote:
| Do you have any proof that that would have increased
| depression rates in children relative to what we see today?
|
| And an 8 digit body count would be impossible in the US for a
| disease with a >99% survival rate. So quit the hyperbole.
| [deleted]
| monocasa wrote:
| What proof would you believe without empirically letting
| the death rate get into the double digits to begin with?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| stickfigure wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| > 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > ..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep
| hospitalization rates below capacity.
|
| "Want to buy this vampire repelling rock?"
| monocasa wrote:
| School closings have been shown to be one of the most
| effective government interventions.
|
| https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338
| whatthesmack wrote:
| > ..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.
| monocasa wrote:
| You would be mistaken then. Government interventions like
| lockdowns and school closings were a very good response.
|
| https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338
| curryst wrote:
| > ..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.
| monocasa wrote:
| The IFR they're quoting is the death rate per infection.
|
| It's not infections/population.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
| wisty wrote:
| Covid barely spreads through children. It spreads through
| travel and large gathering of adults.
| [deleted]
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| Here's direct evidence: school closures are one of the
| most effective government interventions.
|
| https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338
|
| What I have an issue with is people stating crazy stuff
| like "covid barely spreads through children" even though
| they have no real data on it.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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).
| testesttest wrote:
| > compared with what children had to deal with during
| previous social upheavals (world wars, and the like).
|
| You could say that for all of covid. https://en.m.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogen...
| mancerayder wrote:
| >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.
| hiram112 wrote:
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| It's also worth pointing out that at sample sizes like that
| (2), you don't have a sample. You have an anomaly at best.
| monocasa wrote:
| You have a scale for comparing absolute rates, which is
| the gist of what the parent is talking about, I think.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article/113/10/707/5857612
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| Tell that to Italy. Their death rate was in the double
| digits when hospital capacity was overrun.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| When compared to people tested positive, when they only
| had resources to test the people they were pretty sure
| were infected.
|
| Their death rate in April was the same as the peak of the
| second wave in December.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The denominator for that calculation was not "all COVID
| infections".
| monocasa wrote:
| They had already instituted a heavy lockdown by April.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Not sure what that has to do with anything, but if
| April's not it, when was that double digit death rate?
| monocasa wrote:
| End of March. Which is what led to the extremely heavy
| lockdowns in April.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| So, end of March was 900 people dying a day, December was
| 1000 people dying in a day.
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
|
| This is kind of my point.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| 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.
| jansan wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-
| patie...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _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 normal
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-
| seasons.html
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| swayvil wrote:
| Yet Florida is perfectly ok.
|
| Obviously this "8 digit body count" concept is a load of that
| which makes the grass grow green.
| monocasa wrote:
| I would use many phrases to describe Florida's covid
| response, but "perfectly ok" would not be one of them.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
| dehrmann wrote:
| The big, open question is why Florida and California have
| seen such similar case rates despite radically different
| approaches.
| nostrademons wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| whatthesmack wrote:
| 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.
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| it's okay because only one in one thousand people have died
| umanwizard wrote:
| 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.
| jansan wrote:
| While on average, every year roughly 1 in 85 people dies.
| umanwizard wrote:
| The death rate from Covid is not double digits in Italy or
| any other country. Where are your numbers coming from?
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Link sources.
|
| Prediction: you are quoting the meaningless CFR number
| rather than reliable estimates of IFR.
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| makomk wrote:
| 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.)
| gravypod wrote:
| 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.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| This was my experience growing up. I was suicidal by fourth
| grade. I was told by the school consular it was my fault that
| I was being bullied and was feeling bad about myself.
|
| 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.
| xondono wrote:
| 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.
| john_moscow wrote:
| 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.
| hintymad wrote:
| 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.
| onethought wrote:
| 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
| rcpt wrote:
| Having one or both parents spend the rest of their lives
| suffering from a chronic illness isn't exactly great for kids
| either.
| standardUser wrote:
| "Rest of their lives" is a pretty bold and, frankly, made-up
| thing to say about an illness that has barely existed for a
| year.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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_
|
| [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-
| effects....
| standardUser wrote:
| 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.
| rcpt wrote:
| Large fractions of people sick with SARS 1 in 2003 are
| still dealing with it.
