[HN Gopher] No Way to Grow Up
___________________________________________________________________
No Way to Grow Up
Author : testingathing
Score : 126 points
Date : 2022-01-04 21:28 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| paxys wrote:
| When I was a kid there was a big earthquake where I lived and my
| life was disrupted for a few weeks. Many decades later I _still_
| have latent trauma from that incident.
|
| Children involved in situations like accidents, wars, disasters
| and abuse need years and sometimes lifelong therapy to deal with
| it. We are kidding ourselves if we think that the long list of
| behavioral changes we are starting to see in kids is simply
| attributed to keeping them at home, and when school reopens they
| will magically get back to normal. They have been exposed to non-
| stop disruption, illness, death and uncertainty for two years
| now.
|
| Whether the covid pandemic goes away or not, a mental health one
| is upon us soon.
| WalterBright wrote:
| No doubt some are long term traumatized by this. But a brief
| look at history shows that such things happening during
| childhood are _normal_ , not exceptional. If most people need
| therapy to get back to normal, the human race would have died
| out.
|
| In my grandparents' generation, it was _normal_ for a family to
| lose a third of their children before adulthood.
|
| The US has had devastating epidemics before, like the 1918 flu,
| and the polio epidemics.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _When I was a kid there was a big earthquake where I lived
| and my life was disrupted for a few weeks. Many decades later I
| still have latent trauma from that incident._
|
| From the earthquake, or from the disruption?
|
| It's an important distinction in the COVID case. Are kids being
| traumatized by having to attend school via Zoom, or are they
| being traumatized by living through a global pandemic?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| I don't think the distinction is important in any scenario.
| It's always the disruption.
|
| Put another way: if an earthquake happens, but nobody notices
| except the Richter scale, does it impact anyone? Of course
| it's not the _pandemic_ term itself, it 's the first-,
| second-, third-order effects of covid and the term
| _pandemic_. Zoom school, masks, vaccines, media coverage,
| political shifts, fights, worrying about family members
| getting sick (possibly dying), seeing your friends less,
| fewer /smaller gatherings, longer periods of isolation, etc.
| zepto wrote:
| > Children involved in situations like accidents, wars,
| disasters and abuse need years and sometimes lifelong therapy
| to deal with it.
|
| These situations have been very common throughout history, and
| are still prevalent in many developing nations, and yet somehow
| those countries generally have _better_ mental health, at least
| by metrics of depression and anxiety.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| The last half century or so was not as calm as all these rose-
| colored articles would have you believe -- at least on a global
| scale. Even still, we need to realign our expectations to a world
| that's going to be much more turbulent than we'd like.
| titanomachy wrote:
| This article is about the impact on kids of partially shutting
| down schools for two years due to covid. What part of the
| article is your comment responding to?
| Ergo19 wrote:
| Are there places in the US which have had schools partially
| shut down for two years? I have not heard of anywhere being
| remote for more than 1 year.
| [deleted]
| oh_sigh wrote:
| The article mentions increased suicide rates, especially among
| adolescent females, as part of "The Toll", but the study linked
| to specifically says: "(6). Finally, this analysis was not
| designed to determine whether a causal link existed between these
| trends and the COVID-19 pandemic."
| stathibus wrote:
| I don't think its much of a stretch. Besides, what are you
| going to do, ask them why they committed suicide?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I also don't think it is _much_ of a stretch, but I think it
| is too much of a stretch to include in reporting from the
| NYT. I 'm not familiar with "THE MORNING NEWSLETTER", maybe
| it is more of an opinion section than actual journalism from
| the NYT?
|
| Why not blame Tik-Tok, which rapidly increased in popularity
| among 12-17 year old females at pretty much the same time
| COVID was hitting?
| raunak wrote:
| Yeah, strikes me as one of those things that should be
| accepted without that "link" - like really, the suicide rate
| just went up that much, and we're gonna assume it was _not_
| related to COVID/quarantine?
|
| Feels like it should be accepted.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I wonder how all those kids with long covid will view decisions
| to physically disable them potentially for life so the state
| could force their parents to work.
|
| I wonder how kids mental health copes with the idea that adults
| will intentionally expose them and others to a deadly disease
| with no mitigations to make money.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > kids with long covid ... physically disable them potentially
| for life
|
| At what point do we decide that totally evidence-free
| hysterical claims like this are as much misinformation as anti-
| vaxx posting is?
| swayvil wrote:
| tomrod wrote:
| Typically, reliable authority. Though the organization as a
| whole is often targeted by right-wing propaganda outlets much
| more critically than right-wing propaganda is denounced by the
| rest of society.
|
| This article is a hashing out of concerns parents or others
| have regarding children and how they've experienced COVID-19 as
| well as associate non-pharmaceutical interventions. Dynamic
| control problems are hard, even more so when agents (people)
| are autonomous like public health contexts. Time-consistent
| preferences expressed in policy are also hard, as there is
| incentive to bend rules in the very moments those policies are
| written for.
| swayvil wrote:
| That was rhetorical. I'm saying that our population is
| largely composed of capricious bugbrains.
| tomrod wrote:
| Rhetorical questions are not default mode on a forum
| designed for discussion and Q&A.
|
| Our population isn't composed of capricious bug brains, for
| the record, we are human with typical gray matter and
| studies have found that people are generally consistent.
| babyblueblanket wrote:
| Are there any teachers who can really talk about solutions to the
| problems covid presents? Rather seriously, of what I can find
| anecdotally online (as I know no teachers IRL) that even trying
| to have in-person classes haven't really helped, because parents
| pull their kids out of class or a significant chunk misses school
| due to being out sick/quarantine and now the entire lesson plan
| is screwed up.
| runako wrote:
| There's a lot of talk about this in parent's groups on FB.
| Basically, parents all want their kids in school as daycare.
| Schools have logistics problems due to
| students/teachers/support staff/bus drivers/etc. being sick. I
| think if some parents could enlist the police to drag sick
| teachers to school, they would do that.
