add this to the possibly permanent degradation of cognitive function, and we may be witnessing an unprecedented species wide debilitation. I wonder how much this might actually slow us down, imagine an Einstein who never got beyond the clerks job because brain fog stopped his discoveries
Leaded gasoline has been a former experiment in population-wide reduction of intelligence and increase of aggressiveness. Supposedly that affected that 80's, but I am not aware of systematic studies on that.
thx! TIL leaded gasoline was phased out in the 1970s primarily because it clogged catalytic converters needed to end smog, not because of health reasons!
(smog used to be terrible - I lived through the latter half of that period, am I can't even relate to how awful it used to be... friends and I remember walking in midtown Manhattan, blowing our noses and it being black... I can't even imagine pre-1980 let alone pre-1970... https://timeline.com/la-smog-pollution-4ca4bc0cc95d )
Butterfly Effect is not accounted for (how many innovation we would lose are not quantifiable).
Children who never master the basics will grow up to be less productive and to earn less... by 2040 education lost to school closures could cause global gdp to be 0.9% lower than it would otherwise have been—an annual loss of $1.6trn.
The World Bank thinks the disruption could cost children $21trn in earnings over their lifetimes—a sum equivalent to 17% of global gdp today.
Why? We're social beings and it is extremely important for children to be with other children, especially in a setting where not all of them are best friends with each other or family. How else would they learn social skills? You seem to assume that it would be good if school was dispensable, but why would you think that?
Why would you assume the ideal environment for learning social skills is in a school with children interacting primarily with other poorly developed children?
Life experience and growth shouldn't be confined to a standard classroom.
> Why would you assume the ideal environment for learning social skills is in a school with children interacting primarily with other poorly developed children?
No one is saying that. The topic under discussion is that being locked inside with your family probably is very very very far from ideal.
You are projecting. For many families that is indeed the case. There is no one at home to provide either education or motivation for many different reasons
The "in school" part is important here. Children don't have to be in a classroom, but they do need a good teacher, proper resources, etc. for them to learn. Many weren't even getting these basics pre-covid, so when it did hit, they were completely lost.
It's pretty remarkable but from what friends who are parents have told me is that as bad as school can be, remote 'learning' managed to be far worse. The depths of terrible learning environments has truly been plumbed.
This is a false comparison. My SO teaches at a proper virtual school, funded by the state, where the kids outperform students in many brick and mortar schools (on standardized tests).
However, these students & parents both signed up for virtual and are well prepared for what that entails.
The pandemic only shows that poorly-prepared virtual learning is sub-par.
Yes, you're probably right. I should clarify I'm speaking purely about what happened during covid and just aim to illustrate that badly thought out remote is worse than even badly thought out in-person.
I firmly believe remote schooling can work well in a pinch and for long periods of time so long as it's done proactively and the school can lean into it and experiment with it as a fully-fledged alternate learning framework. I think much of the trouble with remote learning in the past couple years, especially in the first world where the resources to do this right should have been available, is attributable to bad planning and political pressures. You had school systems which refused to attempt to plan for remote learning and delayed going remote until half the school was out fighting COVID and the administration had to do a rush job to switch. At which point there was neither time nor money for training, equipment, and personnel to make sure that remote learning succeeded. At which point remote learning was failing so badly that a premature return to the classroom was all but necessary, causing another wave of infections and burning out teachers with terrifying efficiency.
That's because parents were trying to enforce the strict school environment on their child at home, instead of realising kids can learn without being pinned to the desk and certainly won't get way behind in life by not doing strict schooling for a few months.
Could you imagine if your manager at work decided to come to your house for remote work and micro-manage your day for you, in your own home?
Students often find it difficult to understand/express what they find challenging and why, and rely on external motivation. Usually it helps to have peers to work with, and teachers should be assessing and scaffolding for students.
> I think there is something wrong with an attitude that children not in school are apparently unable to learn and develop.
Are people saying that, though? My impression is that the worry is "just" that lots of children learn and develop more poorly if not at school. Not to mention that that's in the case of richer societies and societal strata, where parents can take time out of their day (or pay someone to) focus on their children's development. I suspect the the lack of school may indeed be catastrophic in families where parents work 14 hours a day to make ends meet.
If children are not in school being indoctrinated/babysat/prepared for adulthood then they will whither on the root. Children have no innate curiosity or desire to develop. That is at least the conventional wisdom.
I found it very difficult to teach my kids while they weren’t in school. My wife and I had different “shifts” and I was with them in the mornings. Trying to teach two kids at different levels while I had a two year old crying and causing mischief non stop (and also getting them fed, making sure zoom classes were working, homework was done, etc.) was very challenging. Would’ve been so much easier with a single kid (or without a baby).
Being under effective house arrest makes it a bit tricky. After being released from that, being banned from meeting people outside doesn't make it much easier. Obviously, your lockdown mileage may vary.
Wondering how many people who are commenting here, actually have children themselves.
Because how I see it (as a parent) school closures itself are only the tip of the iceberg...the schools which reopened with harsh mask, social distancing and constant disinfect your hands rules etc..are at least equally as bad for the development of a child
it's easy to see, anyone defending in this thread school closures is someone without children attending school, but there are also enlightened childless people who understand how wrong is it even without having children
> anyone defending in this thread school closures is someone without children attending school
Or like, not seeing everything as black and white. We had to do something because the hospitals were overflowing. When all the hospital beds are full of old covid patients slowly dying, every other person who gets injured is receiving treatment on the floor in the hallway, or not at all. You can have all the nuanced discussion you want about the degree of which any of the controls were implemented, but your position cannot be that we should have done nothing.
What should have happened is everything closes for 2 weeks, the virus dies, and we go back to normal. We should all know who fucked that up.
This is what I mean by framing things as black and white. Why would you make such an incredible claim? How could you possibly support a claim that reducing community spread in schools (where children are around 50% as likely to spread the virus, not 0% [1]) has "zero impact" on community spread outside of schools? How could children at home equally spread covid to other childrens homes as if there were 30 of them wearing poorly fitting masks in a closed room?
> The role of young children in transmission seemed logical to some experts who have been tracking the evolution of the pandemic. “I think what was more surprising was how long the narrative persisted that children weren’t transmitting SARS-CoV-2,” said Sam Scarpino, PhD, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation.
I've been working remotely since the pandemic started. I haven't gotten sick once. Not a cold, flu, covid, strep, bronchitis, nothing, for two and a half years. You get sick from contact with sick people. Reducing your contact with all people reduces your contact with sick people, reducing your likelihood of getting sick, becoming a sick person, and making other people sick. You could, as many do, make the case that we don't need to reduce contact that much, and that closing schools costs more than it returns. You cannot make the case that closing schools does not reduce contact and spread of sickness and death.
My kid was in quarantine like 5 times within 6 weeks, got tested twice a week and guess what, still whole class got it anyway while ruining their education and everybody was fine, it was just big waste of everyone's time - children, teachers and parents.
I'm working from home for many years and guess what who had COVID first in our family, so much for anecdotal experiences.
> You cannot make the case that closing schools does not reduce contact and spread of sickness and death.
