One could assume it's nearly all unvaxxed COVID deaths or lockdown induced suicides depending upon political sports team affiliation.
Breakdowns would be appreciated for the less dogmatically inclined though.
Personally I wonder if it isnt heavily driven by hospital backlogs. I know people who have essentially died from medical neglect caused by systemic overload. This is hard to "count" though.
I know people who died from medical neglect in fear of systemic overload. Got sent out of the not-at-capacity ER early without concern for what the patient was feeling because of the fear of needing a bed. Died at her home. Triage is a lost concept.
Edit: their death was not COVID related, nor did they have COVID
I’m curious how much of this increase can be attributed to suicide? If I recall correctly, suicide rates for children ages 5-11 are up dramatically from pre-pandemic levels.* I can only imagine that the increase is the same or even worse for ages 18 to 64.
We’ve tortured and hindered the youth of this country to protect folks age 60+.
Children are struggling academically due to a lost 1+ year of proper education. The reading gap in 1st-3rd grade is real and documented. And the lingering mental damage … well, we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s not looking good.
*to be fair, they were increasing at a worrying rate year over year pre-pandemic
Imagine a society which is not able to handle a pandemic in a better way than just to throw people age 60+ under the bus.
Interesting thought.
For what do we optimize actually? For the working class? For human lives?
You know what would have not been an issue if we would talk to each other and would find a global compromise independent of capitalism?
A pandemic.
We would just take our knowledge and resources we have and transform it temporarily in a setup in were its not an issue to work from home, work less for a year or two, have family and friend clusters were subgroups can visit each other without spreading virusus, high vaccine rate, masks everywere.
I don't mind discussing IF our society should throw older people under the bus, but only if we accept that we did a lot of stuff shitty before and we could do it much better.
But also lets not forget one thing: This is a pandemic. Our first pandemic in a modern time, unique to our society.
We have handled it much better than 100 years ago.
The Danish authorities assume the "Omicron" variant will be the "natural vaccine" which will end the pandemic in about 2 months [1]. As far as I'm concerned it has been over since the vaccines became available for anyone who cares to take them. While they have proven to be ineffective with regard to getting and spreading SARS2 they did seem to be moderately effective in reducing the need for hospitalisation for the earlier strains - up to and including "Delta". This does not seem to be true for the "Omicron" variant but fortunately this variant seems to require far fewer hospitalisations and have a much lower mortality. Knowing that natural immunity is both far stronger as well as longer-lasting compared to the temporary boost in antibodies caused by recent vaccination and seeing how "Omicron" infects vaccinated and unvaccinated alike this seems like a done deal. As far as I'm concerned, it is.
That's my hope as well, but I think it's mostly wishful thinking.
Best case: Omicron gives everyone a baseline resistance, so that future mutations are more like the flu.
We'll get new mutations a couple times a year. Some will contact them, some won't. It will be fatal to those with comorbidities (just like the flu)
I don't think covid is ever actually going away, though. It is just too contagious.
"End of the pandemic" does not mean the end of the disease, it means it will become endemic and as such something we have to deal with. Influenza is endemic, it takes many lives yet society abides. The same will be true for SARS2 until it either dies out by itself (like SARS1 did) or some generic coronavirus vaccine takes out this class of pathogen once and for all.
>For what do we optimize actually? For the working class? For human lives?
I'm not 100% sure of the answer to this, and I don't think anyone is, but as a resident of Melbourne, AU (world's most locked down city!), I can categorically state that destroying the quality of life for an entire society just so that a small percentage of vulnerable people can prolong their life for a few years is absolutely not the answer.
It's not even a young vs. old thing at this stage. People aged 60+ (who were already lonely before) have suffered just the same as we have and I'm sure would have a very similar opinion to the rest of society.
> that a small percentage of vulnerable people can prolong their life for a few years
What do you even mean? The population-weighted infection fatality rate is somewhere around 0.8% (for vanilla SARS-CoV-2), can you even imagine what that would mean in terms of deaths alone? We are not even talking about hospitalisations or severe cases or chronic disease, or the collapse of critical infrastructure and the economy.
I don't get this "Covid is just a problem for the old and weak" rhetoric, is that the society you want to live in?
