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No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

346 pointstestingathing674 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20220104193247/https://www.nytime...

I don't give a shit what the article says or specifically points to but I can tell you this much. I am a dad of a 6 year old. My kid goes to public school in NYC and last year was bad... They did a test at the beginning of this year before the start of the first grade and her results were awful. This is an unprecedented event and everyone is clueless including in education. I don't make a big deal about the test results and it's the reality. Educators are aware but it's not enough, we should be aware too. These kids are more resilient than most people think and we still need to support them. I am lucky I can get paid support for her but not all families have that privilege. So please stop being pedantic about the article and instead maybe focus on how you might create solutions. And please exclude online classes from those solutions. Thank you.

My kids are in NYC public schools too. My 3rd grader opted into the state assessment tests. They release the scores with breakdowns how the kids do by grade and school. This time they didn't. I'm pretty sure it's because of how terrible the results were that it'd be a scandal.

bingo

Does NYC have some sort of freedom of information act that you can request this?

If you're a programmer (like many on this site are), I find it hard to see how you think state assessment tests can be objective or measure real learning for a student in any statistically meaningful way. They make whiteboard coding tests look extremely subjective, fair, and balanced in comparison.

I know people who have had to teach 3rd graders to give standardized tests, and reality is that a lot depends on the mood of the kid that day. Some kids just idly click away, and the teacher has to tell them to actually read the damn question before clicking on an answer.

A lot of the signal that those tests will give is just that kids weren't super attentive or feeling excited about giving the tests this year, for obvious pandemic reasons. Hard to be in a great mood when your parents are home all the time, everyone is out in masks, and all events and fun things are canceled or have restrictions.

But that doesn't seem to prevent people from pretending like there's some big scandal backed up by objective data about "learning shortfalls" and such.

Obviously tests are imperfect, but it's silly to dismiss them as useless. Standardized tests are the best tool we have to ensure our schools are providing all children quality educations regardless of economic or racial background or disabilities. Making education policy without measuring outcomes in a rigorous way is like doing science without running experiments. Children of priveleged families will always do fine. Their parents have the knowledge and bandwidth to take a proactive role in their children's educations, but we can't leave behind all the kids who aren't so lucky.

> Making education policy without measuring outcomes in a rigorous way is like doing science without running experiments.

It's worse to present an experiment as objective without properly measuring its error bars. As I have pointed out, there are a million different factors that can influence performance on tests. Claiming that you are "measuring outcomes in a rigorous way" from these tests without putting in the time and money to assess and control for all those factors makes for bad public policy. Worse, you'll end up providing incentives to focus only on test scores to the detriment of actual classroom learning.

As I have pointed out, there are a million different factors that can influence performance on tests.

For individuals, yes. But for the entire cohort not really - the results are being compared to previous years, so the error bars should be approximately the same. Children are, on average, the same as two, five or ten years ago, so the test outcomes should be about the same. The article suggests that all children are now doing worse on tests than previous years.

> Children are, on average, the same as two, five or ten years ago, so the test outcomes should be about the same.

The mental state of children today is not the same for those five or ten years ago, for a myriad of reasons; this should be obvious.

> The article suggests that all children are now doing worse on tests than previous years.

Yes. I am also sure they will do worse on a rubric for mental well-being. Unfortunately no one seems to have thought about measuring or improving that, since most of the standardized-test focused measures probably worsen it.

I read you to be dismissing tests outright. If you merely want to stipulate that the test scores are subjected to rigorous statistical analyses that "properly measure its error bars" we are in total agreement.

> If you merely want to stipulate that the test scores are subjected to rigorous statistical analyses that "properly measure its error bars" we are in total agreement.

I am saying that the system should fail open in their absence. "Students' achievement dropped 50 points!" makes for a really potent policy cudgel. "Students' learning dropped 50 points, +/- 40" is silly and meaningless. The former should never be available, unless the +/- is explicitly mentioned.