Obviously reducing contact reduces contact, but it doesn't mean in real life conditions it somehow reduces spread of sickness, that's just wishfull thinking of people admiring Chinese totalitarians, who implemented Chinese nonsense through this pandemic to democratic societies.
It's a fair point you bring up, but why should only people with kids be able to comment on this (which is unrelated to your main point to boot)? Sure, I can't have the same perspective as a parent, but if there is an experience familiar to everyone from minimally developed countries, it's school: we've all been to it. Even if we don't have kids ourselves we're exposed to family's and friends' kids, and we can extrapolate from our own experience what it might've been like to spend over a whole year being "in school" from our bedrooms and then another without natural human contact.
My nephew was surprised (and extatic) that the ladies in daycare are smiling once they took their masks off, it's obviously unhealthy to not be exposed to facial expressions while learning to be a social primate.
Agree. Just made the point it’s different to judge from hearsay.
Of course you are able to relate, but it’s not the same.
I can relate to somebody with cancer, but as long I don’t have the experience myself it’s “only extrapolate”.
It's hard to explain just how brutal and inhuman the lockdown experience was for those of us with kids. At least, those of us who refused to follow the "new normal" of allowing our kids' lives to be ever-increasingly ruled by phones and tablets.
The times I have spoken up in the past have not gone well for me (and almost entirely, it was speaking to people without kids who tell me that "lockdowns aren't so bad" after they've been out cycling all day). There were all of the obvious retorts, like "well, shows how much you don't care about KILLING EVERYONE", as well as ideas like "well, they're your kids, you look after them". That's a bit hard when you and everyone you know are under house arrest.
In fact, it was the experience of living through lockdowns with a 1 year old and a pregnant wife that so strongly coloured my opinions on the overall benefits of them - judging by their effects on the next generation, we have screwed up really badly.
I know several teachers, and they all say that the culture of learning has been disrupted, and those who teach in disadvantaged areas, say that kids will never recover. By "a culture of learning", I mean that it is generally accepted that all kid go to school and at least attempt to get some qualifications. We don't know what we've got till it's gone.
Even after all this the schools around me have the stones to tell parents that they can't take their kids on vacation for a week during the school year because they might miss something and fall behind.
It isn't the intact families that make effort to spend time together that struggle in school frankly. My friends kids are straight A students they still make threats that they are going to take him to court.
Sounds like you would be the perfect candidate for virtual schooling.
Leave the in-person schooling for kids and parents that really have no other option.
Remember, for some kids school is the only safe place where they can also get a decent meal. I think it's best if our underfunded teachers focus on those kids instead of working extra to enable your vacation lifestyle.
My kid isn't of age yet but a lot of parents are looking into the religious schools. From what I'm hearing if you tell them you want so time together as a family they will encourage you and think it's wonderful. I'm a atheist but I'm warming to the idea.
I'd like her to spend time in person with other kids during her schooling hours, and honestly the public schools have a agenda of their own so I have to teach her to think critically about what is taught either way.
The issue is so does everyone else. You can make a trip to Disney World go from unaffordable to affordable if you do it in the off season. Plus you spend less time waiting in lines.
My local public schools have no issue with me taking my daughter on vacation during the school year. She is about to start 10th grade and has missed a week or more of school for vacation and/or horse shows every year. As she has gotten older we just take her school issued Chromebook with us and she will work on assignments while we are traveling or when we are back at the hotel in the evening. Some teachers will allow her to take tests she will have missed while away and others have her take them when she returns after.
Something wrong with medical care for 80+ year olds being a political priority and ensuring every child gets a nutritious lunch at school not being a political priority.
My grandpa got taxpayer funded dialysis at 95+ while I was offered defrosted cardboard pizza for lunch everyday, and would have had to pay for it.
This isn't surprising to me. Most old voters don't want to die broke on the street, and most younger people don't want to see their grandparents die broke on the street, either.
As someone currently on the line between young and old, I get that.
Everything wrong providing free medical care to old people who cost a fortune, but not young people who in aggregate cost hardly anything, but some will cost a fortune if they're unlucky
What's alarming is how quickly it has become not politically correct to suggest that anything about obesity is unhealthy or undesirable. I'm not saying to go around shaming fat people, but there's a reality to obesity that we all (at least in the United States) have been increasingly in denial about. It's a marker for disease. That doesn't mean that all obese people have a related pathology, but metabolic pathologies correspond with obesity enough that people should be concerned.
Part of the problem is that humans are short-sighted, and humans of modern technological society have an even shorter attention span, hence it's not obvious that the actions of today lead to problems of tomorrow. It might seem inconsequential to be obese today, but problems of varying degree are almost inevitable down the road. Maybe it's cardiovascular disease, or wear on joints, or cancer, or sleep apnea, or diabetes, or whatever. These things aren't trivial, but humans are mentally adaptable and can get used to anything, whether it's enslavement or the disrepair of their own bodies.
It's been distressing to me when some individuals I know who have bought into fat-positivity have suggested that there's actually nothing wrong with being fat and that it's a "sliding-scale", as if obesity can only possibly be a bad thing at the point of immobility. In reality, any amount of obesity can be a sign of dysfunction. But to suggest this is now considered offensive by some, such to the point that the media won't touch it with a 10-foot pole and even many doctors have stopped taking the weight of their patients.
If people are going to play the "if it just saves one life" card when it comes to measures against COVID, then they'd better fucking stop living in a fantasy land and consider whether the lack of health of the population is causing excess early death.
As somebody who works in public health in the United States, I can guarantee that obesity is seen as an epidemic, tracked in the population with annual surveys, and targeted as a component of disease. Governmental and non-profit public health organizations spend lots of money and time fighting obesity. They'll never advertise programs as a way for somebody to stop being obese, because accusing your audience of a moral failing is just bad advertising.
I remember arguing with people who said I should be lockdowned, but then balking at my suggestion that people should do mandatory park runs at the weekend, to lessen the chance of getting seriously ill with COVID.
Consider it a benefit for spending 40+ years working and providing the glue that held society together. Not everybody cashed out big time. You can always turn it down and pay for things yourself.
Or, you can work to turn the us into a place similar to the rest of the world where there is less profit made from people’s health. I would think it useful to be a startup that didn’t have to worry about providing health insurance or for workers to know they don’t face disaster when laid off.
No offense, but where have you been? In the United States, protecting the elderly has been the prevalent reasoning in the media and was naturally a part of the public sentiment. The idea that the public's attention should be shifted to protecting children from COVID mostly became a thing in response to schools reopening (and not reopening) and because "don't kill grandma" became a tired phrase.
It would depend on the media you consume, but for me (in Australia) it's always been "flatten the curve" - ie. reduce infections so the health system doesn't get overwhelmed. Once hospitalizations were under control through vaccinations pretty much all restrictions were lifted.
Most people were thinking closer to home: Don't kill me. My family saw a woefully inadequate behavioral response in the community (crowded bars, restaurants, shops), and practically our only source of uncontrolled exposure to the covid denial crowd was at school. If Dad dies or becomes long term disabled, we'll all be homeless.
>A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.
That's not what happened. What actually happened is that we sacrificed everyone's future for some short term "freedoms".