|
| In my area, schools are combining classes across grade levels
| because teachers are sick but parents are demanding that
| schools be open. This accomplishes the daycare aspect of
| school, but to pretend it's about enhancing learning is
| fanciful.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| The person you're responding to asked only about teachers
| though.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| The parents don't create that pressure though. Americans use
| school as childcare because we don't have adequate childcare.
| People don't have leave, paid or otherwise, to take care of
| their children at home, but they must go to work anyway.
|
| This is a labor issue, not an "individuals are mean" problem.
| stathibus wrote:
| In 30 years these kids will be running the world. I can only hope
| they'll understand why this happened to them, so the next
| generation will be a bit wiser.
| hstan4 wrote:
| Yeah I really hope they'll learn to understand the infinite
| wisdom our government had during covid.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Unfortunately, through advances in medical technology, the 70
| year olds who run the world right now will probably still be
| running the world in 30 years.
| mhb wrote:
| Hope sure. But any optimism should be tempered by observing how
| adults who had less coddled childhoods 30 years ago are raising
| their kids today. What have they understood?
| artursapek wrote:
| None of the people worried about "Omicron" could explain what the
| hell it is
| yupper32 wrote:
| Honest question: At what point do we give up?
|
| I'm in the Bay Area and it'll be coming up on 2 years soon of
| what basically amounts to a social shut down.
|
| -- Many social groups are just not getting together anymore,
| including most of mine.
|
| -- Concerts, sporting events, parties of most sizes, crowded
| bars/clubs just seem off the table at this point.
|
| -- Masks for the majority of it, which makes gym going and
| working out, especially cardio, uncomfortable enough to not
| bother.
|
| -- It's been so long that I've now never met, in person, anyone
| on my team at work.
|
| Like yeah, technically we're not shut down. Technically you can
| do most things with masks/vaxxes. But for a lot of us things are
| still essentially shut down. Especially the social aspects.
|
| At what point can we give up? If at 4 years in with Variant
| #3242, are we still going to be doing what we're doing now?
| There's zero sign that this thing is going to stop any time soon.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I read somewhere that a pandemic becomes an endemic when we
| agree on how many people we can accept dying each year.
| amelius wrote:
| If kids have to save the grown ups, then they have a strong
| bargaining position to e.g. fix the climate ASAP.
|
| => Why don't they use it?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| In what way do kids have any sort of bargaining position? They
| hold no power to use as bargaining. They do no control whether
| or how they go to school.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Because they have neither power nor authority. First, kids
| don't have a vote so they really have no direct influence in a
| democratic/representative republic system. Second, they have no
| money, so they have limited ability to exert financial/economic
| pressure.
|
| What are they supposed to bargain with? They are (as a
| population, individuals may be exceptions to this)
| fundamentally dependent upon the adult population for their
| existence. Food, shelter, clothing, transportation is all (in
| the US) provided by adults for the vast majority of kids, at
| least below age 16, and still the majority for most 16/17 year
| olds. If we permit 18-20 year olds to still be counted as
| "kids", they are still poor and a very small voting bloc that
| is notorious for not showing up to vote, even if they are
| increasingly independent.
| amelius wrote:
| The main problem I see is that kids are not (yet) organized.
|
| There is a pandemic going on. Kids can "vote" with their
| behavior.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > There is a pandemic going on. Kids can "vote" with their
| behavior.
|
| So, is your suggestion the kids should get organized to
| deliberately spread or threaten to spread COVID in order to
| control adult behavior?
| monkeybutton wrote:
| So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being
| reinvented for the better or do school boards just keep bumbling
| along like before?
|
| Do zero-tolerance policies really work? Why are students falling
| behind in mathematics compared to the rest of the world? Does
| overloading of take home work produce better test scores, or does
| it just consume free time and stress out kids? Are teachers ever
| going to be paid more? What about later start times for high
| schools?
|
| There's so many things that can be questioned.
| bmitc wrote:
| I think COVID is the inflection point that puts the U.S. behind
| compared to other countries who have a more collective culture
| and less extremism in politics.
|
| I have seen nearly every aspect of life in the U.S. take a
| major hit. Nearly no one cares about anything, and the attitude
| of taking care of me myself and I seems rampant.
|
| I have been worried about children since day one, from social
| disorders to education. We have several generations that
| basically missed out on two years of schooling from pre-school
| through university levels.
| xwdv wrote:
| It is obvious what will happen. The education system will
| crumble, inequality will grow, and to make up for having a
| poorly educated work force we will adopt more automation or AI-
| assisted tasks with very structured workflows to reduce
| cognitive requirements. Only elites will be able to afford
| giving their children strong educations and social experiences,
| presumably with other elite children. This will allow some
| children to pursue high status high skill careers while the
| rest must settle for whatever they can grab.
|
| At the same time, children will increasingly grow to be
| emotionally underdeveloped, leading to poor romantic
| relationships filled with toxicity, leaving them perpetually
| unsatisfied with life and cynical of others. Poor quality
| breeding will become rampant and add to the problem.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I was with you until you got to the... breeding... thing.
| 29800795 wrote:
| Your first paragraph is the set-up to the novel Klara and the
| Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I'm reading it right now, so sshhhhH! :)
| tester756 wrote:
| >Only elites will be able to afford giving their children
| strong educations and social experiences
|
| How about learning from the Internet?
| xwdv wrote:
| Doesn't work very well with young children.
| redisman wrote:
| Today I learned how to alt-tab into Minecraft all day
| while still getting marked as attending!