| [deleted]
| lettergram wrote:
| It's not the whole country.
|
| 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.
| sillyconesally wrote:
| Your comment will be flagged and removed. You cannot be this
| open minded and critical of the lockdown religion.
| monocasa wrote:
| The teachers I know have been working harder under lockdown
| than they did during in person.
| scurvy wrote:
| There's often a large disconnect between teacher's union
| leadership and membership. Probably not unlike most union
| compositions in the US.
| monocasa wrote:
| I don't follow in context. How would union leadership be
| avoiding work by reopening schools?
| sjg007 wrote:
| 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.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Good luck paying for 5 years of lockdowns!
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| "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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| How is any of that relevant to a pandemic and isolation?
| 13415 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| plk8nn wrote:
| Is it social isolation?
|
| 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
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.rapidtests.org/
| superflit wrote:
| That was the reason I decided to go in debt to pay for private
| schools.
|
| 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.
| axiolite wrote:
| 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.
| superflit wrote:
| It is not like I sent him to live inside the school.
|
| 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_.
| roadbeats wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.savethechildren.net/news/almost-10-million-child...
| ern wrote:
| 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.
| permo-w wrote:
| This is what happens when you institutionalise children
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| Are you sure it's the lockdown and not only that the lockdown
| makes you more aware of the danger of the virus?
| pragmatic8 wrote:
| Well, if the person is healthy and young, I can't imagine why
| it'd be the latter.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I had a fairly mild case of Covid, with some consequences
| (heart extrasystoles, muscle twitching) that are almost
| resolved by now.
|
| What messes with me is the missing human contact in person.
| Skype/Zoom just isn't enough.
| croes wrote:
| 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."
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > 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.
| anoncake wrote:
| Your quote doesn't say anything about probabilities, so
| it does not support your argument.
| moooo99 wrote:
| 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.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| 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.
| jjcon wrote:
| 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.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| 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.
| orangecat wrote:
| _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%.
| [deleted]
| barney54 wrote:
| Why won't you be able to see these people the same way again?
| Your comment seems like you are prejudging people without
| providing a reason to do so.
| [deleted]
| primitivesuave wrote:
| 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.
| decafninja wrote:
| I empathize with this so much.
|
| 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.
| _Microft wrote:
| I have a similar experience.
|
| 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.
| mrfusion wrote:
| 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
| mynameishere wrote:
| 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.
|
| But multiplication is hard.
| 1experience wrote:
| And you aren't even considering the effects on developing
| countries
|
| 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...
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| 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?
| 1experience wrote:
| Please tell me where are all these deaths in Sweden, Belarus,
| Brazil, Florida...
|
| 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
| croes wrote:
| Ask yourself, what's the bigger trauma for you. Your
| partner dies of COVID-19, you can't see your parents for a
| year.
| soupbowl wrote:
| COVID is not a death sentence for the majority of people
| that get it.
| croes wrote:
| Neither is the lockdown
| 1experience wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| 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?
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| > 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 :(
|
| [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.
| christkv wrote:
| 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.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > 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.
| christkv wrote:
| 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.
| onethought wrote:
| Australia's lockdown policies seem to have worked a treat
| barney54 wrote:
| 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.
| d6e wrote:
| 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.
| christkv wrote:
| 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.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| 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.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| 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.
| christkv wrote:
| 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.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| > All viruses either die out or become endemic.
|
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2021/b117-va
| riant-li...
|
| [1]: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/03
| /03/scie...
|
| [2]: https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n597
|
| [3]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-
| briefings/202...