Unless we find a proper vaccine, today's children will live their whole life with this disease. Spending an extra week sick each year, accumulating organ damage and maybe dying at the age of 50 after their twentieth bout of covid.
Is there anything to support this fearmongering?
From all I’ve heard subsequent infections tend to be more benign - which is how the immune system usually works.
"I don't think you can generalize [the study] to everybody, but really for people that have risk factors for severe disease," he says, because veterans tend to be older and have more health conditions."
This is not a controlled study, its comparative across number of reinfections. There can be a correlation between overall health and ability to be reinfected. If your health is poor you will be overall more likely to experience death etc as well as symptomatic Covid infection.
You are implying this study shows more reinfections causes rather than is merely coorelated with poor condition. Nothing wrong with doing the study but you can't just ignore confounders to the point you are attempting to drive.
The one study you cited didn't support your original claim
> Unless we find a proper vaccine, today's children will live their whole life with this disease. Spending an extra week sick each year, accumulating organ damage and maybe dying at the age of 50 after their twentieth bout of covid.
> He says the extra risks are more likely among the elderly, the immunocompromised, and people with other medical conditions.
The COVID-19 pandemic has so far followed a similar trajectory to the 1889 "Russian Flu", which some believe may have been the emergence of human coronavirus OC43 (now one of a number of endemic common-cold-causing coronaviruses).
Maybe the disease will fade away, however world population now is four times that in 1890, and mobility is, I dunno, ten times higher? New variants are likely to arise and spread way faster - in the absence of control measures.
Well, OC43 is still with us and those things haven’t happened.
I can see why people worry about this stuff given the deluge of fear-based messaging we’ve been subjected to, but suspect that the reality is far more boring.
"As long as healthcare systems are not being overwhelmed, there is no rationale for any further restrictions." - I'd express that as "as long as healthcare systems aren't at risk of becoming overwhelmed, there's no rationale for high- cost restrictions".
I wouldn't consider mask wearing mandates and vaccination requirements as "high cost".
I'd love it if we could just rely on folks to "do the right thing" but when it requires a significant percentage of the population to maintain particular preventative behaviours for them to be effective, mandates really are the only option. OTOH, testing/isolation is better off left as a strong recommendation, as mandating isolation does come with high costs, where the pros often don't outweigh the cons.
There's no reason for any restrictions, if the healthcare system is not in danger of being overwhelmed.
Risk is a fact of life. And arguably your wish for everyone to wear masks and have compulsory vaccinations focuses disproportionately on one particular, small, risk, in comparisons to other much larger risks, such as travelling on public roads.
Road traffic accidents are a bigger killer of young people, and yet no-one is calling for the speed limit to be drastically reduced.
I think the preoccupation with COVID comes from particular human fear of viruses (invisible, lack of control), rather than an actual measured response assessing all the risks we deal with everyday living normally.
"yet no-one is calling for the speed limit to be drastically reduced"
Actually they have been, and fairly successfully - speed limits have been gradually and significantly reduced over the last few decades in built-up areas in many parts of the world. And I totally agree we need to do more to contain the risks of driving.
However, infectious diseases ARE qualitatively different from risks from traffic accidents, as the latter can't spread exponentially.
As far as there being "no reason" for any restrictions goes, the reality is there's no way to be sure the healthcare system won't reach a point where healthcare workers are constantly overworked just in order to be able to provide the extra care required for infected patients. If cases are not steadily decreasing (or at steady but negligible levels), that risk always exists. All restrictions/regulations have some balance of pros vs cons, and it's the job of governments to determine for which of them the balance is sufficiently on the "pro" side to enact and enforce them.
(Having said that, it does seem that recent data isn't really backing up the "pros" of mask mandates, at least in the US. Though the studies seemed focused on hospitalisations, rather than actual infection rate.)
Regarding speed limits, I had reducing speed on major roads more in mind.
> However, infectious diseases ARE qualitatively different from risks from traffic accidents, as the latter can't spread exponentially.
Which is no longer the case for COVID, hence there no longer being a rationale for restrictions.
> there's no way to be sure the healthcare system won't reach a point where healthcare workers are constantly overworked just in order to be able to provide the extra care required for infected patients.
Then that's a case for increasing resources to a level of care that is deemed appropriate by society.
"All Australian states and territories now have a Reff greater than 1, meaning that even with the current levels of immunity, we are seeing an exponential growth in case numbers."
>I can't remember anyone saying that viruses don't mutate.
In 2020-21 there were plenty of articles claiming stuff like:
"The coronavirus is not mutating significantly as it circulates through the human population, according to scientists who are closely studying the novel pathogen’s genetic code. "
You can google the phrase for the source.
That phrase quickly "mutated" into "Coronaviruses don't mutate" on social media. I have examples, but I don't know how to link them while maintaining privacy.
Original strain not deadly? I must be mis-remembering those Italian villages and the reefers outside nyc hospitals. If usually wasn’t the virus they killed but the cytokine storm it caused damaging the lungs. Finding out dexamethasone worked and that covid wasn’t as bad as sars or mers helped things stabilize. But people died in larger numbers. And health systems and workers were badly overused for a while.
Remember what you want, but there’s less people here than otherwise would have been. And if you begrudge steps to reduce the spread of a very transmissible disease, well, that’s a bit cold hearted to me. Sux to be inconvenienced, but people probably prefer having living grandparents.
Would have had people singing a different tune if it turned into “sars but spreadable” and targeted those 30-50.
> but people probably prefer having living grandparents
Of course, but it’s not like grandparents didn’t already have a habit of eventually dying. I’m a grandparent, and I full expect to die at some point. Seems like there are 1 to 1 odds of it.
Canada sent in the military to help out, and the long term care facilities had staff fleeing rather than risking their lives. Yeah, you can special case anything, but to when both blue and red states and provinces had their icu’s running at 95% and we’re looking at running out of ventilators things were bad. But memory’s evergreen I guess.
3x flu deaths or so at the start. But nobody carries that much extra medical facilities so running out becomes a bad day.
Although frequently highlighted as a reason for alarm, ICUs frequently run at 95% utilization or more. That's a feature of major flu seasons too, press reports of hospitals getting overloaded. It's not great, but it's not something unique to COVID.
Nowhere ran out of ventilators, if I recall correctly. Demand for it vanished as doctors realized that the model projections were wrong, and that they'd been over-using ventilators anyway (and thus contributing to the initial spike of early deaths).
The San Antonio story you cite says this:
"We've got two slots at one of our bigger hospitals for people who pass. We need more than two. We had 14 die in the hospital this weekend. I don't want to alarm people, because they are not all COVID cases"
Again, the numbers we are talking about here are small even at the very start when doctors were unfortunately raising the death rate by over-using ventilators. A hospital needing assistance because it has a grand total of two places to put bodies is not a world-changing crisis that needed to wreck the economy, destroy people's lives and create the most totalitarian society seen in the west since WW2.
The only people saying this were vaxx aficionados and Covid certificate promoters who were trying to convince the public by claiming “you only need to get vaccinated once, the certificates will have unlimited validity”
Then all of a sudden “oops actually you need boosters, the virus magically mutated, literally noone could have predicted that!”
