Anyone else find it strange that a country that has often fallen in line with "think of the children" arguments for hypothetical dangers appears to be completely uncaring about very real dangers of social isolation that are impacting our youth?
They were balancing it against what they saw in Italy: allowing the virus to get out of hand and overwhelm the hospital system and your death rate from covid jumps into the double digits. Kids would be pretty depressed being surrounded by a 8 digit body count in the US too.
Kids would be pretty depressed being surrounded by a 8 digit body count in the US too.
Kudos for expressing an unpopular opinion.
I'll express another one: I think the whole thing about "ZOMG! Suicide rates through the roof!!!elevelty!1!" is blown out of proportion, largely thanks to pseudo-news web sites trying to grab clicks on the internet.
The school district where I live put out a press release lamenting an 18% increase in student suicide in 2020. Reading to the end, you find out that the actual numeric increase was something like 2. Two dead kids isn't good in any way. But when the number of suicides reaches a meaningful fraction of the number of COVID deaths, then I'll take it seriously.
Having to stay home for a year is nothing — absolutely nothing — compared with what children had to deal with during previous social upheavals (world wars, and the like).
It’s not even clear that the hospitalization rate for COVID cases is over 10%, let alone the case-fatality-rate. In fact, it’s pretty clear that it’s not.
Writing from Spain. Schools are open since September, with measures such as masks, isolated groups that don't mix during recreation time, etc. It has been shown that schools are not a major vector of propagation and that kids can safely go to school. Here what has an impact in the propagation of the virus is opening bars and restaurants and allowing people to move between counties (comarca) or regions.
The US federal gov’t spends about 3x as much on those over the age of 65 than it does those under the age of 18 (including transfer payments to parents of those children)[0].
Personally, I think that should be flipped, but kid’s don’t vote.
I'm assuming you mean the US spends 33% as much on those under 18 as it does on those over 65 (otherwise your comment about voting makes no sense)? If so, it seem sensible for the government to spend more on the elderly, simply because they cost most and there is nobody else to pay for it. People under 18 typically have one or two parents to care for them. Older people don't have parents and don't necessarily have family to pay for their housing, food, etc. Then you also have to factor in that healthcare costs for the elderly are necessarily more expensive.
Not saying kids don't deserve to be well-cared for. I was a welfare kid and I'm glad there were welfare programs. Just saying I think we'll all be glad we can also get some help when we're over 65, especially if we can't count on our family (I have no siblings and may not have children).
The overwhelming majority of that spending is social security and other retirement programs which are earned (and often paid-for) benefits from a lifetime of work. The next largest (by far) category is Medicare which was largely, but not entirely, paid for by a lifetime of work.
Take just the retirement program figures out and the figures are much closer to what you prefer. Take out the half of Medicare that was paid for by seniors and it’s even closer.
I LOVE that West Wing episode. A group of kids get shuffled around the white house, not important, ignored. The leader of his school group gets to ask a question to President Bartlet after impressing a staffer.
"Do you think the budget deficit is especially unfair to younger Americans?" -> " a follow up, do you think we'd have such a large deficit if children were allowed to vote?" Such a good use of debate.
I think it's worth debating whether to give teens the right to vote. In my mind at least to 13 and up - but it's capricious / hard to draw the line or come up with 'tests' that aren't flat out repeating our disgusting past treatment of Black Americans.
The West Wing episode [clip below] spells out some of the argument:
I miss the West Wing universe. Would be awesome to see a reboot optimistic show about getting things accomplished, showing a vision for how it's possible to tackle climate change and our other ailments. But move the show past today's progress (it does not treat women well/give them voice, stance on gay marriage etc).
I think you flipped the numbers my dude. The federal government spent "about $615 billion—on transfer payments and services for people age 65 or older" in 2000, and "Federal spending on children in 2000 will total about $148 billion, or $175 billion if payments to the children’s parents are included"
You aren't the only one to suggest in this thread that "think of the children" is usually disingenuous. It is definitely an end goal for a lot of people (otherwise the argument would have no power to manipulate people).
I think people make many choices that are harmful to children because they are trying to protect them and/or work to ensure their children's success.
“think of the children” has always been a lie, though. Or at best a surface level truth. When the rubber hits the road (i.e. when it comes to spending money) the US as a country doesn’t care about things like early childhood education all that much.
In many ways the pandemic response was in line with the norm: rich kids do just fine, poorer kids are mostly ignored.
> When the rubber hits the road (i.e. when it comes to spending money) the US as a country doesn’t care about things like early childhood education all that much.
What countries fund education better per capita than the US? Can you give numbers?
According to various sources, for example https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp , US per-student K-12 education funding is only behind four OECD countries: Switzerland, Austria, and Norway (and far behind Luxembourg, which is an outlier).
The US is ahead of highly developed peer countries like Ireland and Belgium, and *way* ahead of the OECD average.
Meta-point: It irritates me when people assume the problem with US education is low spending, because the US education system is obviously so bad that that must be true, when in reality the problem is much more complex.
In my experience the people who believe this never have numbers at hand; they are just shooting from the hip.
It's not quite a lie, just a very narrow scope. The implied context of "think of the children" is usually something like, "Think of how horrible it would be if the children were exposed to temptations like sex and drugs." Other aspects of children's welfare don't figure as highly in the calculus of those who espouse this slogan.
Rich kids and poor kids alike were ignored by the school districts.
The vast difference is that rich kids had many other avenues for learning and some may even have progressed more quickly freed from the tyrannically slow pace of in-person schooling.
Rich kids have access to private schools, which aren't subject to teacher's unions and political battles like the confusing one you had in New York between the Governor and the Mayor of NYC. They were contradicting each other on policy predictions and did a big disservice.
In California, apparently teacher's unions have been blocking school opening plans. That's what I read and it could just be false or misleading news.
Again, rich people afford private schools, tutors, etc.
In contrast, in France they just went under lockdown in the north this weekend, yet for many months now they had schools open. In the US we're opening up but schools stay closed in many places. Who's being scientific and who's being political?
Nothing makes much sense! We must question authority and special interest groups, constantly. Take nothing for granted, even if a politician claims to be on the side of science.
I dont know, US seems to me to ve obsessed with early childhood education. The expectations on when the kid should read and what not seem to be pushes to very low ages.
Or, it’s like education is a state and local issue and there is a US military sized budget line item called state and local education spending that’s not included in OP’s calculation of federal spending.
As opposed to what? All countries use the same argument to push popular programs, even if it makes little sense.