Is 0.8% of people dying really worse than 100% of people enduring two years of crushing misery?
Call it cold, but I'd rather live in a society where we throw the old and weak under the bus rather than make life unbearable for all.
Hell, I suspect even if I were old and weak I would have rather died surrounded by my family and friends in 2020 instead of gone through two years of isolation only to die alone in 2022.
Not to mention having all the gyms shut and not being able to do many of the things that help to keep people physically and mentally healthy as well.
It seems that there's been little effort or focus on how to cater for increased hospitalisations, or problem solving on how to ensure there are enough people trained to handle covid patients.
The only tools available are vaccines and lockdowns...
The rules are ridiculous - for example you have to wear a mask stepping inside a bar but as soon as you are seated you don't need one. You have to wear a mask to check in at the gym but as soon as you are in the gym you don't need one.
Everyone needs to check in with a QR code... for what reason I really don't know (assuming it's "just incase" a new variant emerges, but half suspect it's just a psychological trick to remind is of covid 24/7)...
I get that a small percentage of people get very sick and may die (and we should protect those people) but the way things are is just ridiculous and is a bunch of red tape that at this stage I don't think is really helping to do anything except keep people obedient and in constant fear.
I’m imagining a post Covid world where contingents that were the most affected by Covid lockdowns (restaurant workers for example) harboring immense bitterness and resentment about it all. I wouldn’t go around telling people we wfh’d home the whole time or worse, those that lucked into prolonged government stimulus (not everyone needed it, but got it).
Just imagine it would be okay to stay at home as a restaurant worker, not fearing to lose your job and knowing that nothing changes in a bad way when the pandemic is over.
We can easily afford this as a society. We just don't.
You're right that we should keep searching for better solutions, but I don't think it helps to trivialize the problem or the steps people have taken to date.
While we're all painfully aware of the shortcomings in various responses, it's disingenuous to say that the pandemic would "not have been an issue if we would talk to each other". Similarly, "just" taking our cumulative knowledge and resources and having WFH, vaccination, and all the other adjustments work instantly and without issue is a high bar; I've personally worked on projects over the past two years trying to help smooth the transition on a small subset or those adjustments, and it's not an easy undertaking.
To have a reasonable discussion of the tradeoffs of various measures, it requires acknowledgement of the challenges and drawbacks of the alternatives. I agree we've got far better capabilities than 100 years ago and we should have these discussions, but thought it might help to shift your framing a bit.
I'm not anti mask but people are way too dismissive of the damage done to children who have to wear masks all the time. Especially when it comes to socializing, learning facial cues, and being able to express emotions.
We really have dropped the ball and turned valid concerns by parents into a political finger pointing shit storm.
Gonna go with everyone. Every day I see some parent go "my kids have no problem wearing masks".
Thing is I realized recently that as a kid with a bpd mother one reason I grew up as a shy nerdy shut in was because any time I did anything it would cause a giant fight with my mom so I just gave up and stopped trying. Now I realize it fucked me up in multiple ways being like that. I imagine it's much the same with a lot of these kids. They have zero agency to go against it.
Regardless of how you or I feel about the usefulness of masks this is a side benefit to many parents and schools. Schools want kids that just bend over and take whatever flavor of capricious BS they're producing on a given week. Few parents want kids with agency and critical thinking skills because you can't just lie to them to get them to do what you want. Everyone says they want critical thinking but look at their actions.
Honestly one reason I don't want kids is that I don't want to deal with schools, parents, and the whole infrastructure of child rearing in today's day. Even five generations ago you had 5 kids and just fed and clothed them..maybe sent them to school if you could but generally they helped you out at home and then went to work and got married and became largely independent by age 20. In today's era the entire concept of raising children is exhausting and not really sustainable. Society wants you to put in literally 10x the amount of hours into child rearing in contrast to what my great grandmother had to deal with.
And everyone acts so insanely self righteous and judgy about it.
> I'm not anti mask but people are way too dismissive of the damage done to children who have to wear masks all the time
I take you don't have children? I have, and they do regularly socialize, and none of the families I've ever talked with, mentioned any form of damage due to this.
Social isolation during the first wave - that was a real problem; there was concrete suffering.