Note that everybody wishing to protect the young over the old will be old one day. I assume their attitude will have shifted? Or, will they go willingly into the booth to free up resources?
If we take the Quality-Adjusted Life Years model to be relatively neutral, then lockdowns and other Pandemic Restrictions were a vastly disproportionate expenditure of wealth for the purposes of extending the lives of the elderly. Neonatal intensive care doesn't even come close as an example of ways that society prioritizes the health of the young in terms of QALYs.
I actually cant imagine being this selfish. If i was 85 and living in a nursing home, the idea of society protecting my last couple years of life at the expense of millions of children's childhood seems insane.
never mind that fact that covid policies made those peoples lives a living hell anyway. Absolutely crushing loneliness because visitors werent allowed and they werent even allowed to see their families as they were dying. Unfathomably cruel, and for what purpose?
> A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.
Press X to doubt (the point being argued).
Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40. And not to forget long covid's disastrous effects on all ages.
I agree that the entire situation could have been better managed (for example it took till December 2020 for the Dutch gov to mandate masks in public areas, the night curfew timings were odd), but I disagree that a proper thorough response wasn't required.
> Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40. And not to forget long covid's disastrous effects on all ages.
I expect the number of younger people dying from missed cancer screenings etc. from Covid policies is higher.
The rate of mental health referrals amongst young people also surged.
"Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40."
If that were true, it would have happened everywhere. If we steelman the COVID policy case by looking at Sweden, which should theoretically be the worst hit place, what we see is that there was no excess death for under 75s in 2020.
There have been many claims that COVID kills the young. But these claims must be exaggerated because it doesn't show up in the data, at least not for Europe. If we look at Euromomo, so incorporating countries with far harsher restrictions and worse healthcare systems, then we also cannot see any mortality under 40:
The first age range where mortality is seen is 45-64 years. But even there, we are talking about a change from ~9k deaths a week (normal) to ~11k deaths a week in each wave, which for a place the size of Europe is hardly a crisis level change.
> Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40
After 27 months, I know of literally no one younger than 40 who was even hospitalized due to Covid-19. I know a total of 5 people who were briefly hospitalized from it, all older than 60. I know of (very elderly family members of acquaintances) 4 people who died from it.
I live in an area where there are 3M people within a radius of 50 miles. We had no mask mandates, no lockdowns.
I keep hearing how much Covid has affected/dangerous for the younger populace (necessity for vaccination, tele-education, school masking, etc…) but from my own experience, I didn’t see it.
You're posting on Hacker News, shouldn't you know basics of statistics or at the very least about anecdote vs data? I don't know anyone who voted Trump, does that mean no one did?
If you can show me any data that shows that Covid was even remotely and possibly dangerous to healthy people under 40, I’ll listen.
And by remotely and possibly dangerous, I mean more of a risk of death than any other possible event or disease that can happen to healthy people in that age group.
But you can’t, because that data does not exist. Covid was simply not dangerous for healthy people under 40.
I can't do that because you literally excluded any evidence that did not make it the number one cause of death. You're not arguing in good faith, so I'll leave you to it.
I think the proper argument to be made here is comparing its mortality for this age group to that of the flu and other causes. Car accidents or homicide are other interesting ones.
Liver disease kills more 35-44 year olds according to the amac.us source.
>> Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40
Which as a editorial on this comment from the commenter above them:
>>> A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.
If you don’t like how I framed the question, perhaps do this instead—provide the statistics that tell us where Covid sits on the danger and mortality scale for healthy people under 40. Then tell us why you think that rate of danger warrant those “protective” measures that adversely affected the young.
I don’t think Covid was a threat that warranted the sacrifice of the young to protect the old and I think the stats prove that out.
As another commenter said, you put the bar arbitrarily high by requiring it to be "more of a risk of death than any other possible event or disease that can happen to healthy people in that age group", because of course, once one is "unhealthy" (whatever that means, as healthy and unhealthy is not binary but a spectrum), then their death doesn't count for data. But here is an article with sources saying it was the number four cause of death for those aged 25-34 in 2021 [0].
The number one cause of death in that same age group was (and remains) accidents, and yet driving has not been curtailed. Young families could not attend school, go to work, or gather with loved ones because of the #4 killer, but the #1 killer inspired no such restrictions.
I don't know what qualifies technically as a hysteria, but locking people in their homes for months for fear of something less dangerous than a typical daily activity sounds like a promising candidate.
Interesting that you make this comment when it was the #4 killer in spite of what you call the "hysterical" lock downs. Also consider that many people are advocates of public transportation precisely because driving cars is so dangerous.
The number you didn’t provide was the most important one to your argument. Using these hypotheticals just to illustrate my point: Say there were of 1000 deaths in the <40 age group. If 900 were caused by accidents, 90 were caused by illness other than Covid, 6 were caused by shark attacks, and 4 were caused by Covid-19. Just being the fourth leading cause of death in that age group doesn’t truly convey it’s real significance does it?
The important number is what percentage of all deaths in the <40 age group was Covid 19. Just saying it was fourth, well, that’s just trying to ascribe significance over what might be an insignificant number…just for the purpose of creating alarm to justify an unpopular and frankly damaging mitigation strategy.
In the article I linked, it says "The study found COVID-19 caused roughly 700,000 deaths between March 2020 and October 2021. The pandemic disease trailed only heart disease and cancer, which caused roughly 2.15 million collectively in that time frame." Clicking into the cited study, it links to this table with the raw numbers for each age group... no one's trying to hide something or mislead you.
Ah yeah disastrous long COVID, I remember having it in mid 2010s...
COVID killed pretty much NONE people under 40 unless they had other serious health issues, which were really cause of their death.
Official Czech (11M population) gov stats for ALL people who were COVID POSITIVE when they died (it just means they died positive in those 2+ years, not that COVID caused their death):
So massive number of deaths - 379 people younger than 44 in two years in 11M country who died while tested positive including (mostly) terminally ill patients, car accidents etc. You better don't wanna know how many people under 44 died from other causes in last two years.
> A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.
Have you considered the millions of bereft "young" people who lost a parent, for instance? Or how many orphans it has created[1]? The pandemic has been an unfathomable disaster on all fronts, for everyone. - A bereft "young" man.
That the pandemic caused suffering, is without question.
The question is whether the measures deployed to combat it caused more harm, overall, than good.
In the UK, children died during lockdown, who may have lived had they been in regular contact with school who could have noticed abuse.
Cancer patients found their cancer could have been caught earlier.
Mental health conditions have surged amongst young people, including those such as anorexia.
There was never a public debate on the full picture. It was either support every, often illogical, policy, or you're labelled as an "antivaxxer" or "granny killer".
> The sad thing is that none of this was inevitable.
I'd like to push back on your framing of this.
Whether you think everything was "hysteria" or not, whether you think the measures taken in the wake of Covid were net-good or not...
Either way you look at it, the ground truth is that there was a pandemic, which would inflict some amount of damage no matter what. You might think that a less "hysterical" approach would've caused less overall damage, but damage would've been done either way.
When a tornado strikes a city (for example), the government response can be better or worse, but at its base, it's an act of nature that causes some amount of damage no matter what.