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It works for 10-year-olds, and I'd say it works for
| younger children too. The problem is needing supervision
| (curiosity leads to doing some very harmful things, and
| that's not even considering bouts of malice...).
|
| If children want to learn, and they _can_ learn, there 's
| no stopping them (except with video games, television,
| toys, a field, a garden, a paved area, a woodland, the
| fact that books make a loud noise every time you close
| them, other children... but apart from the first two, I
| see no problem with that).
| ianbicking wrote:
| "So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system
| being reinvented for the better"
|
| I don't really see how this would happen, or even how they
| connect. Covid is keeping out schools from even being schools.
| It's displaying the flaws in our larger system, but it doesn't
| really speak at all to what's good or bad in the classroom
| itself. EXCEPT that we've had a natural experiment where kids
| are removed from the classroom, and it turns out classrooms are
| pretty good educational environments compared to remote school
| or ad hoc home school! If anything this indicates we don't need
| to reinvent our schools, we just need to reinvent our school
| HVAC.
|
| (We also aren't reinventing school HVAC, which is disappointing
| because of all the options in front of us that's about the
| easiest.)
| 29800795 wrote:
| >So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system
| being reinvented for the better or do school boards just keep
| bumbling along like before?
|
| The type of conservatives that wield the most power in the US
| Senate are skeptical of public education. This is their golden
| chance to finally dismantle it, creating a patchwork of
| federally funded religious private schools.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| No. You have 1st world America and 3rd world America.
|
| The 1st world kids will be fine. Some of them will struggle and
| carry some emotional baggage forward.
|
| The ones who have nothing will have a little less. Society will
| hold them in as much regard as they do now, maybe a little less
| if helping them requires more taxes.
| bsder wrote:
| Except that real _solutions_ never seem to be on the table.
|
| For example, how about atomizing school into pods of smaller
| numbers of students with teachers scattered around the district
| instead of 30+ students per teacher with 1000+ students crammed
| into a building or campus? This would be especially effective for
| the youngest students. And a "Covid Outbreak" would shut down
| less than a dozen students and a teacher for a week or two and be
| done with it.
|
| But, you see, that would take _money_. And everybody likes to
| bitch about education but nobody wants to spend actual cash.
|
| And, by the way, if you think its been bad on kids, the teachers
| have had it bad, too. Unlike the kids, the teachers had a much
| higher probability of dying. And they get the joy of being on the
| frontlines with the anti-vax idiots. Any teachers I know of who
| can exit have been running for the doors.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The schools are funded with rivers of cash. It's simply
| squandered. More money won't help (that's been tried many
| times).
|
| To make schools safe is simple - hold classes outside. It won't
| work everywhere everytime, but it can work enough. It'll work
| fine in California, Arizona, Seattle most of the time, etc.
| joshstrange wrote:
| For the first half of your comment I just kept say "that takes
| money" in my head over and over and then you said it. Pure and
| simple, this comes down to money or rather the lack thereof.
| When I was younger I had heavily considered going into teaching
| until I learned how little they make and how shitty parents are
| to them (not all, but enough to make their jobs hell if they
| want). After the last two years I cannot imagine why anyone
| would go into teaching (or nursing for that matter). Both
| groups bent over backwards (by and large, obviously you are
| going to always have a few duds) to continue to provide the
| best service they could and were treated terribly (and paid
| terribly) in return.
|
| Plenty of people (including some in these comments) want to wax
| poetic about "think of the children" or "the children are our
| future" but I have a hard time those same people are willing to
| put their money where their mouth is. Why we aren't shoveling
| money into education (before the pandemic as well) is
| completely beyond me and that's coming from someone who is
| childless. I'm more than happy to see my taxes go up if the
| money is going towards education.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I'm inquiry: do we have enough educators for that plan?
| [deleted]
| testingathing wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220104193247/https://www.nytime...
|
| https://archive.is/6F3Fp
| sg47 wrote:
| Gun violence in schools has increased so we should be sending
| children to school? There were school shootings before the
| pandemic and there are school shootings now. Nothing has been
| done to address either the mental health issues or access to
| guns.
| zepto wrote:
| What has this got to do with covid? Also, guns have been more
| easily available in the past than they are now.
|
| Access to guns isn't causing the uptick in school shootings. If
| we knew what was causing it, perhaps we could address the
| problem.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| We pretty much do know what causes school shootings though? I
| mean the causes are complex and there is much disagreement
| about which ones contribute what and how much, but the broad
| strokes are known.
|
| The issue is that 1) this information comes from the hn-
| accursed social sciences, 2) people don't like the answers
| and 3) we aren't willing to solve the problem anyway so why
| proselytize it?
| zepto wrote:
| > but the broad strokes are known.
|
| I've rarely seen any broad brush stroke other than 'guns'
| being blamed.
|
| 2) people don't like the answers
|
| Don't they? Or do they simply not agree with the answers.
|
| Social science results are in fact very weak, as is
| constantly being shown.
|
| That is because it's hard to do social science and the
| disciplines are relatively new. The way to improve this is
| not to pretend social science is better than it is, nor is
| it to ignore social science altogether, but to recognize
| its shortcomings and critique it.
|
| > 3) we aren't willing to solve the problem anyway so why
| proselytize it?
|
| Are we not? So we give up and to do something unrelated, in
| the name of solving the problem? That seems even worse.
|
| It doesn't seem like we're going to get rid of guns, so we
| may as well proselytize the real solutions.
| runako wrote:
| I know healthy people not in the "old" age groups who have
| permanent nerve damage from mild cases of unvaccinated (pre-
| vaccine) Covid. We have known from the beginning that Covid
| sometimes causes nerve and/or brain damage (sensory loss) that
| may be permanent. As I am not a virologist any more than the
| author of this piece, I am not comfortable making blanket
| pronouncements like this from TFA:
|
| > For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to
| children in exchange for less harm to adults.
|
| There is already precedent for other acute respiratory infections
| (Scarlet Fever, influenza) causing cardiac damage that persists
| for decades. I don't understand how so many people are willing to
| make conclusions about long-term complications from pediatric
| Covid in the absence of long-term studies.