I don’t see the US using the argument more than Spain for instance. We’ve had a new “educational reform” every ~8 years with every government change, because “think of the children”, when everyone knew the reasons had nothing to do with the children.
When push comes to shove, children can't vote, but 70-80 year old geezers can. And many politicians are in their age bracket too. Forcing kids to give up a year of their childhood just to (in the best case, assuming school closures are effective) provide old people with a month or so extra average lifespan is unjust and incredibly cruel.
I don't understand - are you implying that the act of deciding to have a long lockdown necessitates that the decision makers do not care about children, or are there specifics you are leaving unsaid?
> are you implying that the act of deciding to have a long lockdown necessitates that the decision makers do not care about children
I do get this impression from watching interviews with some of the public-health experts advising governments. As an academic, I can recognize my fellow academics who are obsessively focused on their own field and passionate about it, but they might not realize that people outside the field don’t have the same investment. For some of these public-health experts, reducing transmission to zero and avoiding every potential death is paramount, and the societal and political consequences are only at the margins of their consciousness at best. However, the general public is broadly ready to accept some level of morbidity and disease spread in order to live with fewer restrictions, there is only a debate about how much.
Many decisions about what precisely needs to be locked down seem to have been made without much concern for the needs and interests of children. In the summer, for example, quite a few areas opened stores before playgrounds and restaurants before schools.
> are you implying that the act of deciding to have a long lockdown necessitates that the decision makers do not care about children
Not quite... I'm referring to the fact that society has often gotten quite worked up over "think of the children" arguments for perceived dangers, but when faced with a real threat to child welfare, the response has been rather mild in comparison.
It is always about he teachers unions using students and children to accomplish a political goal. If you do not raise teacher pay, you are hurting children. Do not fund education in the next funding round, hurting the children.
The second the teachers needed to be brave and show what bravery was, they buckled, hid, and showed that it was all bluster.
Well the decision is to either send them to school and risk them all getting infected with and becoming superspreaders of a novel, fast-spreading virus that we don't fully understand yet, or keep them home and risk mental health issues from social isolation.
We chose the less harmful option, it's not that complicated. There's no conspiracy here.
> Anyone else find it strange that a country that has often fallen in line with "think of the children" arguments for hypothetical dangers appears to be completely uncaring about very real dangers of social isolation that are impacting our youth?
No, because (1) it hasn't fallen in line with “think of the children” so much as invoked it as a post-hoc rationalization, and (2) isn't indifferent to the danger here; both the left side (who has been arguing the need to apply the resources for safe reopening of schools) and the right side (who has been opposing those expenditures but pushing reopening anyway) are in agreement that it is a serious concern.
>about very real dangers of social isolation that are impacting our youth?
Can you imagine if this happened when there was no Internet, Mobile phones, Long Distance still existed, no Satellite TV, etc? I grew up like that (Rural Farm) and there were periods of months during the summer I just read books, and wandered around outside and didn't see another kid for what seemed an eternity. If I complained my parents would find me some work to do. My wife thinks I'm normal so I guess it turned out ok, didn't need any mental therapy or anything.
if US really cared about children they would ended the humanitarian crisis in Yemen... so far 85 000+ children under 5 starved to death and they saying 400,000 are going to if this blockade doesn't end.
Well, it is for the good of children as the worst thing a child can get is "implicit racism" that can't be cleansed.
As teacher's union repeatedly said, reopening schools even in this December is "a recipe for propagating structural racism". See? what's bigger than racism? Nothing is bigger than racisms, be it truths, problems, issues, or challenges in the US.
So, if you dare to mention reopening the school again, you're a racist. If you dare to discuss education reform, you're a damn racist. If you dare to challenge teachers union, you're a racist. Case closed.
I mean the "education reform movement" was started by segregationists after brown v board of ed, and many southern counties privatized schools to avoid complying
"think of the children" is only about keeping them free from sin, not actually educating them because well educated children are likely to become atheist adults.
Getting money out of politics and the church out of education are the two most effective things we can do to advance our civilization.
I am convinced social isolation is a convenient excuse to blame for preexisting mental health problems once the primary coping mechanisms are removed. Nonsense like very real danger of social isolation ignores valid problems that were previously discarded out of inconvenience.
No weirder than “prolife” folks often intersecting heavily with “pro war” and “anti lockdown” folks.
US lives in a weird bubble where they ignore the very successful policies around the world and create these weird internal narratives that they all follow relatively blindly
Problem is US leaders are elected based on populism rather than merit and whether theyre actually competent, let alone qualified.
The result is a political system that rewards morally bankrupt, sociopathic behavior that prioritizes self interest and profits over people.
Many will say it has worked considering how wealthy the US is and how it facilitates innovation. However, this is only made possible by the fact US, as global reserve currency of the world, is able to print $$$ w/impunity while exporting much of the resulting inflation which rest of the world has to bare -- essentially subsidizing US wealth.
The issue with covid is now the mutants. England did not lock down the schools this past winter and the B117 spread thru the schools into the wider population.
Brazil and its variant seems to be even worse and they basically let the virus rip from day 1.
These new variants are more lethal and more transmissible. So now we are really screwed unless the vaccine proves effective enough with masks to slow the spread. And that’s not guaranteed. And then we have the rest of the world to deal with.
I don’t expect covid to go away for at least 5 years and that includes boosters and masking. And lots of covid tests.
It’s largely the propagation of fear from the media and the teachers unions who don’t want to work (and the politicians trying to push large stimulus checks to the unions).
For instance, Florida never shut down schools. In contrast, Chicago and SF teachers unions are/were pushing to keep schools closed.
The “science” (note: much of it is not peer reviewed) thus far indicates it’s safe to open schools and there’s little to no risk. at this point most at risk individuals have been vaccinated and estimates were that 40-70% of people already had covid19 (so even less risk of spread). Children have reduced risk of spreading disease as well.
Anybody else find it strange that having students out of school for another few months for their teachers to be vaccinated is being painted as the most important thing in the world when they've already been out of school for a year?
It's fine to mourn the damage that's been done from kids being locked up for a year. To act like the marginal damage from adding a few more months to that year is murder, that's political. To act like the risk to teachers and the families they care for is obviously less important without doing the math is just hatred for working people.
edit: how about this - you're allowed to send your kids back to school if you're willing to stand in a room filled with 30 different people from 30 different households for 8 hours a day, unvaccinated.