Few people in the West like to hear this, but by almost every measure, the zero-CoVID approach followed in mainland China, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere was superior to the let-it-rip approach followed by most Western countries.
Just to take mainland China as an example:
1. Economically, China has outperformed almost every country during the pandemic. It was the only major economy to grow in 2020, and it had solid growth in 2021.
2. We always hear about lockdowns in China, but most of China hasn't experienced a serious lockdown since early 2020. Shanghai went from April 2020 to April 2022 without a lockdown. Then it had one severe lockdown (ironically, triggered by a failed attempt to follow a "living with the virus" approach). Most cities have not had the type of lockdown that Shanghai had. Schools, restaurants, bars, etc. have been open throughout the vast majority of China for most of the pandemic.
There are three approaches to dealing with the virus:
1. Do nothing: 0.5% of your population dies.
2. Mitigation: social distancing, closures or restrictions for certain businesses, mask-wearing. Lots of people die, but hopefully a vaccine comes out before most people are infected. Most rich countries did some variant of this. Notably, after the first wave, the US was much closer to the "do nothing" approach, and lost 0.3% of its population.
3. Zero-CoVID: maximum effort to eliminate the virus, followed by much lower-intensity measures to prevent the virus from regaining a foothold. Long-term, this requires border quarantine for people coming in from abroad, regular testing to catch new outbreaks quickly, and extremely good contact tracing and localized lockdowns to nip new outbreaks in the bud. This policy has to be continued at least until there are vaccines or effective therapeutics.
> A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.
From an East Asian perspective, this is an incredibly immoral thing to say. Old people built the world that young people live in, and they deserve respect and care. That might be why most of East Asia followed either a zero-CoVID policy or a much more rigorous mitigation policy than the West.
That statement is nearly meaningless, because it does not say how many students are facing restrictions.
What fraction of Chinese students are currently doing in-person learning?
This information is available - there are regular updates from every Chinese city about CoVID measures.
The Economist is just too lazy to actually go tabulate the data, so what we get instead is a vague statement about "enduring restrictions," which affect some unspecified number of students. Are we talking about 10% of students, 1% of students, 0.1% of students? Hint: it's probably nearest to the final figure.
It's not just The Economist that is lazy when it comes to reporting about China. Most Western outlets are. The standard of reporting is incredibly low, and it is colored by some massive biases. For people who actually know something about the country, it's incredibly frustrating.
Here's an article, saying all of Shanghai shut down schools in March.[0]
I don't have the figures. You're right.
But, I'm betting against your gut feeling that the impact to the CN school population is a rounding error when mega-cities in CN are shutting down their schools due to CV19.
In Spring 2022, Shanghai had the most serious lockdown that any major Chinese city has had since Wuhan in early 2020. Shanghai's experience is the absolute most extreme case. The number of times any large Chinese city has taken anywhere near as strict of measures at any time in the last 2 years can be counted on one hand.
But to put this in context, Shanghai makes up 2% of China's population.
China reopened schools very early in the pandemic, all the way back in March-April 2020. That's because it ended (as in, zero new infections) its initial outbreak very quickly. Schools have been open in the vast majority of the country for the vast majority of the time since.
> But to put this in context, Shanghai makes up 2% of China's population.
Acknowledging the impact as absolute and sizeable (millions of kids in Shanghai, CN alone) undermines any argument that the impacts are muted and immaterial (See your percentage basis rationale.) Tracing to the original thread, you're acknowledging the significance (and claims by the Economist) , which you opposed earlier.
> That's because it ended (as in, zero new infections) its initial outbreak very quickly.
I don't know man. That "zero new infections" might be true, but it's hard to take China's self-reported figures credibly. See this study showing how CN advertised a death/infection rate ONLY of 1 per 100,000 [0] when all peers are orders of magnitude higher. CN's claims are statistical anomolies.
Data point: my kids are doing fine. They hated lockdown, but who didn’t? They aren’t behind in either academic or social terms.
However, they had parents who supported them throughout with home learning, extracurricular learning, love and encouragement, and a network of friends and families in similar conditions who worked together to keep up virtual contact and socialisation.
What I worry about are the kids who didn’t have this kind of support. We had the resources to compensate for lockdown. A lot of families didn’t
In the final evaluation, I expect this will result in a deepening rich-poor divide.
This is somewhat ironic considering it was predominantly leftward politicians advocating for more/deeper lockdowns that disproportionately harm the poor, and rightward politicians advocating for relaxing lockdowns and sacrificing the elderly.
Not really, the real disaster is the lack of stimulation.
I mean, unless for high-school students, everything that you learn will be re-taught eventually. I missed half a year (well, 5 month) and didn't go over divisions, still the next year was fraction and honestly, i wasn't less prepared than my friends.
I won't homeschool my kids, but if you do all the power to you. Ifyou don't go over the program and just stimulate them, as long as they go see/make some friends at clubs (music, sport, craftmanship, whatever) or stuff like that, they won't be that behind in highschool. If you are actually good and present enough to teach them STEM specifics, they can even be ahead (in my experience this is rare, but this might be skewed by the population of homeschooling parents that will actually send their kid in summer science camps).
We need to stop thinking of school as a place of learning only. School should be stimulating, a place to get friends and to be in touch with knowledge.
I'm encouraged by the comments on this article. It shows that finally, it's ok to dedicate some critical analysis to the downsides of Covid restrictions.
168 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadhttps://theconversation.com/a-century-of-tragedy-how-the-car...
(smog used to be terrible - I lived through the latter half of that period, am I can't even relate to how awful it used to be... friends and I remember walking in midtown Manhattan, blowing our noses and it being black... I can't even imagine pre-1980 let alone pre-1970... https://timeline.com/la-smog-pollution-4ca4bc0cc95d )
... In automobiles.
Lead is very much in use for aircraft fuel, just google AVGAS.
Children who never master the basics will grow up to be less productive and to earn less... by 2040 education lost to school closures could cause global gdp to be 0.9% lower than it would otherwise have been—an annual loss of $1.6trn.
The World Bank thinks the disruption could cost children $21trn in earnings over their lifetimes—a sum equivalent to 17% of global gdp today.
And something even more horribly wrong if that is true.
Life experience and growth shouldn't be confined to a standard classroom.
No one is saying that. The topic under discussion is that being locked inside with your family probably is very very very far from ideal.
That everyone was locked at home during the pandemic and couldn't go anywhere was horrible and damaging for children and adults alike.
They absolutely need to be in person at that age. Her School stopped virtual learning early because it just wasn’t working.
We all got Covid because of it. It sucked but was better for kids.
However, these students & parents both signed up for virtual and are well prepared for what that entails.
The pandemic only shows that poorly-prepared virtual learning is sub-par.
https://www.centralstation.net.au/socialising-and-schooling-...
Could you imagine if your manager at work decided to come to your house for remote work and micro-manage your day for you, in your own home?
Are people saying that, though? My impression is that the worry is "just" that lots of children learn and develop more poorly if not at school. Not to mention that that's in the case of richer societies and societal strata, where parents can take time out of their day (or pay someone to) focus on their children's development. I suspect the the lack of school may indeed be catastrophic in families where parents work 14 hours a day to make ends meet.