I actually have an alternative take on this: if society is not able to do something as simple as consistently use a mask, there's no hope to do something that requires concrete sacrifice as mitigating global warming.
> I actually have an alternative take on this: if society is not able to do something as simple as consistently use a mask, there's no hope to do something that requires concrete sacrifice as mitigating global warming.
Let me frame this positively: Covid as a whole did increase the chances that humanity will actually do something as against global warming, and actually survive the next 200 years or so.
Honestly compared to the 1918 pandemic we have actually done an amazing job with covid. Not only have we gotten a new vaccine out for it in record time but mask wearing is also really high by per capita percentages in the vast majority of the world.
I really am baffled that people don't see things with more positivity.
Conditional on these advances in science, technology, and medicine it's quite obvious how badly many Western democratic societies have done (that's not to say there aren't also positive outcomes, and it varies a lot by nation).
Take the US as an example: Would you have guessed that the 'most pandemically prepared country' would lead Western democratic nations in terms of death count? How ready do you view US society to combat future threats like climate change, an even deadlier pandemic, or non-democratic state actors? What does that mean for the Western model of democracy?
The effects of climate change are mostly natural disasters that come and go as normal which the United States deals with regularly. That entire argument is tired and irrelevant. The United States for all it's faults is also likely keeping the most accurate statistics on the whole thing and gave the the mRNA vaccine to the world.
2 out of 3 of what you brought up has nothing to do with covid.
History doesn't stop just cause there's a pandemic.
This argument works both ways: parents who wanted to politicize mask wearing made a far bigger deal of it and over-exaggerated the impacts. I know a fair number of people with small children, including those born during the pandemic, and the only ones who allegedly had problems uncoincidentally have parents who get their “news” from Facebook or Fox. Everyone else barely even mentions it because it’s no harder than all of the other things kids have to get used to, like toilet training or the oppression of wearing clothes.
Eh I'm on the opposite side of it seeing my future mother in law raise a 5 to 7 year old through this whole thing and at first she liked it cause he's more of an introverted quiet kid so it seemed like it helped him at first but then we started to see small social issues with him start to come out and likely due to him basically missing his entire first and second grade. Kid is probably irrevocable fucked up now. The mask thing is just more icing on the cake.
Working from home the most I had to wear the mask is flying somewhere and I fucking haaaate it. And I say this as a trans person that enjoyed for once not being misgendered in public. The truth is me and my very liberal girlfriend are fucking over it and we don't care anymore. We're triple vaxed and fuck it. We've been going clubbing at maskless down town LA parties for months now and haven't caught it yet.
The fact that kids have to do more than I do as an adult is baffling to me. I legitimately feel bad for them.
My wife is a teacher, and we know a bunch of other teachers, and I'd like to say please do not give up on this kid — they're more resilient than adults often think, and family support is really important, even if it might not seem like it's doing anything now. The problems you described sound like they're more due to other pandemic-related disruption rather than wearing a mask and whatever you can do to be there for him is going to make a difference.
> The fact that kids have to do more than I do as an adult is baffling to me. I legitimately feel bad for them.
I completely agree. Our national policy has basically been to write off children to keep high-risk businesses open for adults and I would in a heartbeat take a blanket vaccination mandate and other risk mitigation measures for high-risk businesses explicitly based on the goal of keeping normal schooling open (e.g. link high-risk activities like indoor dining or drinking being open to community spread rates).
> Especially when it comes to socializing, learning facial cues, and being able to express emotions.
Maybe if we raise a generation that doesn't rely on facial cues to recognize emotions as much we'll end up with a society that's more open and understanding to people who struggle with interpreting facial and other non-verbal cues for other reasons, such as autism?
Mental damage vs brain damage, take your pick. Personally I pick the one that doesn't kill their grandparents, seeing as childhood trauma also causes cognitive impairment.
Difficult in this case; some of those anti-vaccine people are terrible about misreading and misquoting. You may have seen statements recently along the lines of "high vaccination rates don't lead to improvement, study says" that started out as something more like "dropping lockdowns and other measurements in favour of high vaccination rates doesn't lead to improvement" in the study.