This is similar to prescription medicines. We have a lot of prescription medicines that do great things, which no one is debating. But without a proper evaluation process, you have zero access to them. Test assessments should be similar in my opinion.

> Standardized tests are the best tool we have to ensure our schools are providing all children quality educations regardless of economic or racial background or disabilities.

It's a work of fiction but I'd like to refer to "The Wire Season 4" and how they portray standardised test taking to get you a fresh perspective outside of the utopian thought about curricula.

Standardized tests work just fine to assess competency. White board interviews probably would to if they were designed and graded by assessment professionals. Those tests are designed to assess competency at a specific level, and they are a lot better at it than many give them credit for. You don't have to be in a great mood to be able to read, especially at a third grade level. These tests are far better than anyone wants to admit at showing how terrible our schools are in the U.S.

> You don't have to be in a great mood to be able to read, especially at a third grade level.

Massive [citation needed]. It seems reasonably obvious that mood will affect ability of reading, especially when you can't measure it directly; you're probably doing so via some questions that ask about comprehension. Have you not seen all the conversations about adults burning out at their jobs during the pandemic? Why do you expect children to be totally unaffected?

> These tests are far better than anyone wants to admit at showing how terrible our schools are in the U.S.

The science around this is extremely flimsy, and is mostly supplemented by random strident declarations like yours. Learning is a complex topic even in adults, and influenced by many environmental factors. It's staggering to me that people (usually without an education degree) can casually claim to know a lot about how it's happening in children, who learn at a far faster rate than adults.

My 7 yo tested positive yesterday, so we kept her and her 5 yo sister home today to "learn from home".

I had forgotten how bad learning from home was. My wife stayed home to help them - she spent most of the day trying to get them connected to the various videos to listen to stuff and very little time actually learning

I highly suspect there's room for disruption in at-home education - it's so terrible right now.

It'd be interesting to see if VR is a possible solution for such use cases. I think VR tech has to advance a bit more (in terms of ease of use, as well as affordability) before it can be used this way, but these early adopters' experience (see https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385) seems pretty positive to me.

From a practical perspective: outfitting every student with a VR setup sounds very expensive.

For now. But at the end of the day a Quest is essentially a smart phone with a nice screen attached to your face. There’s no reason this hardware can’t come down in price. I mean the thing is only $300 as it is. Plenty of wealthier schools send every kid home with a Chromebook of similar price.

I believe broadband access is the bigger hurdle to having every kid attend in VR. When schools closed during the pandemic there was a shortage of hardware, because of the pandemic. However, even the schools that did snag hardware quickly learned that many of their students didn’t have access to broadband.

yea, i agree that broadband access is vital - not just for education, but for everything. It's the new roads and rail of the 21st century. Broadband should be a public utility, regulated as such and invested in as such imho.

Students learned with nothing more than books for hundreds of years and were better educated than most people today.

>Students learned with nothing more than books for hundreds of years

I don't think that is true

>and were better educated than most people today.

I'm really certain that isn't true

What shocked me (here in Australia) was that every teacher is creating their own resources to give to the kids.

They are probably all working towards a similar curriculum, but all the "projects" and handouts and stuff that the kids were given to work from was created by their teacher.

Thousands of teachers all over Australia (and the world) are recreating the same resources every year!

How is there not a national level library of resources they can draw on.

Khan academy is really great, why is Mr Briggs from my small town recreating it badly in power point every year.

I’m shocked by the same thing in Belgium. Most of teachers’ work outside class could be automated if they decided to work collaboratively. I still can’t understand why they decide not to, and frankly I’m a bit worried that such people are in charge of teaching my kids.

As a child, I remember seeing the poor quality of the material we were given, and hearing how hard teachers had worked to produce it. What’s the message behind it? Hard work is good because it’s work?

