I'm not making political claims or favouring any political causes or parties - but the tremendous costs simply cannot be justified any longer now that they are clearer, and the "at risk" populations are much clearer.

Side note: even if you take public choice theory seriously and bake in the assumption that lockdowns will continue to happen despite being devastatingly costly, then the onus becomes vaccination - there is no reason not to approve AstraZeneca's vaccine this instant and roll it out into every arm you can find ASAP, starting with the elderly and the obese.

Even if the blood clot thing was real (which is appears not to be), you lose more people to covid than the supposed blood clots.

Roll them out, yesterday.

PPS: Every major Western country is doing wacky things on this topic, so don't take my comment as commentary on any given country (except re: approval of the AZ vaccine, which is a commentary directly on the FDA of the US).

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/why-black-paren...

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.

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The “science” (note: much of it is not peer reviewed) thus far indicates it’s safe to open schools and there’s little to no risk.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.

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.

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.

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

Should we ask TSMC for 3nm MDs?

That said, I think you have a good point with the rest of your comment.

Edit: Oh I think I see the confusion now. Did the grandparent change their comment? At any rate, my understanding is that they’re saying that for each dollar the government spends on a child, it’s spending three dollars on a person over 65.

Sure, the "rich" families can afford private school tuition; but even just well-off families are better able to handle the at home school situation. They are more likely to have flexible schedules or work from home arrangements that allow them to properly supervise their children's learning - which I hypothesize that this better being able to supervise remote learning, is a much bigger driver of divergent outcomes than the fairly small number of private school pupils.

In the suburban district my nephews attend, parents double down on sports and refuse to let kids take standardized tests to make them look as good as possible. It’s monsterous.

> Meanwhile, aid agencies say the embargo imposed by the U.S. (and UK-backed) Arab coalition has had dramatic effect with about 80% of population in urgent need of vital resources such as food, water and medical supplies. Saudi Arabia, reportedly relying on U.S. intelligence reports and surveillance images for target selection, began airstrikes, some of which were against weapons and aircraft. The U.S. has dispatched warships in the region after Houthi missiles targeted the UAE-operated HSV-2 Swift, which some critics interpreted as the U.S. reinforcing the coalition blockade. According to Iranian sources, it has refueled Saudi planes, sent the Saudi military targeting intelligence, and resupplied them with tens of billions of dollars worth of bombs. The U.S. (and the UK) support the effort through arms sales and technical assistance. Amnesty International urged the U.S. and the UK to stop supplying arms to Saudi Arabia and to the Saudi-led coalition. It has been reported that U.S. is regarded as an indirect partner for Saudi Arabia in the war and blockade on Yemen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Yemen#United_State...

What messes with me is the missing human contact in person. Skype/Zoom just isn't enough.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

I only wish that the US would see the huge ROI of investing in its citizens (i.e. by ensuring they are healthy, housed, and educated enough to find their path in life) and act accordingly.

Anecdotes aren't useful here. I suspect once the data starts coming out, we'll see some serious educational deficits in most kids.

Additionally teachers and school staff tilt pretty heavily to high risk groups. Watching so many of the adults die in their life would absolutely give kids depression too.

I'm not so sure on vote rate. I hope we might be surprised! Even if not 20% would make a difference in policy. If it was part of curriculum and we tried to give students more confidence in their own power it could have generational change. A lot of social change has happened this way.

I work in politics and it very much disturbs me how often you hear that 'my vote doesn't have any power so why bother' it's self enforcing BS.

I don't want to venture into off-topic political stuff here. And, let's just acknowledge that everything about the pandemic has sucked pretty much whoever you are; the number of dead people, the even greater number of people who have suffered in some other way, whether through illness or isolation or the loss of employment or business or time at school with friends and classmates. You can pick pretty much any aspect of the pandemic and have valid criticisms for how it was handled.

But the worst part of it all was how people reacted to it. That public health and safety were perverted into political identities. That so many people became so aggressively opposed to the welfare of others.

It wasn't a small, isolated thing, and I don't think people should be described as good, and caring, and loving, while they identify with and support so many terrible things.

I think Sweden got accused of letting infected seniors just die. I remember it being a scandal last year.

If the US wanted an international lockdown, it could have had one.