It's not black and white; a lost year of education is a terrible thing on its own in terms of future prospects - but kids need to be around their peers for reasons that go beyond academic success. Lengthy periods of isolation are normally considered a punishment for a reason. It's not supposed to last indefinitely or be a constant threat based on factors they can't control, and appeals to the greater good can only be justified for so long (and only when the effects of the restrictions put in place are actually effective and not overridden by other harms they may cause).
> Mental damage vs brain damage, take your pick. Personally I pick the one that doesn't kill their grandparents, seeing as childhood trauma also causes cognitive impairment.
I think this is overly simplistic, and doesn't consider the relative rates of both.
Besides - The goal of managing Covid shouldn't be to reduce total cognitive impairment, it should be to maximise the total quality of life for everyone. For me, forcing kids to wear a mask throughout school is a significant quality of life reduction, as well as loss of high-quality education which will no doubt continue to drive inequality in the years ahead.
Boy is this editorialized, did you even read your own study?
> Conclusions and Relevance In this study, many children and adolescents hospitalized for COVID-19 or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children had neurologic involvement, mostly transient symptoms. A range of life-threatening and fatal neurologic conditions associated with COVID-19 infrequently occurred. Effects on long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes are unknown.
1. this is among survivors of severe covid. The cohort of under 21's that get severe covid in the first place is extremely low.
2. symptoms are described as "mostly transient".
i.e you're not getting brain damage from casual covid, which is 99.9% of cases.
Even your lancet study shows for non-hospitalization cases, the "cognitive decline" is under SD=0.1 which is arguably within margin of error.
Concerns about the efficacy of cognitive aptitude tests notwithstanding. [0]
There will be a future reckoning with the paranoid pandemic policies, unfortunately [1] this will mostly likely ignore those who put them in place. I happen to live in Sweden where we've been mostly spared in this regard but even the relatively mild measures have left there mark on my children, mostly my oldest (now 17) daughter. She was forced online for a few months which markedly lowered her results. It ended with me more or less home-schooling her (something which is forbidden in Sweden) to get her back on track - not to mention to get her out of bed in the morning.
[1] unfortunately because this means there is no disincentive against future regulatory misbehaviour
"The Evidence Summary from the Department for Education (DfE) accepts the harm inflicted by face masks in class. It cites research showing that:
‘80 per cent of pupils reported that wearing a face covering made it difficult to communicate, and more than half (55 per cent) felt wearing one made learning more difficult’
‘Face coverings may have physical side effects and impair face identification, verbal and non-verbal communication between teacher and learner.’
‘Almost all secondary leaders and teachers (94 per cent) thought that wearing face coverings has made communication between teachers and students more difficult, with 59 per cent saying it has made it a lot more difficult.’"
And also in the article:
"The DfE study of 123 schools says that in schools with masks, Covid absences fell to 3 per cent, from 5.3 per cent — a 2.3 per cent drop. In schools that did not have masks — 1,192 of them — there was a 1.7 per cent drop: a small difference of 0.6 percentage points.
As the DfE accepts, the 123-school analysis is 'non-peer reviewed' and 'shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow-up period'. So the results are within the margin of error, in a study that has not been properly assessed in the standard academic way."
> We’ve tortured and hindered the youth of this country to protect folks age 60+.
I don't understand how this extreme rhetoric will lead anywhere. It distracts from the actual discussion about how to distribute the burden of the pandemic, and is dishonest in two ways:
a) It makes a whole lot of difference whether you lose one year in education vs. actually dying,
b) It frames the pandemic as a problem of the folks 60+, when instead the collapse of health systems and economies harms all members of society.
It is certainly a possibility that as a society, we have under-estimated the burden on children, and time will tell. However, in every single jurisdiction I know schools were the last public system to be locked down, and the first to re-open.
a) This is a false dichotomy, it isn't a binary choice between education and death. 0-17 accounts for 678 *total covid deaths* [0]
b) This IS a problem of people 60+ and 50+. Collapse affects everyone, but the vast majority of deaths and hospitalizations are among individuals in this age cohort (~93%). If hospitals collapse it won't be because the kids went to school.
The goal of this rhetoric should be to guide everyone towards consensus so we can plan better for the next time around. If it sounds extreme, maybe that's because it should be treated with urgency.