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| 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"
| Izkata wrote:
| Not just schools, in general if you look at infection/death
| rates you wouldn't be able to guess if a country/state(US)
| was locked down or open.
| koolba wrote:
| 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.
| taurath wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| 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?
|
| https://www.browardschools.com/backtoschool
| koolba wrote:
| All but three districts were open in September and those
| were open for children for in person learning a month
| later: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/os-
| prem-ne-op...
| optimiz3 wrote:
| 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.
|
| There has been zero leadership here.
| jjcon wrote:
| > COVID does worse in warmer climates
|
| 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.
| optimiz3 wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > > COVID does worse in warmer climates
|
| > 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.
| WalterGR wrote:
| _California and Texas have been doing poorly compared to
| Florida_
|
| That is simply not true. California has had fewer cases
| per capita, fewer deaths per capital, and more tests per
| capita.
|
| https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
| offby37years wrote:
| California COVID death rate: 0.146%
|
| Florida COVID death rate: 0.155%
|
| These numbers are statistically tied.
|
| Yet, FL's economy is open, kids are in school, Disney World
| entertaining tourists.
|
| CA's business are closed & kids are depressed and falling
| behind.
|
| (Bad) leadership matters.
| thesausageking wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/25/undercounting-
| covid-19-d...
|
| https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-florida-
| coron...
|
| https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2020.3
| 061...
| redisman wrote:
| Interesting claims. How do you know FL economy and kids
| depression is doing so much better than CA?
| [deleted]
| jacob2484 wrote:
| Unemployment rates for one. But now, numbers are skewed
| because we printed billions of dollars to bail out
| California.
| WalterGR wrote:
| _we printed billions of dollars to bail out California._
|
| Do you have a (non-opinion piece) citation for this from
| a reputable source?
| thenaturalist wrote:
| The rates seem to be indeed quite similar, but what are
| your sources for these numbers? A simple Google search
| [0, 1] yields
|
| California: 57.501 deaths, 3.641.664 cases (= 1.58%)
|
| [0] https://g.co/kgs/kooiXn
|
| Florida: 32.712 deaths, 2.004.354 cases (= 1.63%)
|
| [1] https://g.co/kgs/Mrh3NR
|
| Total number of cases to total state population is just
| shy of 10% in both cases.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.wftv.com/news/local/facing-3-billion-
| shortfall-l...
|
| [1] https://apnews.com/article/gavin-newsom-california-
| coronavir...
| rajin444 wrote:
| Will you adjust your priors after seeing death rates
| between California and Florida are roughly the same?
| valuearb wrote:
| My kids were never happier when being schooled remotely. Me on
| the other hand...
| runjake wrote:
| 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.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| 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.
| bko wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's a second-order effect of not prioritizing school
| reopenings. Lockdowns aren't all-or-nothing.
| crummy wrote:
| Right. We should have closed restaurants, bars, whatever _so_
| we could keep schools open.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| We were stuck waiting a year while the President used the
| pandemic only for personal in profiteering and to harm
| political opponents.
| anoncake wrote:
| Our species has evolved to deal with deaths. Social
| isolation goes against human nature, it's a lot more
| harmful than any pandemic.
| croes wrote:
| Single deaths not mass deaths. And it's social distancing
| not isolation. The whole lockdown nobody I know was
| isolated even if in quarantine.
| croes wrote:
| BTW it's not social but physical distancing. You can be
| as social as you want, just not so much physical
| contacts.
| matz1 wrote:
| No, we shouldn't have lockdown in the first place, keep
| everything open. Adopt measure that doesn't involve
| lockdown.
| jansan wrote:
| This is debatable, but it is common sense that it shoud
| have been the target. And for somne reason it wasn't.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| 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
| monocasa wrote:
| > 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.
| _Gyan_ wrote:
| From
|
| Association between living with children and outcomes
| from covid-19: OpenSAFELY cohort study of 12 million
| adults in England
|
| https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n628
|
| " _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;"
| monocasa wrote:
| From the UK, where they've closed schools pretty much
| universally across the country.
|
| Yes, the slight immunobump from being exposed to pretty
| much every year's influenza outweighs being next to one
| of the most socially isolated groups.
|
| That doesn't mean that if they repoened you wouldn't see
| the opposite.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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".
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Matt Yglesias wrote an interesting (non-paywalled) piece
| about this: https://www.slowboring.com/p/school-closure
|
| > 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.
| lupire wrote:
| Why can't CA bail out restaurants? Because they are
| afraid to raise taxes on tech billionaires who made a
| fortune during the pandemic?
| easton wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Why can't CA bail out restaurants?
|
| 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.)
| axiolite wrote:
| > 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:
|
| https://www.sba.gov/funding-
| programs/loans/covid-19-relief-o...
|
| https://ilsr.org/information-on-covid-19-small-business-
| assi...
|
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| There's a lot of data that small business overwhelmingly
| didn't get that stimulus; they were just the excuse, but
| systematically missed out on it.