> frankly, made-up thing

The CDC disagrees with your opinion. From the CDC's "Long-Term Effects of COVID-19" article[1]:

> The most commonly reported long-term symptoms include:

> Fatigue, Shortness of breath, Cough, Joint pain, Chest pain

> Other reported long-term symptoms include:

> Difficulty with thinking and concentration (sometimes referred to as “brain fog”), Depression, Muscle pain, Headache, Intermittent fever, Fast-beating or pounding heart (also known as heart palpitations)

> More serious long-term complications appear to be less common but have been reported. These have been noted to affect different organ systems in the body. These include:

> Cardiovascular: inflammation of the heart muscle

> Respiratory: lung function abnormalities

> Renal: acute kidney injury

> Dermatologic: rash, hair loss

> Neurological: smell and taste problems, sleep issues, difficulty with concentration, memory problems

> Psychiatric: depression, anxiety, changes in mood

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects....

If everyone in the US got COVID, and 1% of them died, that would be 3.3 million people dead and over 30 million hospitalized. If the death rate is 3%, 9.85 million would die. I don't think there are 30 million hospital beds in the US, so that figure could reach over 10 million, which is 8 digits.

However, while you're busy focusing on digits, you're missing the overall point.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

> Primary schools may be generally less affected than secondary schools (20, 25–28), perhaps partly because children under the age of 12 are less susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 (29).

The study also goes on to state, in a profound bit of self-awareness:

> Our approach cannot distinguish direct effects on transmission in schools and universities from indirect effects, such as the general population behaving more cautiously after school closures signaled the gravity of the pandemic. Additionally, because school and university closures were implemented on the same day or in close succession in most of the countries we studied, our approach cannot distinguish their individual effects

And:

> (iii) Our results cannot be used without qualification to predict the effect of lifting NPIs. For example, closing schools and universities in conjunction seems to have greatly reduced transmission, but this does not mean that reopening them will necessarily cause infections to soar.

Like stated above, this doesn't prove or disprove a negative. If someone comes out with a direct, causative relationship between re-opening schools and increased infections, and that is reproducible, sure, make policy decisions based on that information. But otherwise, if we are blindly making decisions that can affect the health and development of children, we better have data to back up those decisions.

Schools in Florida have been open for months and they aren't overwhelmed.

If you actually stop and think about the value of a life in a real sense instead of from an abstract or monetary perspective, you're either absolutely horrified by all of this and your path is clear, or you're a monster.

For the past year I just look at my wife and look at my kid and imagine what it would be like to lose them. I would do _anything_ to protect them. I know what losing other family members to COVID feels like. I've seen first hand what it does to people (friends and family).

Almost every one of those five hundred and fifty thousand people (in the US alone) that have died from COVID meant just as much to someone. I want to afford them the same respect and put in at least a minimal effort to protect their family just the same.

To me, any argument based around what essentially amounts to an inconvenience being too much to ask to prevent those deaths just makes me disgusted. Dressing it up in some rationality by demanding absolute and incontrovertible scientific proof of efficacy is nothing but a flimsy excuse.

Approaching all of this with some empathy makes it easier on yourself and leads to better outcomes for everyone. I'm not stuck at home in the face of statistics and arguments about how I should be able to do whatever I want and damn everyone else paying the consequences. I'm at home because I don't want people to suffer.

It sucks some days, but it's easy to keep going when I know it could be the reason _my own child_ doesn't grown up without a father. It's easy to keep going when it could be the reason someone else doesn't have to go through that either.

So I lost a year of hanging out with friends and had to cut my hair in the utility sink instead of going to the hair dresser. That's such a small fucking price to pay relative to what this could cost someone it's not even a fucking question.

How can you measure the effectiveness of “quite a lot of things” over “everything?”

Is that really substantiated or has it just been theorized? California and Texas have been doing poorly compared to Florida so heat itself doesn’t seem to be the differing factor if it is a factor at all.

Florida COVID death rate: 0.155%

These numbers are statistically tied.

Yet, FL's economy is open, kids are in school, Disney World entertaining tourists.

CA's business are closed & kids are depressed and falling behind.

(Bad) leadership matters.

The short version:

Blood oxygen levels were falling into "should be dead" levels never really seen before (even though they were otherwise alert and fine and had no other hypoxia indicators), which caused doctors to panic about pneumonia and not being able to breathe, and put people on ventilators prematurely. However, it wasn't really having an effect, so the ventilators kept getting turned up to their maximum setting, which puts too much pressure on the lungs and causes additional permanent damage. In most people this caused a turn for the worse instead of recovery.

Meanwhile, in SoCal, basically nobody followed the mask mandates and social distancing restrictions. The rules were more like guidelines, and guidelines that were ignored. They also have a lot more problems with overcrowding, with immigrant populations that need to work, etc. So in terms of what people were actually doing, SoCal was actually engaging in significantly riskier behavior than Florida.