Or like, not seeing everything as black and white. We had to do something because the hospitals were overflowing. When all the hospital beds are full of old covid patients slowly dying, every other person who gets injured is receiving treatment on the floor in the hallway, or not at all. You can have all the nuanced discussion you want about the degree of which any of the controls were implemented, but your position cannot be that we should have done nothing.
What should have happened is everything closes for 2 weeks, the virus dies, and we go back to normal. We should all know who fucked that up.
ROFL Yeah, that worked so great for China or for everyone since we had flu.
Closing schools had no impact on virus, not saving hospitals from overflowing. Hospitals were not overflowing with school kids or their parents.
This is what I mean by framing things as black and white. Why would you make such an incredible claim? How could you possibly support a claim that reducing community spread in schools (where children are around 50% as likely to spread the virus, not 0% [1]) has "zero impact" on community spread outside of schools? How could children at home equally spread covid to other childrens homes as if there were 30 of them wearing poorly fitting masks in a closed room?
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/we-now-kn...
> The role of young children in transmission seemed logical to some experts who have been tracking the evolution of the pandemic. “I think what was more surprising was how long the narrative persisted that children weren’t transmitting SARS-CoV-2,” said Sam Scarpino, PhD, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation.
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210817/youngest-kids-more-...
> Nearly 1 in 4 COVID-19 deaths (5868 [CI, 3584 to 8171]; 23.2%) was potentially attributable to hospitals strained by surging caseload.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34224257/
I've been working remotely since the pandemic started. I haven't gotten sick once. Not a cold, flu, covid, strep, bronchitis, nothing, for two and a half years. You get sick from contact with sick people. Reducing your contact with all people reduces your contact with sick people, reducing your likelihood of getting sick, becoming a sick person, and making other people sick. You could, as many do, make the case that we don't need to reduce contact that much, and that closing schools costs more than it returns. You cannot make the case that closing schools does not reduce contact and spread of sickness and death.
I'm working from home for many years and guess what who had COVID first in our family, so much for anecdotal experiences.
> You cannot make the case that closing schools does not reduce contact and spread of sickness and death.
Obviously reducing contact reduces contact, but it doesn't mean in real life conditions it somehow reduces spread of sickness, that's just wishfull thinking of people admiring Chinese totalitarians, who implemented Chinese nonsense through this pandemic to democratic societies.
My nephew was surprised (and extatic) that the ladies in daycare are smiling once they took their masks off, it's obviously unhealthy to not be exposed to facial expressions while learning to be a social primate.
Of course you are able to relate, but it’s not the same. I can relate to somebody with cancer, but as long I don’t have the experience myself it’s “only extrapolate”.
The times I have spoken up in the past have not gone well for me (and almost entirely, it was speaking to people without kids who tell me that "lockdowns aren't so bad" after they've been out cycling all day). There were all of the obvious retorts, like "well, shows how much you don't care about KILLING EVERYONE", as well as ideas like "well, they're your kids, you look after them". That's a bit hard when you and everyone you know are under house arrest.
In fact, it was the experience of living through lockdowns with a 1 year old and a pregnant wife that so strongly coloured my opinions on the overall benefits of them - judging by their effects on the next generation, we have screwed up really badly.
I know several teachers, and they all say that the culture of learning has been disrupted, and those who teach in disadvantaged areas, say that kids will never recover. By "a culture of learning", I mean that it is generally accepted that all kid go to school and at least attempt to get some qualifications. We don't know what we've got till it's gone.
Surely there is a middle ground between kid missing half the school year and a week of vacation.
It's a nightmare for the teacher, who then has less time left for the children who didn't go on holiday to progress.
Leave the in-person schooling for kids and parents that really have no other option.
Remember, for some kids school is the only safe place where they can also get a decent meal. I think it's best if our underfunded teachers focus on those kids instead of working extra to enable your vacation lifestyle.
Every single study shows in-person learning outperforms virtual, and it's not close.
IN fact, that's one of the main causes of the drop in school performance from COVID - virtual learning for children is shit.
This was once true. Have you seen the ticket pricing inflation over the last year?
A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.
We'll be counting the costs of this hysteria for decades to come, when the lives of those "saved" are long over.
Also why medicare is the US makes no sense to me.
My grandpa got taxpayer funded dialysis at 95+ while I was offered defrosted cardboard pizza for lunch everyday, and would have had to pay for it.
Just would like to point out that older people tend to vote much more than younger folks.
As someone currently on the line between young and old, I get that.
https://www.science.org/content/article/why-covid-19-more-de...
Many mistakes were made with COVID response.
Part of the problem is that humans are short-sighted, and humans of modern technological society have an even shorter attention span, hence it's not obvious that the actions of today lead to problems of tomorrow. It might seem inconsequential to be obese today, but problems of varying degree are almost inevitable down the road. Maybe it's cardiovascular disease, or wear on joints, or cancer, or sleep apnea, or diabetes, or whatever. These things aren't trivial, but humans are mentally adaptable and can get used to anything, whether it's enslavement or the disrepair of their own bodies.
It's been distressing to me when some individuals I know who have bought into fat-positivity have suggested that there's actually nothing wrong with being fat and that it's a "sliding-scale", as if obesity can only possibly be a bad thing at the point of immobility. In reality, any amount of obesity can be a sign of dysfunction. But to suggest this is now considered offensive by some, such to the point that the media won't touch it with a 10-foot pole and even many doctors have stopped taking the weight of their patients.
If people are going to play the "if it just saves one life" card when it comes to measures against COVID, then they'd better fucking stop living in a fantasy land and consider whether the lack of health of the population is causing excess early death.
Or, you can work to turn the us into a place similar to the rest of the world where there is less profit made from people’s health. I would think it useful to be a startup that didn’t have to worry about providing health insurance or for workers to know they don’t face disaster when laid off.
That's not what happened. What actually happened is that we sacrificed everyone's future for some short term "freedoms".
Unless we find a proper vaccine, today's children will live their whole life with this disease. Spending an extra week sick each year, accumulating organ damage and maybe dying at the age of 50 after their twentieth bout of covid.
This is not a controlled study, its comparative across number of reinfections. There can be a correlation between overall health and ability to be reinfected. If your health is poor you will be overall more likely to experience death etc as well as symptomatic Covid infection.
It would be weird if veterans were the opposite to everyone else though.
>here can be a correlation between overall health and ability to be reinfected
But the study is about the severity of reinfection rather than the frequency
This is a single study involving elderly people with chronic conditions that got hospitalized.
This will obviously inflict some selection bias
How many studies will convince you?
> Unless we find a proper vaccine, today's children will live their whole life with this disease. Spending an extra week sick each year, accumulating organ damage and maybe dying at the age of 50 after their twentieth bout of covid.
> He says the extra risks are more likely among the elderly, the immunocompromised, and people with other medical conditions.
The COVID-19 pandemic has so far followed a similar trajectory to the 1889 "Russian Flu", which some believe may have been the emergence of human coronavirus OC43 (now one of a number of endemic common-cold-causing coronaviruses).
I can see why people worry about this stuff given the deluge of fear-based messaging we’ve been subjected to, but suspect that the reality is far more boring.