|
| I also don't understand how one could write about tradeoffs for
| children without mentioning the growing ranks of Covid orphans,
| some of whom will be adrift in our anemic social services system
| for the coming decades. Besides that, losing a parent is one of
| the most traumatic events a child can experience. Discounting to
| zero that trauma given the scale of death in American is not
| doing the reader a service.
| superfrank wrote:
| I'm not sure I like this article. They seems to overstate what
| the sources they link to claim.
|
| For example the article says
|
| > Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce
| Covid cases in most instances.
|
| But when you go to the study they link, it says
|
| > Although school closures reduce the number of contacts children
| have, and may decrease transmission, a study of 12 million adults
| in the UK found no difference in the risk of death from covid-19
| in households with or without children.
|
| There's a big difference between, "You're just as likely to die
| from COVID if you have children" and "Children going to school
| doesn't increase the spread of COVID". The study even points out
| that closing schools "may decrease transmission", but the article
| completely ignores that.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| This is an attempt at manufacturing consensus by making it seem
| like these arguments are coming "from the adults in the room"
| because it's in the NYTimes. They're so good at gaslighting
| their readers (and I say this coming from the left of the NYT,
| not the right).
|
| You'll start to see liberal politicians using these same
| talking points in the coming weeks, guaranteed.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _(and I say this coming from the left of the NYT, not the
| right)_
|
| If politics is one-dimensional, that suggests that there is
| only one (main) political issue. History suggests that
| there's more to politics than one main issue, so what were
| you trying to convey by saying this?
| ajmurmann wrote:
| "You'll start to see liberal politicians using these same
| talking points in the coming weeks, guaranteed." This
| article's position seems to be more in line with the
| Republican's general stance on the pandemic. So isn't it a
| good thing of the left can revise its position?
| wayoutthere wrote:
| It's not the left; it's the biden administration feeding
| meat into the machine. They have absolutely betrayed their
| voter base in favor of their corporate donors and they will
| pay for it in the next election when that base simply
| doesn't show up.
| stathibus wrote:
| Yes its an argument, yes its in a well known newspaper.
| That's not what "manufacturing consensus" means.
| boppo1 wrote:
| >You'll start to see liberal politicians using these same
| talking points in the coming weeks, guaranteed.
|
| Well, there's no federal solution, so we gotta do something
| different, right?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Exactly. The NYTimes is the worst, it's like the
| paternalistic dad-figure of the media.
|
| In this case I think they're right; omicron is a super
| spreading variant that is less lethal and impossible to
| control. Their audience is sick of lockdowns and employers
| are tightening the screws.
| geenew wrote:
| Isn't "may decrease transmission" the operative part of the
| citation?
| _jal wrote:
| There appears to be a weird blind-spot when discussing COVID
| outcomes - anything short of death appears to be discounted or
| ignored. So hospital issues, long COVID, etc. just don't exist,
| so catching it either didn't matter or you're dead.
|
| On a planet where that was true, that sort of reasoning would
| make sense. (As it does if you're trying to encourage other
| people to ignore risks.) What I don't understand is why so many
| people seem to view it that way.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| And also the abnormally high ratio of people who die within 1
| year of catching Covid from other reasons: https://www.medica
| lnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-survivors...
|
| 233% increase in chance of death for people 65+...
| vitro wrote:
| The quora answer [1] by Franklin Veaux to question "How can a
| disease with 1% mortality shut down the United States?"
| explains nicely that it is not binary live/die at all. Mind
| though that this was written in the beginning of the pandemic
| when we didn't have the same information as now, so numbers
| may be imprecise, but the explanation still stands.
|
| https://www.quora.com/How-can-a-disease-with-1-mortality-
| shu...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _What I don 't understand is why so many people seem to
| view it that way._
|
| It's classic minimization. You see it all the time when
| someone is motivated to ignore reality, or is suffering from
| a condition that makes it hard to accept reality. A heroin
| addict might say that shooting heroin isn't a big deal
| because they haven't died from it yet, even if they have a
| history of overdosing.
| nsainsbury wrote:
| I don't think anyone is ignoring long COVID and hospital
| issues. Hospital capacity is discussed front and center daily
| and is the primary justification given for lockdowns.
|
| Also, please see this recent meta-analysis which found that
| when you actually add a control group, most "long COVID"
| symptoms disappear in children. A higher study quality was
| associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms.
|
| Original tweet:
| https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876
|
| Link to study: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S01
| 63-4453(21)005...
| dijonman2 wrote:
| How many hospitalizations are due to covid and how many
| just happen to test positive?
| nsainsbury wrote:
| Appears to be very very common (as high as 2/3 'with'
| covid vs 'for' covid). See: https://twitter.com/MonicaGan
| dhi9/status/1478401273317654528
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It's the human tendency to optimise the quantifiable and
| ignore the unquantified. (The unquantified is often partially
| quantifiable, but that would take _effort_ , and the
| statistics aren't _currently_ on the dashboard...)
|
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
|
| > _When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure._
| zepto wrote:
| > It's the human tendency to optimise the quantifiable and
| ignore the unquantified.
|
| Are you sure that isn't just a modern trend now that we are
| able to quantify so much stuff?
| Talanes wrote:
| Modern society is just the result of countless
| generations of the human tendency to quantify. We just
| have so many things quantified now that our problems tend
| to be more "using the wrong quantifications" rather than
| "not having the right quantifications."
| zepto wrote:
| > Modern society is just the result of countless
| generations of the human tendency to quantify.
|
| Is it? I see no evidence to justify this statement at
| all. Care to show some?
|
| The vast majority of how society is organized seems to
| eschew quantification in favor of descriptive
| qualification. Most laws, and governance, for example are
| formed that way.
|
| The use of metrics in governance has been dramatically
| increasing as our methods of quantification have
| developed, but that is definitely a modern development.
| mhb wrote:
| Fine. What also isn't on the dashboard is the lost QALYs
| which is pretty much the point of TFA.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| You can say the opposite about the other side as well...