My daughter has been doing exactly that all year as a teacher in a private school. My son has been attending full day class in a private school long before vaccinations were available. This has been true for private schools all around the country (fortunately w we don't have teachers unions who think they deserve extra special protection, more than everyone else in society). And guess what? No problems. Wash your hands, stay home when you're sick and it's amazing how there are no dreaded COVID "superspreader" events.
I have been out on the front lines as a first responder since the beginning w/o a vaccination. And I would gladly be anywhere without vaccinations and masks, because I know the stats and probabilities, and I don't cower in the face of risk, as lockdown and mask proponents are.
People get sick. People die (2.8M in the US, per the CDC) It's happened since the beginning of humans, and it will always be that way. In past pandemics we never were paranoid cowards like this (smallpox, asian flu, etc), but somehow all of that wisdom was trashed last year because people are so afraid of risk and think they can actually "control" a virus. Good luck with that.
We need to accept that 3 million Americans will die this year and we can't keep everyone alive forever no matter how hard we try - And that our bizarre fixation on making every decision as if Covid19 deaths are the only societal outcome that matters is profoundly wrong.
It's horrifying how we've allowed politicians to inflict collective punishment on our children for over a year. The data is clear that COVID-19 is less dangerous to children than seasonal influenza.
I don't know if you live in the US but for anyone who doesn't I think this mainly boils down to this: the average US citizen does not believe metal health issues are real. In high school I've met people who were clearly suicidal and I've seen the advice given to them: "Just go outside more" or "you don't have anything to be sad about".
One of my friends was depressed and suicidal through high school. He often acted out and got sent to a out-of-school suspension program. There he told people what he was depressed and had thoughts of self harm. What did the advisors of this program say? They didn't believe he was depressed! They said "If you want to kill yourself then why don't you go to the train down the block and jump in front of it".
This is all anacdata but it's my guess that the HN-bubble likely selects for people who don't think like this so it might not seem like this on the internet.
This was my experience growing up. I was suicidal by fourth grade. I was told by the school consular it was my fault that I was being bullied and was feeling bad about myself.
My parents’ solution was to take me to a Christian consular who didn’t really help the situation.
All of my symptoms of being bipolar were explained as my deliberate choice to be a unrepentant, sinful child.
I didn’t see a proper psychiatrist until I was 33. My mom figured something was wrong because my uncle was bipolar and it’s genetic. Didn’t tell me that until I was diagnosed.
Probably because my dad thinks my bipolar uncle is demon-possessed.
Many other people in my support group have similar stories. If anything, I was one of the lucky ones since my parents were otherwise very supportive.
The country has been heavily banking on discouraging the rank-and-file class from having children, and replacing them through immigration. And the ones that are already in the system are very heavily discouraged against the path to independent success and self-esteem. So the recent events are just another step in the same direction.
P.S. I don't think it's a carefully engineered master plan to eliminate independent thinkers, but rather what the society converges into when you eliminate the need for regular people to solve the problems on a daily basis. Medieval feudalism over again.
Or children living a care free life shocked to learn there really are invisible monsters?
Being socially isolated wasn’t the only new reality they had to assimilate.
As someone who grew up rural, DIY, ending up further left than Sanders, the one size fits all assembly line model of education we push kids through doesn’t really seem like it’s thinking of the children.
It seems more like it’s “think of the past greatness these behaviors brought to the motherland!”
As usual the real outcome is forcing intense logistical effort on the masses to manage all this for diminishing returns in their paycheck and increase in stress.
It’s hard for me to see it as truth instead of hand me down narrative.
The Greeks taught math and physics before we had bachelors and PhDs. Our educational system looks back to medieval France, where pretentious ranking for political reasons took hold, when the top down hierarchy knew best!
If we want to think of the children stop forcing them to fellate grandpas old wives tales
So if I'm reading this right, Reuters sent survey's to an unknown number of school districts. Of those sent, 74 replied, and of those 55 answered "yes, we saw an increase in this metric" to at least two questions on the survey.
How many would answer yes to at least two in most years? How many schools saw a decrease in metrics? And how many surveys weren't completed, as a district having issues seems more likely to respond?
I don't doubt there have been issues, but without the full survey details I don't trust any of this article's conclusions.
Nor do I, and especially the youngest students might be suffering, but at the same time there seems to be an concerted effort from the established "brick-and-mortar" education establishment to discourage from further experiments in the remote learning field, something which seriously threatens the way education has been executed hitherto, being potentially both much cheaper and more individually targeted.
That's at least the conclusion that I draw from the fact that there are multiple reports of this supposed mental health hazard that comes with remote learning, but the evidence is notoriously anecdotal. The only reliable real statistic I have seen (from Sweden) is that the quality of learning and grades on average have gone up, if anything.
It is really nothing particular about schools. In Spain the first day schools were closed children started playing on the streets, or playing basketball and soccer(you can play soccer anywhere). They were quite happy doing that.
Then the authorities said: No, no no! Kids must stay in house all day, closed all public spaces, something contranature for kids.
It was the get "in house", secluded, don't do anything socially. Too many don'ts with no does.
I can stay indoors playing guitar or piano. Reading books,or HN, or cooking. Even then I need to get out from time to time. It is not realistic to expect children doing the same.
Most of those activities were not really dangerous with some restrictions.
You can go in a bus or car with mask if people don't talk and introduce air from the outside.
You can play different basketball or football games with little risk. You can jump rope. But bureaucrats decided they were little monks. They are not.
School is not the necessary thing here. It is playing socially and exercising what children need like water and air.
> You can go in a bus or car with mask if people don't talk and introduce air from the outside.
Don't talk don't breathe wear two masks don't leave the house we're all gonna die.
In reality kids are not an at-risk group and there used to be a healthcare maxim "first, do no harm". When did it become OK to hurt one group (young healthy people) in exchange for hypothetical benefits to another group?
Sure, but the entire point of closing the schools is to force the kids to stay home (or at least stay isolated from others) so just accept the terms mean basically the same thing.
Having 30-ish (or more) children crammed inside a classroom is not the same as having smaller groups of children play together outside in terms of potential transmission.
This is really unfortunate second order effect of lockdowns. You see the SAT scores go down as well and some groups don't want to admit the negative effects of in a shift to in home learning, especially among the most vulnerable groups. And we're not even honest about it and just retreat to the idea of getting rid of standardized tests altogether to mask over the achievement gap.
The fallout of all of this will take years to unravel, and it all likely points to overkill. Was it justified given uncertainty (i.e. prepare for the p90 or p95 outcome)? Possibly. But what I saw from the leadership class the last year was a complete disregard for the concerns of the little people and their livelihoods. Once things got politicized re: Trump, the most polarizing american political figure of my lifetime, it became even worse in multiple directions.