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/the-stimulus-
| money...
| EVdotIO wrote:
| 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.
| DC1350 wrote:
| 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.
| ilikedthatone wrote:
| 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 ...
| DC1350 wrote:
| 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
| klyrs wrote:
| 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?
| dnndev wrote:
| 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.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| For my me personally, school was a cause of mental anguish.
| carapace wrote:
| Me too. It was a huge PITA, a sick joke.
|
| 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.
| genericacct wrote:
| I suspect a non student control group would show similar
| cratering.
| decafninja wrote:
| Disclaimer: I am not a parent.
|
| 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.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| 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?
| dehrmann wrote:
| > some kids might be having a hard time not meeting and playing
| with their friends
|
| Probably most kids. Socializing is one of the most important
| things you learn in school.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
|
| That's just my two cents though.
| sjg007 wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Teachers' unions saw an opening and they took it. The fact that
| private schools in SF have been open for so long safely with no
| public schools open should tell you all you need to know.
|
| I, for one, love it. When you're on this side of the wealth
| spectrum, an expanding gap lifts your ship and sinks the other
| guy.
|
| And I'm all for the pursuit of sheer greed. If other people want
| to hamstring themselves for whatever reason, I'm not going to
| stop them.
|
| Party on, dudes. Live your worst life.
| zamzoid wrote:
| Wow. Maybe you didn't intend this (or maybe you're just
| trolling??) but this comment comes across as one of the most
| callous and tone-deaf things I have ever read. Like, Ebenezer
| Scrooge level. Families who can't afford to send their children
| to private schools are clearly negatively affected by this
| through basically no fault of their own, and I cannot
| understand why you choose applaud that. Maybe consider deleting
| this.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Okay, I can see how it comes across. Personally, I want
| America to succeed and I think closing schools is bad for
| that because we're damaging people who are far more precious
| than us (the next generation).
|
| But people get what people vote for. They _could_ smash the
| teaching unions if they want to. But they could choose not
| to.
|
| So if you choose a path I warned you about and it hurts you,
| I'm happy to find some positivity in that by insulating
| myself from you and prospering by not walking off a bridge
| like you.
| superflit wrote:
| You are right and you are being down voted for speaking the
| truth.
| Tossito190 wrote:
| 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.
| zamzoid wrote:
| 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.
| clcaev wrote:
| There is an interesting article about how race affects the
| decision to go back to school.
|
| https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/why-black-paren...
| rayiner wrote:
| 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%).
| kortilla wrote:
| 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.
| testesttest wrote:
| Not accurate in my community and no data. It is an opinion
| piece extrapolating from a few examples.
| II2II wrote:
| 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.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| > as a part of a swift and hopefully short response.
|
| 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.
| II2II wrote:
| 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.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| 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.
| redisman wrote:
| Also how much of this metric is from the school closure vs the
| rest of society dealing with covid?
| stareatgoats wrote:
| >I don't doubt there have been issues
|
| 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.
| 09y234aka wrote:
| the youngest have never mattered, the old steal from them all the
| same.
| sillyconesally wrote:
| As linked elsewhere in the thread, the US Govt. spends 3 times
| more money (about $615B USD) on those aged 65+ compared to
| about $175B on children.
| https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/23x...
| It is reassuring that we have Bill Gates' leadership in the
| vaccine debate. He correctly points out that expensive medical
| costs associated with the elderly could be cut so that we can
| keep teachers employed.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03MZG9vK0W8 This is the right
| attitude, as unfortunately these elderly are mostly white,
| racist and a net negative to society.
| perardi wrote:
| 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.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| When times become hard, people turn to drugs, depression and
| religion. The wave will die down with the virus.
| alibarber wrote:
| 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.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| 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.
| cpach wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| Long lasting effect like COVID. Just google long COVID
| kids.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| 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.
| xenihn wrote:
| 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.
| Tossito190 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| anewaccount2021 wrote:
| I predict California will also be full remote for the coming
| school year as well.
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