I'm shocked that you are shocked and blaming the teachers for not organising themselves. Who the fuck is in charge of coordinating these efforts? Teachers have a lot to do, kids to care about, other stresses, and they aren't experts in ED-tech or even technology in general. They use the tools they know about or have been told about, they aren't going out of their way to learn new tools in their spare time, it sucks but not every profession is focused on min-maxing like software engineering does, not everyone is out there thinking about how to automate their menial tasks, you need to be educated/trained in that, maybe with programming as basic school curriculum we can train a whole new generation to think about automation through software? I know I wouldn't be thinking much about that if I was a teacher.

I worked in the ED-tech space (related to music) for a while and for me it's shocking you are expecting teachers to be on top of this. The issue is systemic, the teachers are doing the best they can, the people on the top aren't trained either on using software to leverage and scale their teaching resources. There needs to be someone/some government that implements that as a policy, with experts guiding and driving the adoption of ED-tech in a better and more productive way.

> As a child, I remember seeing the poor quality of the material we were given, and hearing how hard teachers had worked to produce it. What’s the message behind it? Hard work is good because it’s work?

The message probably was more in line with "look at how much more work outside your expertise you'll have to do in real life, rather than just what you were hired and trained for". Seems pretty in line with our economic systems, no?

I think you're getting the better deal. In America we offloaded a lot of lesson planning, worksheets, and more to independent companies. The problem arises with this because many teachers now just rely on answer keys, and can't answer why an answer is what it is, or notice that the given answer wasn't actually correct. Since teachers aren't putting in the work to design anything, some aren't putting in the work to teach beyond the given script, so they really can't do anything beyond read to kids. This unsurprisingly, leads to poor results.

American society depends on personal responsibility in the aspects of healthcare, retirement, and employment.

Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run and borderline volunteer-run, but funding for that is not adequate to the point where you can reasonably expect it to continue as usual in the midst of a global pandemic.

The sooner you can come to terms with this, the better will be the outcome for your child. I recommend looking up resources on sharing childcare and teaching with other parents in addition to your kids' teachers.

Research after research comes out pointing to the fact that parents should be directly involved in their children's education.

> Your child's education is usually an honorable exception to this in that it's totally government run

It is sad that this is the case

Consider the median in terms of intelligence. For each subject taught in school take the median in terms ability to explain things to a child in a constructive way. Almost everyone falls below the median in multiple categories. Hence what’s best for the child, and society too, is to attempt to organize things in such a way that the child is taught by people above the median in intelligence and above the median in teaching ability in the subject taught by that person. At scale this requires a government solution unless we are ok saying “screw you” to those who are less than rich.

Agreed, we should all come to terms with this and work towards is the point of my small rant as well. Thank you for clarifying.

Also, I wouldn't worry too much about standardized tests if you have any insight into the conditions that usually influence the results. I have details in my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29805200 – in short, they can be quite easily influenced by factors extrinsic to knowledge retention even in non-pandemic times; and there have been a lot of those factors recently.

> personal responsibility in the aspects of healthcare

Pre-retirement: I don't take any personal responsibility for healthcare. It’s not an option. My employer provides me with a menu of more-or-less completely standardized options. Those options even specify how often I should go to general checks-ups and strictly police my access to specialists. I have very little power to control my own consumption of healthcare, aside from the things that almost all countries delegate to individuals: attending my regular check-ups and avoiding the obvious vices. At least in Germany I could get access to a specialist without first finding a doctor who is expert at interacting with automated processes at some actuarial firm. The biggest choice I can ever make is “do I take on a bit more risk so that I can stow away money pre-tax in an HSA”.

Post-retirement: Medicare.

> retirement

All Americans pay into SS and a huge portion of retirees do/will depend mostly on SS income to be able to retire.

Even without SS, one in five Americans have a pension. The rest (who can afford to save for retirement) probably have a 401(K) with a small menu of target date funds. There are some tricks you can play on the side, sure, but they’re marginal. The rest is post-tax savings; again, afforded to most individuals in most (all) western societies.

> employment

I’m not sure how this is different from places like Europe or even China/Russia.

In fact, the US is a bit of an outlier to the other extreme. As best I can tell, the US Department of Defense is undeniably the world’s largest social jobs program.