Very few people come out looking good in this, except the scientists and regulators who pushed the vaccine forward.
Gen Z today are becoming increasingly more isolated; the long-term effects of this are yet to be known and could be serious. But it angers me that this is often an issue that's overlooked, especially when it's such a prevalent one.
It's truly disturbing to think of the little regard there is for the mental health of young people, especially in an age fraught with enough social isolation as it is. Gen Z will be forever known as The Lonely Generation if something won't be done to help.
Recently, RTE News in Ireland did a segment covering short films that young people made about their experiences in lockdown (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jZWm6tzpQ), and it was truly harrowing to hear what they had to say and the short films that resulted.
If social isolation were a real concern for people they would get off their damn phones and drastically reduce their access to social media. Blaming this entirely on the pandemic is sorely misplaced and not a solution.
Terrifyingly, this isolation makes it easier to manipulate and polarize the population. Paired with capitalistic engagement-hungry algorithms, I see a dark future.
My greatest fear in this whole thing is precedent. It's easy to sell a new "Once-In-A-Century Event" every couple of years. If we burnt the whole world's goodwill on this disease, and a more devastating one comes along, what are we going to do?
How about here in Australia? I think our outcomes look pretty good. We went hard and early, locked down, and now we basically have no restrictions internally (apart from not being able to travel internationally except to New Zealand (travel bubble should be starting in two or three weeks), and having to quarantine on entry coming from anywhere but NZ for two weeks and with two negative tests on I think the 10th and 13th days).
We have cinemas, sporting events, music concerts, etc. all open, you don't have to wear masks, you don't have to sit with empty seats between you and others. Schools have been mostly normal this year (save for a 3 day lockdown in QLD and a one week lockdown in Victoria and Western Australia). Lots of people are still choosing to work from home but offices are back to normal, domestic travel has been back on all this year an a decent part of last year... All with basically zero community transmission.
All this with about an eight week lockdown where I live (unfortunately Victoria had another outbreak so had to have another three months later on but got that back down to zero community transmission). So the lesson should be that it actually was perfectly possible to eliminate the virus locally and open up again fairly quickly. We could have done it even quicker if our incompetent Federal Government had acted more quickly, but luckily for us the State Governments all did mostly all the right things apart from a few issues (letting in a cruise ship with dozens of infected people with no quarantine or testing early on in New South Wales being a big one, and some issues with hotel quarantine later on).
I do recall talk about "overkill" at the beginning - that if we were doing enough, it would look like overkill by the time it was done. Likewise, if it did not look like overkill, we could have done better and saved more lives.
> The fallout of all of this will take years to unravel, and it all likely points to overkill.
No, the biggest problem was the vast underkill at the start. After that, everybody was screwed.
For starters, a whole bunch of things needed funding. Mask manufacturers should have been given contracts so they would switch to 24/7 production--didn't happen. Unemployment needed to be funded so people could stay home when states burned through their funds--didn't happen. Schools needed money for A/V equipment, training, and internet connections for students--didn't happen.
Things needed to shut down fast at the beginning. Mardi Gras happened because the feds buried information. SXSW went down to the wire before being cancelled. International flights took forever before even they were finally cancelled.
I can go on and on and on ... this ain't what "overkill" looks like. This is what "malicious incompetence" looks like, and I won't let you rewrite that history.
Before delving into accusations of maliciousness, might I suggest you first review the annual budgets of the relevant public health agencies? At least a hundred billion dollars have been spent by my government during my lifetime on public health. Some of this spending was overseen by the very same officials you see on TV condemning others for their poor performance. The budgets they were given feel to me like more than enough money to be prepared for a foreseeable respiratory pandemic.
I am neither in the U.S. nor a student, not even an extrovert - and I still feel the effects of our local lockdown on my mental stability. So does my wife, who is usually more resilient than I am.
This will have a lot of subtle consequences down the line.
Speaking for myself: the biggest consequence for me, in terms of mental health, has been the total erosion of my belief that most people were basically good, and decent, and cared about the welfare of others. It was a choice I made years ago; I wanted to be the sort of person that believed those things, even when there was occasional evidence to the contrary.
But 2020 brought a trifecta of social stress that laid bare some festering social diseases. Both national and global politics, the response to Black Lives Matter, and the pandemic, all in the same year.
I don't know quite how to describe it. It's the loss of an ideal? I don't know. But, I feel it, viscerally. Whereas depression is more of an internally-focused feeling, this is externally-focused.
In the before times, I loved road trips, especially through smaller towns. It was a part of my identity. I've traveled through most of what's west of the Mississippi. I always knew that I had political differences with many of the people in the places I visited, but it rarely mattered. It wouldn't come up in casual conversation. Everyone was friendly. I won't ever be able to see people in those places the same way again.
I happily spent money in small towns as I went. Gas, food, lodging, services, the occasional trinket. I can't do that anymore, either.
I've been fortunate throughout the last 12 months in a lot of ways, and it's still left a big long-term impact on me.
> the total erosion of my belief that most people were basically good, and decent, and cared about the welfare of others
Oh my god, this. When the pandemic is over, I’ll be left with the knowledge that a significant fraction of the people around me at any given moment wouldn’t lift a finger for someone else if it meant even the slightest inconvenience or discomfort for them. I don’t know how to recover from that.
Are things really that different than they were before though? I still chat with my neighbors, doctors etc etc... everyone is just as friendly as before. I think it’s just our main connection to the outside world has been doomscrolling... I don’t think the people in this world are that different. They are good, caring, loving... despite what some would have us believe.
I too, feel the most significant way my mental health has been negatively affected was not due to the lack of in-person face-to-face social interaction, but rather the destruction of my faith in humanity. I will add a caveat that some countries, societies, or even enclaves, have done a lot better job than others.
The pandemic made me lose hope that we will adequately deal with something as abstract as the climate crisis when people cannot even act appropriately when the effect of their combined actions can be seen in the numbers just two weeks later.
I felt the same way. I live in San Francisco which has overwhelmingly supported liberal policies for many years. The young progressives, who have the most free time and money to “fight” for their fellow human beings, were the ones buying up all the meat, eggs and toilet paper when this thing started.
I work on vaccine scheduling for a large health system. We are now dealing with a large influx of young people lying about having a chronic illness to jump the vaccine line (the requirement for verification was recently lifted).