> We’ve tortured and hindered the youth of this country to protect folks age 60+.
Have we become so mentally weak that the last 2 years have been considered "torture"?
> Children are struggling academically due to a lost 1+ year of proper education.
The worst kept secret is that schools in the US are little more than babysitting services.
> And the lingering mental damage … well, we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s not looking good.
My son is a type 1 diabetic and we pulled him out of school a month before schools went virtual and he hasn't been back. He hasn't played with his friends in 18 months. He's still a happy go lucky kid. Kids are adaptable. It's not all doom and gloom.
Suicides were actually down. This is entirely due to Covid deaths. This effect is so large you can’t minimize it, and some of these kids who didn’t die will have lifelong issues because of Covid. It doesn’t only kill old people.
And it always amazes me that people are just now caring about kids education. Our school systems have been demonstrably backsliding for 20 years. The ranks of teachers are thinner than ever, and the pay/benefits are so low teachers aren’t going to risk their lives to go into the classroom — many were already working second jobs, which made it really easy to stop teaching.
You want to improve kids education? Invest in the school systems, because a big part of the reason the pandemic was so negative for kids’ learning is that we had starved our public school systems of resources for decades before anyone ever got sick.
There was much fear about a rise in suicide among children during any sort of lockdown, but actual evidence suggests that suicide rates fell rather than rising.[0]
One might infer that school itself drives suicide among children, or one might say only that correlation should not be confused with causation, and we don't know why the suicide rate fell during the pandemic.
What one should never do, of course, is to claim that suicides are up dramatically when they aren't.
Anecdotally, although my 11-year-old daughter has been back at school since September of last year, she loves wearing masks at school and in public generally. She plays volleyball while wearing a mask. Not all children are struggling or feel tortured or hindered.
no, it isn't. Don't go around spreading FUD, the article makes no mention of causation for the deaths, extrapolating that to an entirely hypothetical (and unfounded) vaccine induced immunodeficiency is unjustified.
You could compare it to countries like new zealand who are very highly vaccinated, but which have had essentially zero covid cases over the past 2 years, and which you see no change in death rates from previous years. It is quite clearly not the vaccine.
A lot of nonsense is being aired by a lot of people when they open their mouths. Even more so when they keep it closed and instead type messages to the internet on a keyboard. Until I see a proper study on that “hypothesis”, I would treat it the same as the hypothesis that the vaccines make you magnetic or turn you into a 5G modem (at least that might help with the current chip shortage)
I'd be curious if this is a correlation is not causation issue. Are those who vaccinated more typically those who also followed lockdown and social distancing laws/recommendations, while those who remain unvaccinated were more likely to continue their normal lives through all of this? In other words, could it be that staying in your room and only leaving for necessities meant you weren't exposed to day-to-day illnesses and as a result might now be worse off than someone who was?
There isn’t much detail on the cause of those increased deaths. Worth noting from both articles is that insurance companies don’t pay out for suicide deaths, and there is mention of hospitals filled with other ailments instead of just COVID. So what’s left is the assumption that people of working age are dying from other causes that increase insurance payouts for the working age bracket. Could be worse health, more sedentary lifestyle, increased rate of cancers, heart disease, trauma caused by activities done to reduce boredom, car accidents, alcohol and drug abuse etc. If you have data sources on recent % of causes of death, that may shed more light on the underlying problem than speculation.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadBreakdowns would be appreciated for the less dogmatically inclined though.
Personally I wonder if it isnt heavily driven by hospital backlogs. I know people who have essentially died from medical neglect caused by systemic overload. This is hard to "count" though.
There were less suicides during lockdowns then outside of them.
Edit: their death was not COVID related, nor did they have COVID
As a result COVID tore through care homes, giving the UK one of the highest death rates.
We’ve tortured and hindered the youth of this country to protect folks age 60+.
Children are struggling academically due to a lost 1+ year of proper education. The reading gap in 1st-3rd grade is real and documented. And the lingering mental damage … well, we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s not looking good.
*to be fair, they were increasing at a worrying rate year over year pre-pandemic
Interesting thought.
For what do we optimize actually? For the working class? For human lives?
You know what would have not been an issue if we would talk to each other and would find a global compromise independent of capitalism?