If you compare Bay Area, where people largely did follow the mask & social distancing guidelines, with Florida or SoCal, the death rates are not the same. SF and San Mateo counties had approximately 1/3 as many deaths/1M as the U.S. (and Florida) average; Santa Clara had about 1/2 as many.

This is kind of my point.

Gates: Private Prep school, Harvard

Zuckerberg: Philips Exeter Academy, Harvard

Ellison: South Shore HS (Publicly funded, selective enrollment), UIUC

One thing I'd add is that the loss of education and economic wealth from the lockdown is going to impact life expectancy for years to come, so that also needs to be taken into account.

Do you have a (non-opinion piece) citation for this from a reputable source?

The differences arising from living in a poorer district vs a richer district have more to do with factors outside of school, like I said. It has to do with the home environments provided by parents who are often much poorer and thus less able to provide care and tutoring outside of school. Less access to role models that can guide the way to getting to college and upward mobility. As our country's economy becomes increasingly competitive, these disadvantages ossify socioeconomic statuses for people and their offspring.

Obviously, more oversight of funds is a good thing, but it really isn't a lack of money that leads to these problems (for the most part).

Edit: Also, a poorer district usually has lower cost of living to weigh against lower property taxes.

My understanding is that lockdowns didn't really change things significantly, so the "with lockdowns in effect" is not really relevant. See California (extreme lockdowns from the top) vs Florida (a bit of lockdown from the top) and their associated infection rate per 100k, which is nearly the same.

“Want to buy this vampire repelling rock?”

Lockdowns likely wouldn't affect IFR. It's a measure of fatality, not of infection rate, unless you think lifting the lockdown would cause a dramatic shift in infections to more vulnerable populations.

Depressions are still through the roof, grades are low.

> in the actual United States of America, it’s Congress that can write huge checks; it’s mostly states who write rules for restaurants; and schools are a local responsibility — often run by special purpose school boards that have no other governing powers. Given that Congress did not appropriate funds for a bar and restaurant bailout, I don’t think it’s crazy that governors mostly decided they had to reopen their restaurants. And given that this decision ensured continued community spread all through the summer and fall, I don’t think it’s crazy that teachers lobbied to keep schools closed.

> D.C. eventually got a leg up thanks to our unusual governance. We are a “mayoral control” city (i.e., the schools are run by a political appointee rather than by a separately elected board), and our city government also performs the functions of a state government. So the mayor, in her capacity as essentially a governor, gave teachers vaccine priority, and then in her capacity as the head of the school system said they had to reopen. I think it’s clear that San Francisco mayor London Breed would do that if she could, but she doesn’t control California vaccination rules and she doesn’t control the San Francisco public schools, so she can’t.

Yes, the slight immunobump from being exposed to pretty much every year's influenza outweighs being next to one of the most socially isolated groups.

That doesn't mean that if they repoened you wouldn't see the opposite.

Certain news sites in my state spent 2020 lamenting about how the lockdown is causing overdose deaths to skyrocket. Well, 2021 rolls around and the 2020 overdose death statistics were calculated, and there were about a dozen more overdose deaths in 2020 than in 2019, a change that is statistically insignificant when comparing it to the tens of thousands of overdoses that occurred in the state each year in 2019 and 2020, or to the tens of thousands of people who died from COVID there in 2020.

For whatever reason, the types of people who shared such news in 2020 were not the kind of people who gave two shits about addiction and its effects on others before the pandemic. I say this as a person who has struggled with addiction in the past and has lost numerous people I care about to it. It seems to me that the overdose stats were merely a tool to be used to complain about policy that they disliked.

Tacky childish mocking of valid concern over the mental health of children, some of whom are truly not doing well, is a garbage take. There are kids crying on a daily basis because of this Zoom shit and the expectations placed on them. While they will (likely) survive, it’s not good for them. I’ve seen kids test scores decline, parents enduring outright mutiny and violence from their children. I’ve seen single parents trying to work from home while their kids, who were already struggling when they had someone to pay attention to them, are screaming at the top of their lungs and breaking things.

Mental health issues can persist even in privileged circumstances, and deserves our concern. The existence of worse suffering doesn’t make current circumstances magically better. In a way, your take feels like the mental health counterpart to ‘it’s just the flu’ style arguments.

I also believe that, during wartime, a lot of children were able to go outside and play with other children.