I’ve grown pretty disillusioned and can now see there is major hypocrisy on both sides.
Thats something I realized on myself. Since the start of the first lockdown I am much more concerned about my own health. That combined with the social isolation and the stress I experience at work and university is a really bad combination.
But with everyone talking about health, the virus and the pandemic, it seems obvious that more people become aware about their own health.
What would it have been like if the schools had not been closed?
If millions had been infected in a short time and the hospitals had been overloaded so that in addition to the deaths from Corona, the deaths from lack of capacity would have been added?
How traumatic would that be for the children?
Are there any studies on this from New York or Italy?
Can the consequences of the lockdown be so cleanly separated from the consequences of the pandemic?
Couldn't it also be that the lockdown simply makes people more aware of the threat of the pandemic because it has a tangible impact on their personal lives?
It's nice that schools that follow the hygiene rules have fewer COVID cases, but what percentage of schools have the space for it and actually implement it?
Why else have studies shown that school closures are one of the top 3 measures against the spread of infection, after closing down restaurants and limiting contacts to 5 people?
Likely nothing. Look at Florida for a decent example of what’d happen at scale if we left schools open. It’s been fully open, 5 days a week in person, since the start of the most recent school year last September. The state as a whole has done better at dealing with the virus than other similar sized large states. It also has a wide range from dense urban to light rural populations.
It’s not that you don’t have any mitigations. It’s that you tailor them to the problem. Florida did have lockdowns for senior centers and that likely lowered the overall death rate given the skewed mortality stats.
So why did they open, but not CA or NY? I’m sure cozying up to the teacher’s unions at the very least factored into those states’ Governor’s decisions.
COVID does worse in warmer climates; it would be useful to see data adjusted for factors such as ventilation, climate, baseline prevalence, viral variants, etc.
No one AFAIK has attempted to do any of this work. All I've seen are unsubstantiated claims for each side's agenda.
We need to know what hard conditions guarantee an R0 small enough to prevent disease transmission in schools.
>"It’s been fully open, 5 days a week in person, since the start of the most recent school year last September."
Not true. The largest county in Florida, Miami-Dade, has had my child do school at home since March 2020. Only a tiny percentage of students are allowed in person even now.
I wonder what the Covid infection and death rate for teachers is compared to CA and NY. It’s easy for you to say they should’ve come back to school when you’re not the one getting exposed to 30+ families at once every day.
Why are you making absurd claims like " fully open, 5 days a week in person, since the start of the most recent school year last September", that trivial to refute with a simple web search?
Comparing regions where schools opened earlier or were open for longer doesn’t support this extreme claim that “additional millions would have been infected in a short time”
> Can the consequences of the lockdown be so cleanly separated from the consequences of the pandemic?
The consequences of the pandemic with all it's effects will be difficult to predict. But we do have data of how isolation/lockdown effects people[1]. Although no studies (I know of) that deal with the effects on children. The below linked study is worth reading beyond the abstract. I'd imagine it will be more severe than how it affects adults :(
edit: I found this: Nutrition crisis looms as more than 39 billion in-school meals missed since start of pandemichttps://www.unicef.org/press-releases/nutrition-crisis-looms... - so distribution of hardship is distributed unevenly and not in favor of already vulnerable groups.
Lots of European countries kept schools open during most of the pandemic so the answer is quit simple not much. I don’t know what studies you are referencing but they don’t seem to be backed by the experience in European countries.
> Lots of European countries kept schools open during most of the pandemic
More like "SOME European countries kept schools open during SOME of the pandemic". And look at the state of Covid in the EU now, with infection rates climbing yet again.
What were the infection numbers when those European schools were open? Most of Europe did an actual lockdown and so was able to open schools at times when the numbers are down.
The claim that a lack of lockdown means the healthcare system being overloaded with COVID victims, leading to no capacity for sufferers of other illnesses, depends on a major assumption: that hospitals would have to treat patients coming in with COVID symptoms. Another approach could be to triage COVID patients away from intensive care, providing them only with palliative, end-of-life care, and letting those beds remain available to the bulk of the population. That might sound pretty harsh, but it is actually how things have played out in some regions of the world.
I suggest you might be seeing things too linearly. Consider all the evolved variants.
By letting it run wild you would a) just accelerate viral evolution and b) eventually and unpredictably find yourself in a situation where the mortality rate might spiral out of control across all kinds of demographics.
You would then do the same thing as now: lockdown measures to curb mortality.
I guess the question of lockdown is not if but when: After many more deaths and mutations which render costly vaccines ineffective or early, vaccinate as much as possible as fast as possible and get done with the virus.
All that being said: Do you have a source for your claim that certain countries triage patients with COVID to end of life care? I’d be genuinely interested in reading up on that.
I live in a part of North America that kept its schools open during most of the pandemic. Children are learning and playing together. The games they play are pretty much the games they would have played a bit over a year ago. The adults in their lives don't transfer the stress that they are feeling to children whenever two kids get the urge to hug each other. It is almost as though the pandemic does not exist.
For the most part, it does not exist in our small corner of the continent because adults behaved responsibly. This means that most of the measures we take happen behind the scenes: the children have a few more rules to comply with, adults calmly correct them when those rules are broken, and (most important) the focus is on teaching them good habits and sheltering them from the burden of the emotional stresses of this exceptional time.
If we have another outbreak, I am all for shutting down the schools as a part of a swift and hopefully short response. Just as keeping children home for months on end is not good for their mental health, exposing them to a twisted version of the classroom environment for an extended period of time is not good for their mental health.
I am not going to claim that it will always work, but it did work the one time our schools were shut down.
That being said, we have kept numbers very low. This means the response can be targeted since tracing the source of an infection is more realistic. When it looked like schools would be affected, they were temporarily shut down. Since it came during the Christmas break, only seven days were lost for students and two for staff. The most recent increase did not affect schools, so the response was directed towards the most common causes of spread. Now that new cases are due to travel and direct contact with someone who has travelled, those targeted restrictions are being lifted.
Is this approach going to be effective in the long run? Probably not. Remaining on guard for an extended duration is stressful and the virus will eventually catch us off guard. On the other hand, our children are still enjoying their childhood and the burden is not so heavy on adults.
Readit News
Kudos for expressing an unpopular opinion.
I'll express another one: I think the whole thing about "ZOMG! Suicide rates through the roof!!!elevelty!1!" is blown out of proportion, largely thanks to pseudo-news web sites trying to grab clicks on the internet.
