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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?

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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.

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?

https://www.browardschools.com/backtoschool

All but three districts were open in September and those were open for children for in person learning a month later: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/os-prem-ne-op...

The largest county in Florida, Miami-Dade, has had my child do school at home since March 2020.

I've been trying since September to get him back in person but they don't allow it, so it's misleading to say they're open for in person. Only a tiny percentage of students are allowed in person.

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.

There has been zero leadership here.

> COVID does worse in warmer climates

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.

Technically, it's based around the fact the virus spreads slower in summer (warm, humid) than winter (cold, dry). Though I suppose California and Texas are more (warm, dry) so maybe the union factor is dry. Or something else like population density or time spent indoors.

California and Texas have been doing poorly compared to Florida

That is simply not true. California has had fewer cases per capita, fewer deaths per capital, and more tests per capita.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

> > COVID does worse in warmer climates

> 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.

California is much colder than Florida, if you weight it by population and not land area.

Wouldn't be surprised if that is also true of Texas. Both have large tracts of sparsely populated arid, very hot land that contributes to popular image but isn't where most people live.

Also, California has not been doing poorly compared to Florida, but there are a whole lot of non-climatic differences.

California COVID death rate: 0.146%

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.

Interesting claims. How do you know FL economy and kids depression is doing so much better than CA?

Unemployment rates for one. But now, numbers are skewed because we printed billions of dollars to bail out California.

we printed billions of dollars to bail out California.

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

California’s robust budget will get another $26 billion from new COVID-19 stimulus

- https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-11/californ...

You wrote "to bail out California" and yet the headline says "robust budget." Do you have evidence that California was bailed out?

How much money does California give the federal government compared to that $26 billion that it got back? How much does California give vs. other states?

Florida is currently facing a $2-$3 billion tax shortfall (numbers vary depending on the time of projection [0]) and California is facing a budget surplus [1]. There are details around this like one-off capital gains and tax rates and budget cuts, but the overall story is that FL had a slightly higher death rate than CA in exchange for an overall economy that isn't doing so well. Some of this is due to the fact that FL's economy is tourism-driven and my personal response to that is: as a tourist I was very tempted to (safely) visit FL this winter, but the whole "our state doesn't believe in basic COVID restrictions" thing made that much too scary.

[0] https://www.wftv.com/news/local/facing-3-billion-shortfall-l...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/gavin-newsom-california-coronavir...

Will you adjust your priors after seeing death rates between California and Florida are roughly the same?

They're not the same, Florida is higher. But overall Florida seems to be an outlier among the "low restriction" states and California seems to be an outlier among the "high restriction" states. A better approach would be to average the groups of states that took different approaches, and maybe also try to normalize by other confounders like population density. This is probably a better approach because there might be other pandemics in the future that are way deadlier, and we should actually know what works and what doesn't.

Note that this is Florida's official death rate which we know underestimates the real rate. The governor stepped in and made all numbers go through a special department which does things like throw out any deaths from non-residents (snowbirds and visitors).

Based on excess death counts, the real number for Florida maybe 25-100% higher. See:

https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/25/undercounting-covid-19-d...

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-florida-coron...

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2020.3061...

Those are theorizing based on excess deaths. Meanwhile, when the records were directly inspected, they found that Florida's death count was inflated by about 10%: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/house-report-say...

The rates seem to be indeed quite similar, but what are your sources for these numbers? A simple Google search [0, 1] yields

California: 57.501 deaths, 3.641.664 cases (= 1.58%)

[0] https://g.co/kgs/kooiXn

Florida: 32.712 deaths, 2.004.354 cases (= 1.63%)

[1] https://g.co/kgs/Mrh3NR

Total number of cases to total state population is just shy of 10% in both cases.

Catholic schools opened in all states that allowed them to, and there hasn’t been - to my knowledge - any outbreak of Catholic COVID.

The Archbishop of New Orleans is working hard on this. Don’t count him out yet.

As a resident of New Orleans I would like to speak for my city and tell you to go jump in the nearest body of water

>"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.

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”

Not just schools, in general if you look at infection/death rates you wouldn't be able to guess if a country/state(US) was locked down or open.

> 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 :(

[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.

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.

Sure but locking down again is not going to change that significantly and even the WHO who I don’t trust at all has consistently been saying that lockdowns should be avoided at all costs.

Australia’s lockdown policies seem to have worked a treat

France has had school open for much of the last year—when infections were increasing and decreasing. It doesn’t appear that schools are driving the infections.

The French schools my family attend were all on cohort models attending one week on, one week off, for context.

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.

Spain’s been open school wise since the first lockdown and it’s not been a main driver of infections. Sure every week or so a class gets sent home for quarantine due to a case but each class is in a bubble so it’s not stopped school from happening and the kids are better for it. People got to stop panicking about it like it’s the Black Death it’s not helping anyone and it undermines my the argument because people push back at fear mongering. Vaccines will curb it as it seems it’s doing in the uk or Israel.

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.

All viruses either die out or become endemic. They mutate continuously while reproducing in your body because copies are not perfect. Most mutations do nothing. Sars2 is already well adapted to humans and none of the new mutations have significantly changed anything about the virus no matter what the media says so it looks like vaccines will end the pandemic soon.

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

> All viruses either die out or become endemic.

Well... sure, the million dollar question is though how many die before that happens in the case of Sars2 isn't it? Can't really run a school without teachers or a factory without workers. What's your take away from this obvious fact?

> ...and none of the new mutations have significantly changed anything about the virus no matter what the media says...

That is a bold opinion. I guess the media pretty much does say nothing, but rather conveys scientific results? Several [0, 1, 2] scientific publications and studies done suggest something very different. There also seems to be a NY variant which seems to be markedly less affected by vaccines. [3] Quote Dr. Fauci: "Work done by David Ho has shown that we have to really keep an eye on that for its ability to evade both monoclonal antibody and, to a certain extent, the vaccine-induced antibodies. So it’s something we take very, very seriously."

It sure seems like we're on a good track to pushing COVID towards one of the two outcomes, but to me it seems that the path to reaching said outcomes is not yet as trivial and safe as you make it sound.

[0]: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2021/b117-variant-li...

[1]: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/03/03/scie...

[2]: https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n597

[3]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...

HIV anyone? Neither died out, neither endemic. How about ebola?

Define significant change. The UK strain B 1.1.7 is 40% more infectious and 60% deadlier. The South African strain renders the AstraZeneca vaccine nearly useless.

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