This is incredibly frustrating to read. Among students, the relevance of this topic - mental health issues spiking do to online curriculum - is painfully obvious. And yes, we are balancing this against the realized danger/negative health consequences of the pandemic.

I understand that this is anecdotal, but it seems that large, robust data sets are not convincing for you.

From what perspective are you writing? Do you have children in school? Do you feel that rising suicidality correlates with a broader issue that suggests some amount of increased suffering in the larger population?

> compared to what children had to deal with during previous social upheavals

Are you saying that we can't aspire to manage crises better than some historical bar? Why does this comparison appear here?

I am genuinely curious, and I hope you understand that my questions are genuine. I just rarely come across a comment that so confidently disagrees with things that are extremely obvious to me. Cheers

"Mental health consequences of the COVID-19 crisis including suicidal behavior are likely to be present for a long time and peak later than the actual pandemic."

https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article/113/10/707/5857612

You do realize you're replying to a Reuters article about mental health results, not predictions.

Quite a hyperbolic and probably politically inclined comment.

I don't think you can be this confident. Young humans deal particularly poorly with social isolation and those previous upheavals didn't have that as the main feature.

Wow what a brave thing to do, arguing with a straw man.

Suicide rates actually dropped during the world wars. People are able to handle war much better than social isolation.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51291.How_to_Lie_with_St... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43722897-the-art-of-stat...

It doesn't - the kids have a better survival rate than they do from the flu, and the people who are at risk are overwhelmingly not getting it from kids.

Do a cost-benefit analysis. Keeping kids in detention fails it every time.

You could say that for all of covid. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogen...

> Kudos for expressing an unpopular opinion.

Here's a real unpopular opinion - "Epstein did nothing wrong"

Here's a popular opinion people hide behind saying it's unpopular - "Epstein didn't kill himself"

"unpopular opinion" <==> "I know I'll be downvoted"

If we're comparing years of life, isn't one 16 year old worth 60-70 85 year olds in nursing homes? Maybe more because one year in the life of an 84 year old who's already experienced a full life is worth a lot less than a 16 year old going on 17. Societally wise, it's much worse to sacrifice a young person for an 80 year old who's essentially a burden on the rest.

This comparison of the value of a life is morbid, but we've been making decisions like this anyway, even if the media has refused to speak of it openly.

And of course this assumes that all these lockdowns, school closings, etc. made any difference. Again, we can debate that and both sides have data to make their case.

So yeah, maybe one or two suicides and the massive increase of unknown mental health issues weren't a good tradeoff for the unknown number of mostly elderly whose lives were extended a year or two.

The "caused by the behaviour of young people" thing is a weird non-sequitur. Are you suggesting 10-year-olds share culpability for spread caused by the spring break behavior of high-school students?

That and yes, FL clearly lied and has fired people for indicating correct numbers. This is not helped by many US states that try to record CV19 deaths as being due to "underlying conditions" instead of covid.

If you go to hospital due to covid, and then die, whatever other conditions you have aren't relevant, covid is what killed you.

b) In order to have children at school, you need teachers at school. In order to have teachers at school, you need public transport. Suddenly, you have a significant amount of people moving around spreading the virus.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/we-now-kn...

I'm not sure the young are making anywhere near same sacrifice compared to the war effort in terms of lives and limbs and post war mental effects.

The really young are the future. Anyone in there late teens and 20s is past that point. The work from home training/conditioning the younger generation received will payoff when they reach 20. While your generation may struggle with the isolation by preparing the next generation those issues will disappear reaping larger economic benefits.

In terms of praise, remember all age groups are staying home. Appreciation should first be given to the soldiers (nurses,people who put themselves in danger) but appreciation should be given to everyone who stayed at home, everyone who convinced someone stop doing something that would spread this and everyone who did all they could to stop the spread.

It's like saying "when you're older, we will treat you like shit" and people going back to society and saying "if you're gonna treat me like shit, I'm not going to be a productive member of society like you want me to"

I hope, that if my "economic output" is zero I don't get ground up into protein so I can have a contribution to society.

A token of appreciation from previous generations is the infrastructure built to benefit from. Like say planting a tree, whose economic output might be zero but you can enjoy it long after the person who planted it died. Not everyone that went before you has mortgaged the future to buy a yacht, maybe show some perspective?

If there needs to be outrage, it should be against monopolies like Comcast which has said it will expand data caps to more markets this year. I for one would support life in prison for the current Comcast CEO as well as dismantling the company and making an example out of it.