2020: "It's no more severe than a cold"
2021: "Coronaviruses do not mutate" and "You won't catch it more than once"
2022: "Viruses become less deadly over time... so if we just bear with it a bit longer..."
> 2022: "Viruses become less deadly over time... so if we just bear with it a bit longer..."
I can't remember anyone saying that viruses don't mutate.
And nobody is currently saying "bear with it a bit longer". The media has just moved onto Ukraine as the next crisis fit for news saturation.
As long as healthcare systems are not being overwhelmed, there is no rationale for any further restrictions.
We just accept it as part of this risk of living, like using motorways, which are one of the biggest killers amongst younger cohorts.
Risk is a fact of life. And arguably your wish for everyone to wear masks and have compulsory vaccinations focuses disproportionately on one particular, small, risk, in comparisons to other much larger risks, such as travelling on public roads.
Road traffic accidents are a bigger killer of young people, and yet no-one is calling for the speed limit to be drastically reduced.
I think the preoccupation with COVID comes from particular human fear of viruses (invisible, lack of control), rather than an actual measured response assessing all the risks we deal with everyday living normally.
Actually they have been, and fairly successfully - speed limits have been gradually and significantly reduced over the last few decades in built-up areas in many parts of the world. And I totally agree we need to do more to contain the risks of driving.
However, infectious diseases ARE qualitatively different from risks from traffic accidents, as the latter can't spread exponentially.
As far as there being "no reason" for any restrictions goes, the reality is there's no way to be sure the healthcare system won't reach a point where healthcare workers are constantly overworked just in order to be able to provide the extra care required for infected patients. If cases are not steadily decreasing (or at steady but negligible levels), that risk always exists. All restrictions/regulations have some balance of pros vs cons, and it's the job of governments to determine for which of them the balance is sufficiently on the "pro" side to enact and enforce them.
> However, infectious diseases ARE qualitatively different from risks from traffic accidents, as the latter can't spread exponentially.
Which is no longer the case for COVID, hence there no longer being a rationale for restrictions.
> there's no way to be sure the healthcare system won't reach a point where healthcare workers are constantly overworked just in order to be able to provide the extra care required for infected patients.
Then that's a case for increasing resources to a level of care that is deemed appropriate by society.
Not turning society itself into a sick patient.
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/what-to-expect-fro...
Published July 6th.
In 2020-21 there were plenty of articles claiming stuff like:
"The coronavirus is not mutating significantly as it circulates through the human population, according to scientists who are closely studying the novel pathogen’s genetic code. "
You can google the phrase for the source.
That phrase quickly "mutated" into "Coronaviruses don't mutate" on social media. I have examples, but I don't know how to link them while maintaining privacy.
Remember what you want, but there’s less people here than otherwise would have been. And if you begrudge steps to reduce the spread of a very transmissible disease, well, that’s a bit cold hearted to me. Sux to be inconvenienced, but people probably prefer having living grandparents.
Would have had people singing a different tune if it turned into “sars but spreadable” and targeted those 30-50.
Of course, but it’s not like grandparents didn’t already have a habit of eventually dying. I’m a grandparent, and I full expect to die at some point. Seems like there are 1 to 1 odds of it.
3x flu deaths or so at the start. But nobody carries that much extra medical facilities so running out becomes a bad day.
Although frequently highlighted as a reason for alarm, ICUs frequently run at 95% utilization or more. That's a feature of major flu seasons too, press reports of hospitals getting overloaded. It's not great, but it's not something unique to COVID.
Nowhere ran out of ventilators, if I recall correctly. Demand for it vanished as doctors realized that the model projections were wrong, and that they'd been over-using ventilators anyway (and thus contributing to the initial spike of early deaths).
The San Antonio story you cite says this:
"We've got two slots at one of our bigger hospitals for people who pass. We need more than two. We had 14 die in the hospital this weekend. I don't want to alarm people, because they are not all COVID cases"
Again, the numbers we are talking about here are small even at the very start when doctors were unfortunately raising the death rate by over-using ventilators. A hospital needing assistance because it has a grand total of two places to put bodies is not a world-changing crisis that needed to wreck the economy, destroy people's lives and create the most totalitarian society seen in the west since WW2.
There’s lots of hits when I google reefer trucks covid in both red and blue states.
The only people saying this were vaxx aficionados and Covid certificate promoters who were trying to convince the public by claiming “you only need to get vaccinated once, the certificates will have unlimited validity”
Then all of a sudden “oops actually you need boosters, the virus magically mutated, literally noone could have predicted that!”
never mind that fact that covid policies made those peoples lives a living hell anyway. Absolutely crushing loneliness because visitors werent allowed and they werent even allowed to see their families as they were dying. Unfathomably cruel, and for what purpose?
Press X to doubt (the point being argued).
Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40. And not to forget long covid's disastrous effects on all ages.
I agree that the entire situation could have been better managed (for example it took till December 2020 for the Dutch gov to mandate masks in public areas, the night curfew timings were odd), but I disagree that a proper thorough response wasn't required.
I expect the number of younger people dying from missed cancer screenings etc. from Covid policies is higher.
The rate of mental health referrals amongst young people also surged.
https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/the-pandemic-has-...
If that were true, it would have happened everywhere. If we steelman the COVID policy case by looking at Sweden, which should theoretically be the worst hit place, what we see is that there was no excess death for under 75s in 2020.
There have been many claims that COVID kills the young. But these claims must be exaggerated because it doesn't show up in the data, at least not for Europe. If we look at Euromomo, so incorporating countries with far harsher restrictions and worse healthcare systems, then we also cannot see any mortality under 40:
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
The first age range where mortality is seen is 45-64 years. But even there, we are talking about a change from ~9k deaths a week (normal) to ~11k deaths a week in each wave, which for a place the size of Europe is hardly a crisis level change.
After 27 months, I know of literally no one younger than 40 who was even hospitalized due to Covid-19. I know a total of 5 people who were briefly hospitalized from it, all older than 60. I know of (very elderly family members of acquaintances) 4 people who died from it.
I live in an area where there are 3M people within a radius of 50 miles. We had no mask mandates, no lockdowns.
I keep hearing how much Covid has affected/dangerous for the younger populace (necessity for vaccination, tele-education, school masking, etc…) but from my own experience, I didn’t see it.
And by remotely and possibly dangerous, I mean more of a risk of death than any other possible event or disease that can happen to healthy people in that age group.
But you can’t, because that data does not exist. Covid was simply not dangerous for healthy people under 40.
Liver disease kills more 35-44 year olds according to the amac.us source.
https://freopp.org/comparing-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19...
https://amac.us/estimating-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19-v...
>> Covid has affected and killed enough "younger" people - by which I mean folks younger than 40
Which as a editorial on this comment from the commenter above them:
>>> A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.
If you don’t like how I framed the question, perhaps do this instead—provide the statistics that tell us where Covid sits on the danger and mortality scale for healthy people under 40. Then tell us why you think that rate of danger warrant those “protective” measures that adversely affected the young.
I don’t think Covid was a threat that warranted the sacrifice of the young to protect the old and I think the stats prove that out.