| Anything short of eradication (which is impossible) means
| nonstop lockdowns, masking, vaccine mandates and making the
| unvaccinated pariahs.
|
| What I don't understand is why you would shut down schools
| and enforce silly unhelpful mask mandates on them when the
| science shows children do not spread the disease in any
| meaningful way and are not badly affected by it. This is the
| "blind" spot I see.
| datavirtue wrote:
| There is a dangerous level of cognitive dissonance around
| school closures that effects nearly everyone. I have to filter
| arguments by finding out if the people making them have or do
| not have kids in school. People with kids in school just want
| schools open. Teachers and administrators want schools open.
| ...and therefore politicians want schools open.
|
| There are a lot of vested interests that bias toward opening
| schools.
|
| Honestly I do not think we are capable of weighing particulars
| to make a scientific determination. We need policies around
| school closure that are rigidly followed in the course of a
| pandemic.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| >Teachers and administrators want schools open. ...and
| therefore politicians want schools open.
|
| This is just false. The largest teacher unions in the country
| have been pushing school closures. This means many teachers,
| administrators and politicians also want school closures.
|
| Until like the last week politicians have been reluctant to
| even suggest schools reopen
|
| https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-teachers-unions-odds-
| over-20482...
| delecti wrote:
| School closures making it so people in those households are no
| more likely to die of COVID sounds like school closures are
| wildly effective. The most relevant comparison is not
| households with vs without children, but among households with
| children, outcomes with and without school closures.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| I think the article does a good job at looking at this as a
| trade-off. No where in the article do they state outright that
| there is no change to transmission. The main point is to ask
| the question "Is avoiding the damage to those that are older
| worth the damage to those that are younger?"
| boppo1 wrote:
| Seconding @wayouthere. I saw this sentence:
|
| > They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim.
|
| And thought, "Right, yeah, it's the NYT." They're not fake news
| like Breitbart, but I seem to catch them 'pushing the envelope'
| on the truth a lot. And I like/agree with a fair amount of what
| they publish.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Hm, I found David Leonhardt's summary of that article to be
| fairly sound - it even opens with "School closures have been
| implemented internationally with insufficient evidence for
| their role in minimising covid-19 transmission."
|
| "[A]ccumulating evidence shows that teachers and school staff
| are not at higher risk of hospital admission or death from
| covid-19 compared with other workers" quote seems most
| pertinent. Other quotes that certainly back the paraphrase
| include "teacher absence decreased in tier 3 regions during the
| November lockdown despite schools remaining open" and "Teacher
| absence because of confirmed covid-19 in England was similar in
| primary and secondary schools in the autumn term."
|
| Finally, the "Transmission" section explicitly casts doubt on
| studies that _did_ show a reduction in transmission. Overall,
| "skeptical," as the linked NYT article states, seems dead on.
|
| Were there other sources from the article that you took issue
| with?
| superfrank wrote:
| I actually agree with the summary you provided, but I think
| the article it self way over steps that and I don't think
| their sources back up a lot of the claims they make inside
| the article.
|
| The one I quoted above is the most obvious, but the other two
| things I take issue with are:
|
| 1. They seem to attribute the rising gun violence to covid,
| but when you look at the data they provided on school
| shootings, it's been rising since 2015. The number we're at
| now just looks like a continuation of that trend.
|
| 2. The fact about a third of their sources are just other NYT
| articles written by their colleagues. Chasing down the true
| source behind some of their claims is near impossible since
| it's often multiple levels of people interpreting the data.
| 99_00 wrote:
| You're cherry picking from the study.
|
| >They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim.
|
| With a title like this, I think they are understating what the
| source claims.
|
| Closing schools is not evidence based and harms children
| https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n521
| ajmurmann wrote:
| "For the past two years, large parts of American society have
| decided harming children was an unavoidable side effect of
| Covid-19."
|
| This sentence also implied that there had been consensus about
| what the trade-off is which I don't think everyone would agree
| with. I definitely know some parents who are afraid if their
| children returning to badly ventilated classrooms
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Welcome to link "citations". Journalists use links as a way to
| back up their statements because almost no one will click on a
| the link and even less will actually read it. Link "citations"
| are used a lot.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Yep, between that and twitter "citations" which make me want
| to scream. I don't care what NateDog2244 said on twitter,
| that could be the "reporter" for all I know. You can find
| someone defending/attacking ANY position online so you can
| cherry-pick like crazy.
|
| I'll admit I'm much less likely to follow links when my
| confirmation bias is kicking up into high gear but I've been
| trying to force myself to do it more after I received an
| article from a parent that I knew was full of BS and after
| following the links (the ones that weren't dead) I found the
| studies linked actually refuted the position the original
| article took. For way too much of my life I took "Blue text
| with underline" (or whatever color the style it to) meant
| "fact"/"cited"/"backed up", that couldn't be further from the
| truth.
|
| I encourage everyone to follow links even if you are "sure"
| the article is 100% true, it can be very eye opening. At the
| very least you will get a better understanding.
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| I agree that adults have failed kids during the pandemic, but the
| agenda that this article is pushing is deeply, deeply flawed. The
| consequences the pandemic is having on kids is not due to schools
| being closed, it's due to kids growing up in the middle of a
| society collapsing under the weight of a pandemic.
|
| To argue that we shouldn't have closed schools, or should have
| made things more normal for the kids is to say that our half-
| assed mealy-mouthed nothing of a response to the pandemic didn't
| work, so we should have done even less, tried to spread the virus
| even harder, and that would have made things better. No. What
| would have made things better is a real, collective, and
| effective response to the pandemic. Modeling a real, pro-social,
| collaborative, and reasonable response to the pandemic.
|
| Of course it's not _fair_ that kids are being kept away from
| school while hoards of adults are too obsessed with proving they
| have freedom to consider how to use their freedom to act
| appropriately. It's not fair that they can't get an education,
| but hoards of the unmasked, unvaxxed, and unconcerned can huff
| and puff their way through bars, restaurants, gyms, clubs, and
| every other super spreader event they care to name without a
| concern for the costs of their actions to them or anyone else.