The school district where I live put out a press release lamenting an 18% increase in student suicide in 2020. Reading to the end, you find out that the actual numeric increase was something like 2. Two dead kids isn't good in any way. But when the number of suicides reaches a meaningful fraction of the number of COVID deaths, then I'll take it seriously.
Having to stay home for a year is nothing — absolutely nothing — compared with what children had to deal with during previous social upheavals (world wars, and the like).
And an 8 digit body count would be impossible in the US for a disease with a >99% survival rate. So quit the hyperbole.
Surely with so many similar cases the processes could be streamlined?
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Obviously this "8 digit body count" concept is a load of that which makes the grass grow green.
Personally, I think that should be flipped, but kid’s don’t vote.
[0]https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/23x...
The most interesting place I've seen this type of argument made it along these lines:
- US policy is for housing to appreciate in cost over time
- Housing is demanded by young people starting new households, and freed up by old people dying or moving into group housing.
- Housing policy is thus a massive ongoing transfer of wealth from incipient households to long-established ones.
- This is no way for a non-dysfunctional society to operate
Not saying kids don't deserve to be well-cared for. I was a welfare kid and I'm glad there were welfare programs. Just saying I think we'll all be glad we can also get some help when we're over 65, especially if we can't count on our family (I have no siblings and may not have children).
It's just that high absolute amount of medicare spending throws off the comparison.
https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF1_2_Public_expenditure_educat...
Take just the retirement program figures out and the figures are much closer to what you prefer. Take out the half of Medicare that was paid for by seniors and it’s even closer.
"Do you think the budget deficit is especially unfair to younger Americans?" -> " a follow up, do you think we'd have such a large deficit if children were allowed to vote?" Such a good use of debate.
I think it's worth debating whether to give teens the right to vote. In my mind at least to 13 and up - but it's capricious / hard to draw the line or come up with 'tests' that aren't flat out repeating our disgusting past treatment of Black Americans.
The West Wing episode [clip below] spells out some of the argument:
I miss the West Wing universe. Would be awesome to see a reboot optimistic show about getting things accomplished, showing a vision for how it's possible to tackle climate change and our other ailments. But move the show past today's progress (it does not treat women well/give them voice, stance on gay marriage etc).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSDxg-bDw1A
The whole point of social security is a government retirement program based on you putting money into it.
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I think people make many choices that are harmful to children because they are trying to protect them and/or work to ensure their children's success.
In many ways the pandemic response was in line with the norm: rich kids do just fine, poorer kids are mostly ignored.
What countries fund education better per capita than the US? Can you give numbers?
According to various sources, for example https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp , US per-student K-12 education funding is only behind four OECD countries: Switzerland, Austria, and Norway (and far behind Luxembourg, which is an outlier).
The US is ahead of highly developed peer countries like Ireland and Belgium, and *way* ahead of the OECD average.
Meta-point: It irritates me when people assume the problem with US education is low spending, because the US education system is obviously so bad that that must be true, when in reality the problem is much more complex.
In my experience the people who believe this never have numbers at hand; they are just shooting from the hip.
The vast difference is that rich kids had many other avenues for learning and some may even have progressed more quickly freed from the tyrannically slow pace of in-person schooling.
In California, apparently teacher's unions have been blocking school opening plans. That's what I read and it could just be false or misleading news.
Again, rich people afford private schools, tutors, etc.
In contrast, in France they just went under lockdown in the north this weekend, yet for many months now they had schools open. In the US we're opening up but schools stay closed in many places. Who's being scientific and who's being political?
Nothing makes much sense! We must question authority and special interest groups, constantly. Take nothing for granted, even if a politician claims to be on the side of science.
I don’t see the US using the argument more than Spain for instance. We’ve had a new “educational reform” every ~8 years with every government change, because “think of the children”, when everyone knew the reasons had nothing to do with the children.
I do get this impression from watching interviews with some of the public-health experts advising governments. As an academic, I can recognize my fellow academics who are obsessively focused on their own field and passionate about it, but they might not realize that people outside the field don’t have the same investment. For some of these public-health experts, reducing transmission to zero and avoiding every potential death is paramount, and the societal and political consequences are only at the margins of their consciousness at best. However, the general public is broadly ready to accept some level of morbidity and disease spread in order to live with fewer restrictions, there is only a debate about how much.
Not quite... I'm referring to the fact that society has often gotten quite worked up over "think of the children" arguments for perceived dangers, but when faced with a real threat to child welfare, the response has been rather mild in comparison.
It is always about he teachers unions using students and children to accomplish a political goal. If you do not raise teacher pay, you are hurting children. Do not fund education in the next funding round, hurting the children.
The second the teachers needed to be brave and show what bravery was, they buckled, hid, and showed that it was all bluster.
We chose the less harmful option, it's not that complicated. There's no conspiracy here.
Ron DeSantis would agree.
No, because (1) it hasn't fallen in line with “think of the children” so much as invoked it as a post-hoc rationalization, and (2) isn't indifferent to the danger here; both the left side (who has been arguing the need to apply the resources for safe reopening of schools) and the right side (who has been opposing those expenditures but pushing reopening anyway) are in agreement that it is a serious concern.
Can you imagine if this happened when there was no Internet, Mobile phones, Long Distance still existed, no Satellite TV, etc? I grew up like that (Rural Farm) and there were periods of months during the summer I just read books, and wandered around outside and didn't see another kid for what seemed an eternity. If I complained my parents would find me some work to do. My wife thinks I'm normal so I guess it turned out ok, didn't need any mental therapy or anything.
As teacher's union repeatedly said, reopening schools even in this December is "a recipe for propagating structural racism". See? what's bigger than racism? Nothing is bigger than racisms, be it truths, problems, issues, or challenges in the US.
So, if you dare to mention reopening the school again, you're a racist. If you dare to discuss education reform, you're a damn racist. If you dare to challenge teachers union, you're a racist. Case closed.
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Getting money out of politics and the church out of education are the two most effective things we can do to advance our civilization.
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US lives in a weird bubble where they ignore the very successful policies around the world and create these weird internal narratives that they all follow relatively blindly
The result is a political system that rewards morally bankrupt, sociopathic behavior that prioritizes self interest and profits over people.
Many will say it has worked considering how wealthy the US is and how it facilitates innovation. However, this is only made possible by the fact US, as global reserve currency of the world, is able to print $$$ w/impunity while exporting much of the resulting inflation which rest of the world has to bare -- essentially subsidizing US wealth.