[0] "And for those ages 15 to 24 and 25 to 34, COVID-19 wasn't in the top five in 2020 but ranked as the fourth leading cause of death in both age groups in 2021." - https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/covid-was-the-leadin...
I don't know what qualifies technically as a hysteria, but locking people in their homes for months for fear of something less dangerous than a typical daily activity sounds like a promising candidate.
The important number is what percentage of all deaths in the <40 age group was Covid 19. Just saying it was fourth, well, that’s just trying to ascribe significance over what might be an insignificant number…just for the purpose of creating alarm to justify an unpopular and frankly damaging mitigation strategy.
[0] Study https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[1] Table (long link!) https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/intem...
COVID killed pretty much NONE people under 40 unless they had other serious health issues, which were really cause of their death.
Official Czech (11M population) gov stats for ALL people who were COVID POSITIVE when they died (it just means they died positive in those 2+ years, not that COVID caused their death):
age group - total number
0–14 - 9
15–24 - 10
25–34 - 82
35–44 - 278
https://onemocneni-aktualne.mzcr.cz/covid-19/prehledy-khs
So massive number of deaths - 379 people younger than 44 in two years in 11M country who died while tested positive including (mostly) terminally ill patients, car accidents etc. You better don't wanna know how many people under 44 died from other causes in last two years.
Have you considered the millions of bereft "young" people who lost a parent, for instance? Or how many orphans it has created[1]? The pandemic has been an unfathomable disaster on all fronts, for everyone. - A bereft "young" man.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/covid-19-...
The question is whether the measures deployed to combat it caused more harm, overall, than good.
In the UK, children died during lockdown, who may have lived had they been in regular contact with school who could have noticed abuse.
Cancer patients found their cancer could have been caught earlier.
Mental health conditions have surged amongst young people, including those such as anorexia.
There was never a public debate on the full picture. It was either support every, often illogical, policy, or you're labelled as an "antivaxxer" or "granny killer".
I'd like to push back on your framing of this.
Whether you think everything was "hysteria" or not, whether you think the measures taken in the wake of Covid were net-good or not...
Either way you look at it, the ground truth is that there was a pandemic, which would inflict some amount of damage no matter what. You might think that a less "hysterical" approach would've caused less overall damage, but damage would've been done either way.
When a tornado strikes a city (for example), the government response can be better or worse, but at its base, it's an act of nature that causes some amount of damage no matter what.
That being said, I am not sure why are school still closed there. In other countries in the SEA region, they are being reopened?
Just to take mainland China as an example:
1. Economically, China has outperformed almost every country during the pandemic. It was the only major economy to grow in 2020, and it had solid growth in 2021.
2. We always hear about lockdowns in China, but most of China hasn't experienced a serious lockdown since early 2020. Shanghai went from April 2020 to April 2022 without a lockdown. Then it had one severe lockdown (ironically, triggered by a failed attempt to follow a "living with the virus" approach). Most cities have not had the type of lockdown that Shanghai had. Schools, restaurants, bars, etc. have been open throughout the vast majority of China for most of the pandemic.
There are three approaches to dealing with the virus:
1. Do nothing: 0.5% of your population dies.
2. Mitigation: social distancing, closures or restrictions for certain businesses, mask-wearing. Lots of people die, but hopefully a vaccine comes out before most people are infected. Most rich countries did some variant of this. Notably, after the first wave, the US was much closer to the "do nothing" approach, and lost 0.3% of its population.
3. Zero-CoVID: maximum effort to eliminate the virus, followed by much lower-intensity measures to prevent the virus from regaining a foothold. Long-term, this requires border quarantine for people coming in from abroad, regular testing to catch new outbreaks quickly, and extremely good contact tracing and localized lockdowns to nip new outbreaks in the bud. This policy has to be continued at least until there are vaccines or effective therapeutics.
> A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.
From an East Asian perspective, this is an incredibly immoral thing to say. Old people built the world that young people live in, and they deserve respect and care. That might be why most of East Asia followed either a zero-CoVID policy or a much more rigorous mitigation policy than the West.
> By the end of May [2022] pupils in 13 countries were still enduring some restrictions on face-to-face learning—among them China, Iraq and Russia.
Your suggested approaches aren't reflective of current circumstances. We have vaccines; yet, lockdowns affecting early education are still in effect.
What fraction of Chinese students are currently doing in-person learning?
This information is available - there are regular updates from every Chinese city about CoVID measures.
The Economist is just too lazy to actually go tabulate the data, so what we get instead is a vague statement about "enduring restrictions," which affect some unspecified number of students. Are we talking about 10% of students, 1% of students, 0.1% of students? Hint: it's probably nearest to the final figure.
It's not just The Economist that is lazy when it comes to reporting about China. Most Western outlets are. The standard of reporting is incredibly low, and it is colored by some massive biases. For people who actually know something about the country, it's incredibly frustrating.
I don't have the figures. You're right.
But, I'm betting against your gut feeling that the impact to the CN school population is a rounding error when mega-cities in CN are shutting down their schools due to CV19.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-shanghai-shuts-sc...
But to put this in context, Shanghai makes up 2% of China's population.
China reopened schools very early in the pandemic, all the way back in March-April 2020. That's because it ended (as in, zero new infections) its initial outbreak very quickly. Schools have been open in the vast majority of the country for the vast majority of the time since.
Acknowledging the impact as absolute and sizeable (millions of kids in Shanghai, CN alone) undermines any argument that the impacts are muted and immaterial (See your percentage basis rationale.) Tracing to the original thread, you're acknowledging the significance (and claims by the Economist) , which you opposed earlier.
> That's because it ended (as in, zero new infections) its initial outbreak very quickly.
I don't know man. That "zero new infections" might be true, but it's hard to take China's self-reported figures credibly. See this study showing how CN advertised a death/infection rate ONLY of 1 per 100,000 [0] when all peers are orders of magnitude higher. CN's claims are statistical anomolies.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
However, they had parents who supported them throughout with home learning, extracurricular learning, love and encouragement, and a network of friends and families in similar conditions who worked together to keep up virtual contact and socialisation.
What I worry about are the kids who didn’t have this kind of support. We had the resources to compensate for lockdown. A lot of families didn’t
In the final evaluation, I expect this will result in a deepening rich-poor divide.
This is somewhat ironic considering it was predominantly leftward politicians advocating for more/deeper lockdowns that disproportionately harm the poor, and rightward politicians advocating for relaxing lockdowns and sacrificing the elderly.
https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/784041/a...
I mean, unless for high-school students, everything that you learn will be re-taught eventually. I missed half a year (well, 5 month) and didn't go over divisions, still the next year was fraction and honestly, i wasn't less prepared than my friends.
I won't homeschool my kids, but if you do all the power to you. Ifyou don't go over the program and just stimulate them, as long as they go see/make some friends at clubs (music, sport, craftmanship, whatever) or stuff like that, they won't be that behind in highschool. If you are actually good and present enough to teach them STEM specifics, they can even be ahead (in my experience this is rare, but this might be skewed by the population of homeschooling parents that will actually send their kid in summer science camps).
We need to stop thinking of school as a place of learning only. School should be stimulating, a place to get friends and to be in touch with knowledge.
Back away slowly.