|
| Fair would have been for everyone to do their part, to exercise a
| modicum of self control, and work together to actually contain
| things, keep them to a reasonable level, and then let things get
| back to normal in the ways we can, and have a clear plan for how
| to monitor and react to changes in the future. Fair would be
| everyone working together to make this thing actually be over, at
| least for some periods of time, rather than making the reasonable
| people pay the entire burden for the whims of the hoards of pro-
| plague cultists.
| mithr wrote:
| It's amazing to me that this article presents the "hard choices"
| as mostly "should we trade off harming _children_ against harming
| _adults_? ", rather than "should we trade off _not harming
| anyone_ against _people 's freedom to choose to go about their
| normal lives while unvaccinated_?" and only mentions the
| unvaccinated offhandedly.
|
| It's less that the US has chosen to prioritize adults over
| children and thus children are suffering, and more that the US
| has chosen to prioritize the freedom to be selfish and ignorant
| over _both_ adults _and_ children, and thus _everyone_ is
| suffering. Make vaccination a requirement for (both foreign and)
| domestic flights. Make it a requirement for attending any public
| event. Make it a requirement for eating at any restaurant. Make
| it a requirement for parents who want to send their kids to
| school. Make a process whereby those relatively few adults who
| legitimately _can 't_ be vaccinated due to e.g. medical reasons
| have an exception (other countries have already done so). Make
| the willfully unvaccinated have to stay at home because society
| is closed to those who care more about making a point about
| "freedom" than about harming everyone else in it.
| divbzero wrote:
| I wonder if this pandemic will change our views on the pace of
| vaccine testing in children. There might be a willingness to
| begin testing in children sooner though I doubt we would ever
| test in children at the same time as adults.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I am very thankful that my youngest graduated high school in
| 2020. The last couple of months were screwed up, but there wasn't
| much real education lost by then; most seniors pretty much check
| out after Spring Break anyway.
|
| I really feel for the kids who are younger. The effects of this
| are going to be with us for decades.
| [deleted]
| cm2187 wrote:
| It always surprises that left-leaning politicians and media
| were the most fervent advocates of school closures, because it
| has disproportionately affected kids from the poorest
| backgrounds. What I see around me is that educated couples
| invested the time to make up for the lack of school education
| (and were typically home working themselves), so those kids
| will probably do OK, other kids were left on their own all day.
|
| I think it is more of a relative problem than an absolute
| problem.
| swayvil wrote:
| I see kids getting off the schoolbus wearing masks. My nephew
| got a facial rash. My local food-coop has a sign up front
| cheerfully ordering everybody to wear a mask, with big hipster
| love and aggressive smile. It's messed up.
| throwaway75787 wrote:
| Seeing the lower face is important to reading emotion. The
| masks muffle speech as well. I wonder if children, especially
| in that critical 2-4 year-old period, will have stunted
| language and interpersonal skills. It's not right.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| So personal anecdote our two year old is behind on speech,
| we had someone come in to evaluate him and he mentioned
| that he has been seeing it a lot, citing that because so
| many people are wearing masks, and the kids weren't
| spending more time around other people it had created a
| trend he had noticed.
| crummy wrote:
| what was your nephews mask made out of? that sounds very
| unusual
| swayvil wrote:
| It's actually pretty common.
| halostatue wrote:
| Highly unlikely. My wife taught children who came out of
| Sarajevo in the mid-90s and many of them have gone on to excel
| in life.
|
| Children are resilient. What is _hurting_ them is not the
| school closures, but the panic and uncertainty that some people
| have put around this.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Decades? I missed 3 months of 4th grade. The teacher said I
| should be stuck back in 3rd because 4th grade had moved along
| so quickly. My mom said no, and put me in the 4th grade class
| around Christmastime.
|
| I wasn't a day behind. The class had not advanced at all.
|
| But I'm sure the pandemic will be _blamed_ for school
| unachievement for decades. It 's a godsend to the school
| industrial complex.
| criddell wrote:
| Did your kid go on to college? My two kids did and it's a
| pretty lousy experience. Classes are mostly online still,
| cafeterias are take out only, socialization opportunities are
| mostly gone.
| tester756 wrote:
| My last year of higher edu was remote and I really loved it
| in 80%
|
| Finally I didn't have to waste time on commute and it was way
| easier to ignore doubtful profs/useless courses and focus on
| the right things.
|
| but yea, things may be harder if you don't know people you're
| studying with
| WalterBright wrote:
| Why did you take useless classes? Colleges give students
| great leeway in course selection.
| tester756 wrote:
| (not US)
|
| I couldn't
|
| I could only take "specialisation" - a few courses at the
| last year or something like that.
|
| It could be software engineering / cybersecurity /
| something else
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yes. One was on-campus, and it wasn't ideal but he did OK
| with it. The other was all online and it didn't go well. He's
| taking time off now (working, not sitting idle) until he can
| be fully in-class, on campus.
| divbzero wrote:
| On campus interactions may not be strictly needed for book
| learning but they are such a big part of the college
| experience in general.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > The effects of this are going to be with us for decades.
|
| Unlikely. The evidence from kids who get sick enough to miss a
| lot of school is that at worst it takes three years for them to
| be indistinguishable from those with uninterrupted school
| attendance. Even unstructured homeschoolers, who have little to
| no explicit instruction of any kind, are only on average a
| grade level behind average children[1]. The last historically
| comparable school closures, for the 1918 flu pandemic, had _no
| detectable long run effects_ [2].
|
| [1] The Impact of Schooling on Academic Achievement: Evidence
| From Homeschooled and Traditionally Schooled Students
|
| http://zoleerjemeer.nl/files/1313/9109/4391/The_Impact_of_Sc...