Brazil and its variant seems to be even worse and they basically let the virus rip from day 1.
These new variants are more lethal and more transmissible. So now we are really screwed unless the vaccine proves effective enough with masks to slow the spread. And that’s not guaranteed. And then we have the rest of the world to deal with.
I don’t expect covid to go away for at least 5 years and that includes boosters and masking. And lots of covid tests.
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It’s largely the propagation of fear from the media and the teachers unions who don’t want to work (and the politicians trying to push large stimulus checks to the unions).
For instance, Florida never shut down schools. In contrast, Chicago and SF teachers unions are/were pushing to keep schools closed.
The “science” (note: much of it is not peer reviewed) thus far indicates it’s safe to open schools and there’s little to no risk. at this point most at risk individuals have been vaccinated and estimates were that 40-70% of people already had covid19 (so even less risk of spread). Children have reduced risk of spreading disease as well.
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It's fine to mourn the damage that's been done from kids being locked up for a year. To act like the marginal damage from adding a few more months to that year is murder, that's political. To act like the risk to teachers and the families they care for is obviously less important without doing the math is just hatred for working people.
edit: how about this - you're allowed to send your kids back to school if you're willing to stand in a room filled with 30 different people from 30 different households for 8 hours a day, unvaccinated.
I have been out on the front lines as a first responder since the beginning w/o a vaccination. And I would gladly be anywhere without vaccinations and masks, because I know the stats and probabilities, and I don't cower in the face of risk, as lockdown and mask proponents are.
People get sick. People die (2.8M in the US, per the CDC) It's happened since the beginning of humans, and it will always be that way. In past pandemics we never were paranoid cowards like this (smallpox, asian flu, etc), but somehow all of that wisdom was trashed last year because people are so afraid of risk and think they can actually "control" a virus. Good luck with that.
We need to accept that 3 million Americans will die this year and we can't keep everyone alive forever no matter how hard we try - And that our bizarre fixation on making every decision as if Covid19 deaths are the only societal outcome that matters is profoundly wrong.
One of my friends was depressed and suicidal through high school. He often acted out and got sent to a out-of-school suspension program. There he told people what he was depressed and had thoughts of self harm. What did the advisors of this program say? They didn't believe he was depressed! They said "If you want to kill yourself then why don't you go to the train down the block and jump in front of it".
This is all anacdata but it's my guess that the HN-bubble likely selects for people who don't think like this so it might not seem like this on the internet.
My parents’ solution was to take me to a Christian consular who didn’t really help the situation.
All of my symptoms of being bipolar were explained as my deliberate choice to be a unrepentant, sinful child.
I didn’t see a proper psychiatrist until I was 33. My mom figured something was wrong because my uncle was bipolar and it’s genetic. Didn’t tell me that until I was diagnosed.
Probably because my dad thinks my bipolar uncle is demon-possessed.
Many other people in my support group have similar stories. If anything, I was one of the lucky ones since my parents were otherwise very supportive.
P.S. I don't think it's a carefully engineered master plan to eliminate independent thinkers, but rather what the society converges into when you eliminate the need for regular people to solve the problems on a daily basis. Medieval feudalism over again.
Or children living a care free life shocked to learn there really are invisible monsters?
Being socially isolated wasn’t the only new reality they had to assimilate.
As someone who grew up rural, DIY, ending up further left than Sanders, the one size fits all assembly line model of education we push kids through doesn’t really seem like it’s thinking of the children.
It seems more like it’s “think of the past greatness these behaviors brought to the motherland!”
As usual the real outcome is forcing intense logistical effort on the masses to manage all this for diminishing returns in their paycheck and increase in stress.
It’s hard for me to see it as truth instead of hand me down narrative.
The Greeks taught math and physics before we had bachelors and PhDs. Our educational system looks back to medieval France, where pretentious ranking for political reasons took hold, when the top down hierarchy knew best!
If we want to think of the children stop forcing them to fellate grandpas old wives tales
How many would answer yes to at least two in most years? How many schools saw a decrease in metrics? And how many surveys weren't completed, as a district having issues seems more likely to respond?
I don't doubt there have been issues, but without the full survey details I don't trust any of this article's conclusions.
Nor do I, and especially the youngest students might be suffering, but at the same time there seems to be an concerted effort from the established "brick-and-mortar" education establishment to discourage from further experiments in the remote learning field, something which seriously threatens the way education has been executed hitherto, being potentially both much cheaper and more individually targeted.
That's at least the conclusion that I draw from the fact that there are multiple reports of this supposed mental health hazard that comes with remote learning, but the evidence is notoriously anecdotal. The only reliable real statistic I have seen (from Sweden) is that the quality of learning and grades on average have gone up, if anything.
Then the authorities said: No, no no! Kids must stay in house all day, closed all public spaces, something contranature for kids.
It was the get "in house", secluded, don't do anything socially. Too many don'ts with no does.
I can stay indoors playing guitar or piano. Reading books,or HN, or cooking. Even then I need to get out from time to time. It is not realistic to expect children doing the same.
Most of those activities were not really dangerous with some restrictions.
You can go in a bus or car with mask if people don't talk and introduce air from the outside.
You can play different basketball or football games with little risk. You can jump rope. But bureaucrats decided they were little monks. They are not.
School is not the necessary thing here. It is playing socially and exercising what children need like water and air.
Don't talk don't breathe wear two masks don't leave the house we're all gonna die.
In reality kids are not an at-risk group and there used to be a healthcare maxim "first, do no harm". When did it become OK to hurt one group (young healthy people) in exchange for hypothetical benefits to another group?
A trolley is running towards a single 80-year old. If you do pull a trigger, it will instead kill an unknown number of people, including children.
If you don't, you're a monster.
I thought the problem was kids were an infection vector and could spread COVID-19 to older folks at home?
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Very few people come out looking good in this, except the scientists and regulators who pushed the vaccine forward.
It's truly disturbing to think of the little regard there is for the mental health of young people, especially in an age fraught with enough social isolation as it is. Gen Z will be forever known as The Lonely Generation if something won't be done to help.
Recently, RTE News in Ireland did a segment covering short films that young people made about their experiences in lockdown (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jZWm6tzpQ), and it was truly harrowing to hear what they had to say and the short films that resulted.
We have cinemas, sporting events, music concerts, etc. all open, you don't have to wear masks, you don't have to sit with empty seats between you and others. Schools have been mostly normal this year (save for a 3 day lockdown in QLD and a one week lockdown in Victoria and Western Australia). Lots of people are still choosing to work from home but offices are back to normal, domestic travel has been back on all this year an a decent part of last year... All with basically zero community transmission.