> I’m not sure how this is different from places like Europe or even China/Russia.

In most developed countries it's illegal to fire someone without good cause.

> The rest (who can afford to save for retirement) probably have a 401(K) with a small menu of target date funds

If by have, you mean use, my own anecdata is quite the opposite. Everyone I know that isn’t in tech/software, is not contributing to their retirement plans that are offered. Maybe they “have” them with a 0 balance.

> funding for that is not adequate to the point where you can reasonably expect it to continue as usual in the midst of a global pandemic

The US spends way more on education per capita than many countries that were able to keep their schools open during 2020-2021: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

> The US spends way more on education per capita than many countries that were able to keep their schools open during 2020-2021: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

The US also spends way more on healthcare and has worse outcomes. Those countries also have way different societies, taxation regimes, healthcare, attitudes towards vaccination, and social safety nets. It's hard to find a country that you can fairly compare the US to in all respects.

> It's hard to find a country that you can fairly compare the US to in all respects.

Surely that is the point of making the comparisons: to highlight the differences, omissions, and additions so that they can be addressed.

There may be differences in taxation, but there are more similarities than differences. Every resident/citizen of EU/US/UK/Australia is subject to income tax at some level. The tax rates are even roughly equivalent[1], at least at the low-to-mid end.

And yet Australia has universal healthcare (among other things). Universal healthcare isn't perfect, but it is significantly better than sickness or injury causing a risk of bankruptcy (etc).

[1]: https://sendmoneyaustralia.com/tax-rates-in-australia-compar...

One of the problems could be that spends a lot of money also on misinformation and "dis-education". Is not a problem from US exclusively. Sign of the times.

I haven't looked at the numbers in a while, but I think we also have much more top heavy education organizations, and much more unequal distributions of funds due to the bulk of funding coming from local property taxes. So, while we may, at a national level, have higher per capita spending, many, and maybe even most, places have much lower per capita spending.

>>American society depends on personal responsibility in the aspects of healthcare, retirement, and employment.

All societies in all aspects are like this. Regardless of people like to accept this or not, a person as an individual is always in total ownership of any situation. Sure every once in a while there are bigger problems and the society has to come together. But by and large, we are all on our own.

Acknowledging this helps take control of their life, then do whatever is the best for them.

People need to be ok, with this concept of 'total ownership'.

Some societies make it easier for people to have good outcomes and some make it harder. Pretending it is not so makes it impossible to fix root causes of issues.

> Regardless of people like to accept this or not, a person as an individual is always in total ownership of any situation.

A person as an individual is rarely in total ownership of any situation. The only thing that we could say an individual has total ownership of is his own actions, which is a totally different thing to what you are saying.

You should move, as soon as possible.

I feel like European countries handled school much better. Rapid tests 1-2 times a week for all students.

Meanwhile in the USA, private schools stayed open the whole time (with the exception of March-May 2020) while public schools in San Francisco were shut until January 2021.

This is absolutely not uniform in Europe.

The more gerontocratic and science confused the country, region, or simply it's current elected executive, the more likely that schools (even preschools!) were closed by legal order for much of last year. It has been a nightmare.

I hold to my initial opinion that the price of closing any schools at all for > 1 week was too high and simply should never have happened. I state that in the certainty that more people would have died of covid overall had schools been left open.

Thank you for this comment, it's incredibly true.

Some elementary school teachers I know (in Europe) repeatedly remind me how important non-academic elements are in school.

* Kids go to school to get emotional care.

* Kids go to school to get attention, and someone to listen.

* Kids go to school to learn social behavior.

* Kids go to school to have a surrogate mommy to care for them while parents work.

* Kids go to school to learn (from teachers or peers) how to tie shoe laces, wipe your nose, go to the bathroom and so on.

In first and second grade, all of this makes up more than 50% of what kids actually learn, and this is what they are missing completely in home schooling.