|
| [2]School Closures During the 1918 Flu Pandemic
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w28246
| [deleted]
| librarianscott wrote:
| You can't have a years-long pandemic without consequences, good
| and bad. My state of Texas has had schools open almost all of
| this time--and we're not doing better than the other states.
| Where are all the folks in the United States who say that parents
| are the best teachers of their children, that home-schooling
| should rule the day, that the best care comes from families? That
| would imply that children would be better than ever, right? They
| will never believe that it takes a village.
| [deleted]
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I'm not in the US, but the home-schooling comparison is not
| fair from my Australian experience of it.
|
| In home schooling a parent teaches the kids, full time, with no
| pressure from their day job.
|
| In pandemic home schooling, the parent probably is trying to do
| a job at the same time (or do a shift to suit or something?) is
| stressed out, and is not setting the curriculum - instead the
| teacher is setting the day's agenda via a zoom call or two, and
| the kids have to follow the exercises after. Some of these
| exercises may not make sense to the parents.
|
| The parents don't get any advance "teachers notes" or inkling
| of what is coming, the exercises appear and if the kid is stuck
| you need to figure out how to help them.
|
| In summary pandemic remote schooling is not home schooling for
| 2 reasons. One is the parents probably have their main job to
| do. Two is the parents are not teaching, they are at best a
| teachers assistant who is badly prepped.
| bmitc wrote:
| Why are parents being expected to teach at all during remote
| education? Just because someone's kids are home doesn't mean
| they need to start contributing to the workplace. Why is it
| the other way around?
| sanedigital wrote:
| You have your groups backwards. Those of us who homeschool (or
| whose children attend small, alternative private schools)
| understand fully that it takes a village. That's why we went to
| great pains to keep that village active, pandemic or no
| pandemic. Our specific community has accepted the additional
| risk to us adults in order to keep some level of normalcy for
| our children.
|
| This article is about the other kids. The kindergartners who
| haven't seen a teacher's face in 24 months. The grade schoolers
| forced to eat outside in the cold. The high schoolers who
| unofficially "dropped out" when their schools closed and will
| never return to receive their diploma. Those kids have suffered
| greatly in the name of reducing risk to adults.
| ctyc wrote:
| So Perfectly said. We are in the exact same situation with
| our children. I would happily accept a nasty bout of COVID
| (and did so last week in fact!) in exchange for letting my
| children experience a proper childhood, complete with
| friends, education and experiences.
| javagram wrote:
| Pandemic homeschooling is definitely not homeschooling at its
| best.
|
| Homeschooling by choice has a great academic record with
| students doing well on standardized exams and in college. Kids
| who were sent home for "virtual school" on the other hand have
| a lot of learning loss on average.
|
| Especially when parents still had to work and just put their
| kid in front of a TV, that's not home schooling.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Parents aren't home-schooling... they're trying to keep working
| full-time while their kids sit on the computer and try to learn
| over zoom. There's no comparison.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Too little, too late NY Times. I won't forgive you.
| Ergo19 wrote:
| Were you a subscriber and you cancelled your subscription? Or
| are you simply withholding future subscriptions?
| artursapek wrote:
| For real. Their front page is still fear mongering "Omicron" to
| people who never try to learn what "Omicron" even is or why
| they should be afraid of it
| abdel_nasser wrote:
| this is horse shit. the overall well-being of children has been
| declining for decades. now it has reached its precipice and
| snobby NYT says its because of the virus. its just a way to
| deflect from the truth which is that we have created a culture
| that enables kids to be shitty. the inmates have been running the
| asylum for a decade plus at our public schools. the environment
| that kids grow up in now is one where nobody is in control of
| what they experience. i remember when facebook first came out and
| i saw all my friends invest into it 100%. nobody ever asked, wait
| a second, isnt this unhealthy? isnt creating a points system for
| socializing a bit unfair to the less popular kids? isnt it sort
| of crazy to give facebook all of this information? i did my part
| and never made an account but nobody else did their part and
| nobody ever asked whether or not it was a good idea to make
| facebook a default entity in the lives of our children. something
| that everyone uses "because" and you cant choose to opt out
| without serious consequences for you social life which is a huge
| deal at that age. that was the contribution of the millennials to
| the the environment for our children. good job! children need an
| environment that is deliberately and thoughtfully controlled. not
| micro-managed, but controlled. soon the damage will be so great
| that even the dumbest people will realize this finally.
| elpakal wrote:
| [RANT]
|
| At this point I've lost faith in my generation, my parents'
| generation, and everything in between and outside of that. I
| don't care what your degree says or does not say. I don't care
| about your credentials. I don't care about your politics.
| Everyone has been wrong. MY YOUNG CHILDREN SHOULD NOT HAVE TO
| CONTINUE WEARING MASKS AT SCHOOL WHEN THEY ARE VACCINATED. That
| is no way to grow up indeed.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Aaaaand there's the consensus manufacturing the NYT is famous
| for.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| > For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to
| children in exchange for less harm to adults.
|
| At first we didn't know how much harm the virus would cause to
| children. But now that we see it is much less dangerous for them
| we shouldn't be preventing them from learning because we are
| afraid of getting sick. The children are the future, and in order
| to secure a positive growth in society it is our obligation to
| give them their very important education.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Chinese deaths stats by age were available from March 2020. It
| is just the media decided to ignore them.
| stathibus wrote:
| Human nature. Harm through inaction is more palatable than
| risky action.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| This cannot be mentioned enough. It's such a weird bias. Just
| repeated again with the bizarre delay of the critical Pfizer
| medication that statement was unethical to not give to the
| control group but ok to delay approval for months.
| [deleted]
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| "Children are our future and you should be prepared to accept
| arbitrary Covid consequences for them" _might_ be a compelling
| argument on an orange web site, but it is not going to be one
| when you present it to over-worked, under-appreciated teachers
| who have families of their own and their futures to worry
| about.