A pandemic.
We would just take our knowledge and resources we have and transform it temporarily in a setup in were its not an issue to work from home, work less for a year or two, have family and friend clusters were subgroups can visit each other without spreading virusus, high vaccine rate, masks everywere.
I don't mind discussing IF our society should throw older people under the bus, but only if we accept that we did a lot of stuff shitty before and we could do it much better.
But also lets not forget one thing: This is a pandemic. Our first pandemic in a modern time, unique to our society.
We have handled it much better than 100 years ago.
Is that so? The pandemic seems far from over. I think it is a little early to draw any conclusions.
[1] https://www.dn.se/varlden/danmark-omikron-kan-fa-slut-pa-pan...
Best case: Omicron gives everyone a baseline resistance, so that future mutations are more like the flu. We'll get new mutations a couple times a year. Some will contact them, some won't. It will be fatal to those with comorbidities (just like the flu)
I don't think covid is ever actually going away, though. It is just too contagious.
We have 'only' 5 Million covid death while the estimate for spanish flu is at 50 Million.
1920 we had way less people, way less/none cheap air travel, fast transport.
We have never created a vaccine that fast and responded on such a global level together.
Have we?
Especially given that it's much much less lethal than the one 100 years ago.
I'm not 100% sure of the answer to this, and I don't think anyone is, but as a resident of Melbourne, AU (world's most locked down city!), I can categorically state that destroying the quality of life for an entire society just so that a small percentage of vulnerable people can prolong their life for a few years is absolutely not the answer.
It's not even a young vs. old thing at this stage. People aged 60+ (who were already lonely before) have suffered just the same as we have and I'm sure would have a very similar opinion to the rest of society.
What do you even mean? The population-weighted infection fatality rate is somewhere around 0.8% (for vanilla SARS-CoV-2), can you even imagine what that would mean in terms of deaths alone? We are not even talking about hospitalisations or severe cases or chronic disease, or the collapse of critical infrastructure and the economy.
I don't get this "Covid is just a problem for the old and weak" rhetoric, is that the society you want to live in?
Call it cold, but I'd rather live in a society where we throw the old and weak under the bus rather than make life unbearable for all.
Hell, I suspect even if I were old and weak I would have rather died surrounded by my family and friends in 2020 instead of gone through two years of isolation only to die alone in 2022.
It seems that there's been little effort or focus on how to cater for increased hospitalisations, or problem solving on how to ensure there are enough people trained to handle covid patients.
The only tools available are vaccines and lockdowns...
The rules are ridiculous - for example you have to wear a mask stepping inside a bar but as soon as you are seated you don't need one. You have to wear a mask to check in at the gym but as soon as you are in the gym you don't need one.
Everyone needs to check in with a QR code... for what reason I really don't know (assuming it's "just incase" a new variant emerges, but half suspect it's just a psychological trick to remind is of covid 24/7)...
I get that a small percentage of people get very sick and may die (and we should protect those people) but the way things are is just ridiculous and is a bunch of red tape that at this stage I don't think is really helping to do anything except keep people obedient and in constant fear.
Just imagine it would be okay to stay at home as a restaurant worker, not fearing to lose your job and knowing that nothing changes in a bad way when the pandemic is over.
We can easily afford this as a society. We just don't.
While we're all painfully aware of the shortcomings in various responses, it's disingenuous to say that the pandemic would "not have been an issue if we would talk to each other". Similarly, "just" taking our cumulative knowledge and resources and having WFH, vaccination, and all the other adjustments work instantly and without issue is a high bar; I've personally worked on projects over the past two years trying to help smooth the transition on a small subset or those adjustments, and it's not an easy undertaking.
To have a reasonable discussion of the tradeoffs of various measures, it requires acknowledgement of the challenges and drawbacks of the alternatives. I agree we've got far better capabilities than 100 years ago and we should have these discussions, but thought it might help to shift your framing a bit.
We really have dropped the ball and turned valid concerns by parents into a political finger pointing shit storm.
Who's "we?" Politicians?
Thing is I realized recently that as a kid with a bpd mother one reason I grew up as a shy nerdy shut in was because any time I did anything it would cause a giant fight with my mom so I just gave up and stopped trying. Now I realize it fucked me up in multiple ways being like that. I imagine it's much the same with a lot of these kids. They have zero agency to go against it.