I kinda hope they go to bathroom at home too. I agree it is better for kids to be in school then not, but lets not pretend there is no basic learning going on at home.

Haha sure! What I implied is: There are many things we need to learn about life in public spaces, including trivial things such as: What is a stall, where is the toilet paper, how do other people behave, what's the etiquette etc etc.

Much of this is completely non-evident to small kids, because behavior at home is (naturally) so different.

That could be taught at the public library.

Only if that involves watching people, since much of what kids learn is subconscious and sub-vocal.

I.e. they learn many things we don't know they learn, and don't know exist, because we are taking them for granted all the time.

Wow that’s absolutely not what public school was like for me. It was brutality left right and center. My first grade teacher put me in “remedial class” after she “caught” me being able to read upside down and backwards. She was across the room at the time. Then there’s all the bullying on the playground - including being knocked out unconscious the first time I actually stood up to a bully. The school punished us both with the exact same punishment. I swore. He probably did brain damage to me. Etc etc.

In short, this concept that school actually has benefits is pretty alien to my lived reality.

First week ever of school, my daughter was bitten to almost bleeding. Some kids (both 4yo) tried to kiss her on her mouth, she pushed him away.

This year (7-8yo), one sexually harassed her, school did shit, so she is homeschooling now.

I won't say more but many other things, including a crazy teacher humiliating kids as punishment (in a nutshell, asking the classmates to laugh at the kid), only listening to bullies etc.

If this is the so called socialization, fuck school. And we are in a supposedly a good town in Switzerland.

One of my first bullies (around 7-9 yo, I think?) was my “best friend” at the time. As an adult I suspect he just singled me out and I wouldn’t have known any better. Social pressure may have contributed there too. He would grow his fingernails out, sharpen them to points, and dig them into my hands until I bled on the playground.

I vehemently support homeschool. The homeschooled adults I met in both college and in professional work are some of the best able to actually deal with reality. They’re not perfect and can be downright unaware, but that’s going to be true of anything. The bullying out there overrides any benefits.

I'm deeply sorry that school was so horrible for you.

I can also tell you that in contemporary affluent european regions, my rosy version of the story is common.

It's of course an enlightment-style utopia, but even if reality often was and is different, I'm very convinced that this is what we should strive for.

There are different stances towards educating children, of course, but this one (and its versions) is arguably the humane one.

This is depressing. Like really really depressing.

I was homeschooled, albeit not in the pandemic form and I got all of that from my parents. I can't even express how much more grateful your comment makes me that my mom sacrificed what she did to ensure I didn't have to get all of the above from school.

I don't understand your point, the article is clearly advocating for school to get back to normal despite of Covid, because their education and social development is so important in contrast to their risk to covid.

I'd love to see an emotionless cost-benefit analysis of different approaches to handling schools in the pandemic. I suspect the cost of closed schools far exceeds what we intuitively think, since it's not just the educational loss now, it's the cost of future mitigations due to the problems we're causing, and a large cost of lost productivity by parents. How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each day a classroom is closed? At least a hundred per classroom, more than a thousand for each day a school is closed. There's a lot of things that cost less than a thousand person-hours that could be done to help schools stay open.

I'm not a huge fan of cost-benefit decision processes but they are useful for removing some false dichotomies. Like "we can't afford to do the right thing" when the right thing is actually more cost effective.

First, let's learn to account for emotional, mental, spiritual costs. Then we can talk about the productivity hit.

While those are important costs to consider, there is no way people will agree on how to measure such things in comparable terms.

So don't bother trying?!

Nope. That just means it's a moonshot. Besides I don't agree with current education approaches, so why pedestal one over the other.

Also, there ARE metrics of subjective wellbeing and we can use them. There's a culture of denial and aversion to real challenges that leads to people to escape it through numbers and dollars. What you're saying sounds like what that culture says.

Those are all important too, but I think these different indicators all point in the same direction: that we should be putting a lot more effort into keeping schools open

I disagree. We need to stop the nonsense disconnected from reality and nature society of bullshit now, not later. That includes bullshit child care and education and jobs.