|
| Bringing back pensions and free post-retirement healthcare for
| teachers will back up grandiose statements like yours with
| actions. With the current right-wing thinking in vogue in the
| US, I suspect there is vanishingly little chance of that
| happening.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Hell, increase their current healthcare benefits if they're
| to teach during this crisis.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > The children are the future, and in order to secure a
| positive growth in society it is our obligation to give them
| their very important education.
|
| Great, so just set up a fund to compensate teachers and daycare
| workers who get long covid in order to pay their salary and
| medical expenses for the rest of their lives if they're unable
| to work.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Our taxation system is already set up for these kinds of
| transactions, and we definitely should be putting more money
| into teacher salaries and education.
| datavirtue wrote:
| No we should not. They all get a pension. Do you know how
| much pensions cost? There are people on waiting lists to
| fill teacher positions. The benefits make up for the low
| bank deposit.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| The problem isn't the kids getting sick, it's the adults
| teaching them getting sick and dying. We've treated teachers
| like shit for so long that many are just saying "nope, not
| dying for a job" because they can go make more money doing
| literally anything else. We were scraping the bottom of the
| barrel even before Covid.
|
| If kids education were really a priority, the right time to
| invest was 20 years ago. The system has been broken for a long
| time already.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| This sentiment seems strange in 2022. Vaccines for teachers
| have been widely available for almost a year now.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| > the right time to invest was 20 years ago
|
| The second best time to plant a tree is today
| cardamomo wrote:
| I couldn't agree with you more. Teachers and other school
| workers were not even mentioned in this article.
| FiReaNG3L wrote:
| Counterpoint: at first it was extremely obvious that this virus
| was affecting you harder the older you are, with 60+
| populations starting to be at risk. Nobody thought it was
| harming children.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Before vaccines the major concern was children as a vector
| for spreading it (especially because they were more often
| asymptomatic), anyone with school age kids know how quickly
| they spread illness.
|
| There was some secondary concern of long-term side-effects
| ("long covid") cases in children as well, and I recall some
| talk of MIS-C and Kawasaki disease... but even early on those
| seemed fairly rare.
| woodruffw wrote:
| The reasoning here is flawed: we had early _positive_
| evidence that COVID-19 was particularly dangerous for the
| elderly and those with a variety of medical preconditions. We
| _didn 't_ have positive _or_ negative evidence that children
| _weren 't_ an at-risk group (for any number of reasons: lack
| of case evidence, the fact that children can't be modeled
| medically as adults, etc.).
|
| Instead, we applied the lessons of the common flu[1]:
| children _do_ get more sick from the common flu than young
| and middle-aged adults and so, in light of a novel severe
| respiratory disease, it doesn 't make sense to take chances.
|
| [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm
| aantix wrote:
| >We didn't have positive or negative evidence that children
| weren't an at-risk group
|
| Why aren't the low death rates for the 0-17 cohort enough?
| DennisP wrote:
| Because people are experiencing long-term effects besides
| death.
| nsainsbury wrote:
| Actually, a recent meta-analysis found that when you
| actually add a control group, most of the "long COVID"
| symptoms disappear. Higher quality studies were was
| associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms.
| "Long COVID" appears to be almost entirely an artifact of
| bad science (and bad science reporting)
|
| See https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/147262289315
| 4639876 and https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0
| 163-4453(21)005...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| How good is this data? How does it compare to long term
| effects of other common viral infections?
| throwawayboise wrote:
| But how many, and is it more than other respiratory
| illness?
| woodruffw wrote:
| Because, again, children's health is not accurately
| reflected in adult models. "Kills adults" can be
| correspond to almost anything in children, and telling
| people to bet their children's health on an unknown
| respiratory disease isn't good politics _or_ good public
| health policy.
| civilized wrote:
| No. As the article explains, this uncertainty might explain
| at most a couple months of the initial response. It was
| very obvious, very early, that the risk to children was low
| and did not fit the age profile of the flu. Nearly all the
| debate around closing schools was in regards to their role
| as general transmission hubs (many argued that kids didn't
| even _transmit_ COVID enough to worry about) and the risk
| to teachers. Nobody who was paying attention thought going
| to school was going to kill lots of kids relative to
| historically normal levels of child mortality.
|
| If you're having a hard time remembering how things
| actually played out in 2020, just ask yourself: did you
| hear about pediatric wards filling up with COVID patients?
| No, you did not. You heard about an extremely rare
| multisystem inflammatory disorder and that's about it.
| woodruffw wrote:
| You've performed a very subtle conversational pivot here:
| I didn't assert that COVID _is_ more deadly to children,
| or that public policy was structured around that
| hypothesis. I said that we didn 't know how dangerous it
| was and that, among other things, treating COVID as
| potentially flu-like in young children was a reasonable
| policy.
|
| When it became clear that children weren't dying in large
| numbers from COVID, keeping them out of school throughout
| 2020 because of the transmission theory was (and may
| still be, depending on other circumstances) sufficient
| justification.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Counterpoint: It was extremely obvious that this virus was
| hitting old folks hard because nursing homes were
| concentrating them in recirculated air. It wasn't completely
| obvious that the same thing wouldn't happen in schools.
|
| It should be obvious by now, however.
| floren wrote:
| From the very start children were considered essentially
| immune to COVID. I remember in 2020, well into the pandemic,
| that there was huge news coverage the first time a kid ended
| up hospitalized.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| The audacity. The NYT have been constantly supportive of more
| restrictions and barely asked a single journalistic question with
| regards to if they actually work and the impacts of them. "No Way
| To Grow Up"? You don't say!
|
| Here's a thought with less hot air than the NYT: If Covid doesn't
| impact kids and the vaccine barely moves the needle on
| transmission, how about let them go to school, remove the masks,
| stop jabbing them etc and let them live a normal life. It's
| disgusting what we have done to them and the US seems to be one
| of the worst offenders.
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