Regardless of how you or I feel about the usefulness of masks this is a side benefit to many parents and schools. Schools want kids that just bend over and take whatever flavor of capricious BS they're producing on a given week. Few parents want kids with agency and critical thinking skills because you can't just lie to them to get them to do what you want. Everyone says they want critical thinking but look at their actions.
And everyone acts so insanely self righteous and judgy about it.
I take you don't have children? I have, and they do regularly socialize, and none of the families I've ever talked with, mentioned any form of damage due to this.
Social isolation during the first wave - that was a real problem; there was concrete suffering.
I actually have an alternative take on this: if society is not able to do something as simple as consistently use a mask, there's no hope to do something that requires concrete sacrifice as mitigating global warming.
Who cares about society? Focus on your kid.
Let me frame this positively: Covid as a whole did increase the chances that humanity will actually do something as against global warming, and actually survive the next 200 years or so.
I really am baffled that people don't see things with more positivity.
Take the US as an example: Would you have guessed that the 'most pandemically prepared country' would lead Western democratic nations in terms of death count? How ready do you view US society to combat future threats like climate change, an even deadlier pandemic, or non-democratic state actors? What does that mean for the Western model of democracy?
2 out of 3 of what you brought up has nothing to do with covid.
History doesn't stop just cause there's a pandemic.
Working from home the most I had to wear the mask is flying somewhere and I fucking haaaate it. And I say this as a trans person that enjoyed for once not being misgendered in public. The truth is me and my very liberal girlfriend are fucking over it and we don't care anymore. We're triple vaxed and fuck it. We've been going clubbing at maskless down town LA parties for months now and haven't caught it yet.
The fact that kids have to do more than I do as an adult is baffling to me. I legitimately feel bad for them.
My wife is a teacher, and we know a bunch of other teachers, and I'd like to say please do not give up on this kid — they're more resilient than adults often think, and family support is really important, even if it might not seem like it's doing anything now. The problems you described sound like they're more due to other pandemic-related disruption rather than wearing a mask and whatever you can do to be there for him is going to make a difference.
> The fact that kids have to do more than I do as an adult is baffling to me. I legitimately feel bad for them.
I completely agree. Our national policy has basically been to write off children to keep high-risk businesses open for adults and I would in a heartbeat take a blanket vaccination mandate and other risk mitigation measures for high-risk businesses explicitly based on the goal of keeping normal schooling open (e.g. link high-risk activities like indoor dining or drinking being open to community spread rates).
Maybe if we raise a generation that doesn't rely on facial cues to recognize emotions as much we'll end up with a society that's more open and understanding to people who struggle with interpreting facial and other non-verbal cues for other reasons, such as autism?
Covid-19 causes brain damage in children: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...
Even non-hospitalized covid-19 cases cause measurable cognitive impairment: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
Mental damage vs brain damage, take your pick. Personally I pick the one that doesn't kill their grandparents, seeing as childhood trauma also causes cognitive impairment.
One can discuss (dis)advantages of certain approaches without entirely discounting them.
Depressing.
I think this is overly simplistic, and doesn't consider the relative rates of both.
Besides - The goal of managing Covid shouldn't be to reduce total cognitive impairment, it should be to maximise the total quality of life for everyone. For me, forcing kids to wear a mask throughout school is a significant quality of life reduction, as well as loss of high-quality education which will no doubt continue to drive inequality in the years ahead.
There is no 'right' and 'wrong' approach here.
Boy is this editorialized, did you even read your own study?
> Conclusions and Relevance In this study, many children and adolescents hospitalized for COVID-19 or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children had neurologic involvement, mostly transient symptoms. A range of life-threatening and fatal neurologic conditions associated with COVID-19 infrequently occurred. Effects on long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes are unknown.
1. this is among survivors of severe covid. The cohort of under 21's that get severe covid in the first place is extremely low.
2. symptoms are described as "mostly transient".
i.e you're not getting brain damage from casual covid, which is 99.9% of cases.
Even your lancet study shows for non-hospitalization cases, the "cognitive decline" is under SD=0.1 which is arguably within margin of error.