All this with about an eight week lockdown where I live (unfortunately Victoria had another outbreak so had to have another three months later on but got that back down to zero community transmission). So the lesson should be that it actually was perfectly possible to eliminate the virus locally and open up again fairly quickly. We could have done it even quicker if our incompetent Federal Government had acted more quickly, but luckily for us the State Governments all did mostly all the right things apart from a few issues (letting in a cruise ship with dozens of infected people with no quarantine or testing early on in New South Wales being a big one, and some issues with hotel quarantine later on).
Also having leadership which denies anything is bad until a major sports league (NBA) takes action doesn't help.
No, the biggest problem was the vast underkill at the start. After that, everybody was screwed.
For starters, a whole bunch of things needed funding. Mask manufacturers should have been given contracts so they would switch to 24/7 production--didn't happen. Unemployment needed to be funded so people could stay home when states burned through their funds--didn't happen. Schools needed money for A/V equipment, training, and internet connections for students--didn't happen.
Things needed to shut down fast at the beginning. Mardi Gras happened because the feds buried information. SXSW went down to the wire before being cancelled. International flights took forever before even they were finally cancelled.
I can go on and on and on ... this ain't what "overkill" looks like. This is what "malicious incompetence" looks like, and I won't let you rewrite that history.
This will have a lot of subtle consequences down the line.
But 2020 brought a trifecta of social stress that laid bare some festering social diseases. Both national and global politics, the response to Black Lives Matter, and the pandemic, all in the same year.
I don't know quite how to describe it. It's the loss of an ideal? I don't know. But, I feel it, viscerally. Whereas depression is more of an internally-focused feeling, this is externally-focused.
In the before times, I loved road trips, especially through smaller towns. It was a part of my identity. I've traveled through most of what's west of the Mississippi. I always knew that I had political differences with many of the people in the places I visited, but it rarely mattered. It wouldn't come up in casual conversation. Everyone was friendly. I won't ever be able to see people in those places the same way again.
I happily spent money in small towns as I went. Gas, food, lodging, services, the occasional trinket. I can't do that anymore, either.
I've been fortunate throughout the last 12 months in a lot of ways, and it's still left a big long-term impact on me.
Oh my god, this. When the pandemic is over, I’ll be left with the knowledge that a significant fraction of the people around me at any given moment wouldn’t lift a finger for someone else if it meant even the slightest inconvenience or discomfort for them. I don’t know how to recover from that.
I too, feel the most significant way my mental health has been negatively affected was not due to the lack of in-person face-to-face social interaction, but rather the destruction of my faith in humanity. I will add a caveat that some countries, societies, or even enclaves, have done a lot better job than others.
The pandemic made me lose hope that we will adequately deal with something as abstract as the climate crisis when people cannot even act appropriately when the effect of their combined actions can be seen in the numbers just two weeks later.
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I work on vaccine scheduling for a large health system. We are now dealing with a large influx of young people lying about having a chronic illness to jump the vaccine line (the requirement for verification was recently lifted).
I’ve grown pretty disillusioned and can now see there is major hypocrisy on both sides.
But with everyone talking about health, the virus and the pandemic, it seems obvious that more people become aware about their own health.
It’s not that you don’t have any mitigations. It’s that you tailor them to the problem. Florida did have lockdowns for senior centers and that likely lowered the overall death rate given the skewed mortality stats.
So why did they open, but not CA or NY? I’m sure cozying up to the teacher’s unions at the very least factored into those states’ Governor’s decisions.
No one AFAIK has attempted to do any of this work. All I've seen are unsubstantiated claims for each side's agenda.
We need to know what hard conditions guarantee an R0 small enough to prevent disease transmission in schools.
There has been zero leadership here.
Not true. The largest county in Florida, Miami-Dade, has had my child do school at home since March 2020. Only a tiny percentage of students are allowed in person even now.
https://www.browardschools.com/backtoschool
The consequences of the pandemic with all it's effects will be difficult to predict. But we do have data of how isolation/lockdown effects people[1]. Although no studies (I know of) that deal with the effects on children. The below linked study is worth reading beyond the abstract. I'd imagine it will be more severe than how it affects adults :(
[1] The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
edit: I found this: Nutrition crisis looms as more than 39 billion in-school meals missed since start of pandemic https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/nutrition-crisis-looms... - so distribution of hardship is distributed unevenly and not in favor of already vulnerable groups.
More like "SOME European countries kept schools open during SOME of the pandemic". And look at the state of Covid in the EU now, with infection rates climbing yet again.
By letting it run wild you would a) just accelerate viral evolution and b) eventually and unpredictably find yourself in a situation where the mortality rate might spiral out of control across all kinds of demographics.
You would then do the same thing as now: lockdown measures to curb mortality.
I guess the question of lockdown is not if but when: After many more deaths and mutations which render costly vaccines ineffective or early, vaccinate as much as possible as fast as possible and get done with the virus.
All that being said: Do you have a source for your claim that certain countries triage patients with COVID to end of life care? I’d be genuinely interested in reading up on that.
For the most part, it does not exist in our small corner of the continent because adults behaved responsibly. This means that most of the measures we take happen behind the scenes: the children have a few more rules to comply with, adults calmly correct them when those rules are broken, and (most important) the focus is on teaching them good habits and sheltering them from the burden of the emotional stresses of this exceptional time.
If we have another outbreak, I am all for shutting down the schools as a part of a swift and hopefully short response. Just as keeping children home for months on end is not good for their mental health, exposing them to a twisted version of the classroom environment for an extended period of time is not good for their mental health.
Unfortunately that doesn’t work because once you decide to close them, you also need to decide to bite the bullet and open them again.
And if it turns out it doesn’t work (or ‘doesn’t work enough’) and cases remain high, that’s a tough decision.
That being said, we have kept numbers very low. This means the response can be targeted since tracing the source of an infection is more realistic. When it looked like schools would be affected, they were temporarily shut down. Since it came during the Christmas break, only seven days were lost for students and two for staff. The most recent increase did not affect schools, so the response was directed towards the most common causes of spread. Now that new cases are due to travel and direct contact with someone who has travelled, those targeted restrictions are being lifted.
Is this approach going to be effective in the long run? Probably not. Remaining on guard for an extended duration is stressful and the virus will eventually catch us off guard. On the other hand, our children are still enjoying their childhood and the burden is not so heavy on adults.