Concerns about the efficacy of cognitive aptitude tests notwithstanding. [0]
[0] https://www.apa.org/monitor/dec03/measuring
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234
[1] unfortunately because this means there is no disincentive against future regulatory misbehaviour
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/masks-in-schools-how-con...
"The Evidence Summary from the Department for Education (DfE) accepts the harm inflicted by face masks in class. It cites research showing that:
‘80 per cent of pupils reported that wearing a face covering made it difficult to communicate, and more than half (55 per cent) felt wearing one made learning more difficult’
‘Face coverings may have physical side effects and impair face identification, verbal and non-verbal communication between teacher and learner.’
‘Almost all secondary leaders and teachers (94 per cent) thought that wearing face coverings has made communication between teachers and students more difficult, with 59 per cent saying it has made it a lot more difficult.’"
And also in the article:
"The DfE study of 123 schools says that in schools with masks, Covid absences fell to 3 per cent, from 5.3 per cent — a 2.3 per cent drop. In schools that did not have masks — 1,192 of them — there was a 1.7 per cent drop: a small difference of 0.6 percentage points.
As the DfE accepts, the 123-school analysis is 'non-peer reviewed' and 'shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow-up period'. So the results are within the margin of error, in a study that has not been properly assessed in the standard academic way."
I don't understand how this extreme rhetoric will lead anywhere. It distracts from the actual discussion about how to distribute the burden of the pandemic, and is dishonest in two ways:
a) It makes a whole lot of difference whether you lose one year in education vs. actually dying,
b) It frames the pandemic as a problem of the folks 60+, when instead the collapse of health systems and economies harms all members of society.
It is certainly a possibility that as a society, we have under-estimated the burden on children, and time will tell. However, in every single jurisdiction I know schools were the last public system to be locked down, and the first to re-open.
b) This IS a problem of people 60+ and 50+. Collapse affects everyone, but the vast majority of deaths and hospitalizations are among individuals in this age cohort (~93%). If hospitals collapse it won't be because the kids went to school.
The goal of this rhetoric should be to guide everyone towards consensus so we can plan better for the next time around. If it sounds extreme, maybe that's because it should be treated with urgency.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
So what do you think about the ‘if you go to school you’re killing grandma’ rhetoric?
Have we become so mentally weak that the last 2 years have been considered "torture"?
> Children are struggling academically due to a lost 1+ year of proper education.
The worst kept secret is that schools in the US are little more than babysitting services.
> And the lingering mental damage … well, we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s not looking good.
My son is a type 1 diabetic and we pulled him out of school a month before schools went virtual and he hasn't been back. He hasn't played with his friends in 18 months. He's still a happy go lucky kid. Kids are adaptable. It's not all doom and gloom.
And it always amazes me that people are just now caring about kids education. Our school systems have been demonstrably backsliding for 20 years. The ranks of teachers are thinner than ever, and the pay/benefits are so low teachers aren’t going to risk their lives to go into the classroom — many were already working second jobs, which made it really easy to stop teaching.
You want to improve kids education? Invest in the school systems, because a big part of the reason the pandemic was so negative for kids’ learning is that we had starved our public school systems of resources for decades before anyone ever got sick.
One might infer that school itself drives suicide among children, or one might say only that correlation should not be confused with causation, and we don't know why the suicide rate fell during the pandemic.
What one should never do, of course, is to claim that suicides are up dramatically when they aren't.
Anecdotally, although my 11-year-old daughter has been back at school since September of last year, she loves wearing masks at school and in public generally. She plays volleyball while wearing a mask. Not all children are struggling or feel tortured or hindered.
0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8110323/
There isn’t much detail on the cause of those increased deaths. Worth noting from both articles is that insurance companies don’t pay out for suicide deaths, and there is mention of hospitals filled with other ailments instead of just COVID. So what’s left is the assumption that people of working age are dying from other causes that increase insurance payouts for the working age bracket. Could be worse health, more sedentary lifestyle, increased rate of cancers, heart disease, trauma caused by activities done to reduce boredom, car accidents, alcohol and drug abuse etc. If you have data sources on recent % of causes of death, that may shed more light on the underlying problem than speculation.