Essentialism is what's needed here.

Ok, how do you measure spiritual costs?

Underrated comment. In the spring of 20 all the talk of what was essential and what wasn’t lead me to believe that just about everything shut down was actually the things that made life worth living for many people.

> How many person-hours of lost productivity is there for each day a classroom is closed? At least a hundred per classroom, more than a thousand for each day a school is closed.

I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity? If so, does parental productivity also fall drastically during summer when schools have holidays?

Stresses by the pandemic itself have likely caused parental productivity to plummet. Remember that "classrooms" are not the sterile abstractions you seem to bucket them into, they are staffed by teachers who are both employees and often parents themselves; with the accompanying stresses. They are required to face Covid, often from students who are imperfectly masked or unmasked.

I don't understand the American blind spot that allows people to think of schools being as essential as hospitals; and requires them to both face Covid infections while paying teachers $40k and doctors $400k. Clearly the rates at which teachers are paid indicate that US society doesn't consider them as essential.

I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity?

Because child care has long been part of the value proposition of public schools. It's amusing how "you shouldn't have had kids if one parent wasn't willing to stay at home full time" is now something that the far left and far right agree on.

> It's amusing how "you shouldn't have had kids if one parent wasn't willing to stay at home full time" is now something that the far left and far right agree on.

I consider myself somewhat left wing, and I don't agree with this statement at all. Cooperative babysitting, more flexible work arrangements, larger friend groups, joint families, and more social cohesion in general are a good way to balance childcare.

I actually agree that teaching can provide some part of this, but don't understand the fact where everything else runs according to a hyper-capitalist algorithm, but teachers are expected to take on outsize responsibility and risk adverse healthcare outcomes because "Think of the children".

It does take a village to raise a child. Let's do that, and not just leave it to two parents and a teacher.

Replace "teachers" with "schools." There is no reason we can't appropiately resource schools to provide these services. We should be paying teachers enough for them to be eager to come in to work every day. Telling parents they are on their own to figure it out is not "a good way to balance childcare." It amounts to saying everyone fend for themselves, to saying that we don't really care what happens to kids whose families can't afford childcare. And sadly in our society, it mostly amounts to dumping those burdens specifically on women, who get saddled with the bulk of childcare duties in the American household. It's regressive, and it hobbles the effort to achieve equality for women in the workplace.

For better or worse American public schools have basically become an essential service as a free day care system for busy parents. I'm not saying this is good, I think it's a huge problem, but pretending that is not the way it is doesn't help fix it. The question is how to make improvements to our education system to prevent it from being misused this way, and on top of that how to actually politically make those changes happen when there's a huge number of parents that just want to pawn their children off to the state and would oppose such improvements.

That's not a bug, it's a feature. Why shouldn't we have socialized childcare? Our economy needs parents to be able to work 40 hours per week while raising children. If anything, we need to provide better support to families who can't afford childcare every summer.

Why do you need parents to work 40 hour weeks? Wouldn't it be more beneficial for anyone if they 'somwhow' have time raising their own children without running poor?

Many parents in Europe heavily depend on our social net, and I know that's a different debate, however single parents or families where both HAVE TO work full-time sounds like the wrong approach to me.

<i>Our economy needs parents to be able to work 40 hours per week while raising children. </i>

Let's be honest. Our economy only needs people to work 20-25 hours a week max.

Isn't that a good thing? The externalities are universally good - single parents have it significantly easier. Even married moms have easier time to find work or occupation outside of the house - whether for money or to not be restless and isolated.

"I think I must have missed the point at which classrooms took on a responsibility for parental productivity?"

Why the resentful reaction? Schools DO increase parent productivity, and that's one among many positive features of a school. It's not a bad thing!

I'm proposing that the cost benefit analysis would show that we should invest more in keeping schools safely open, and doing so will probably pay off immediately without even factoring in future harm or benefit to children. It's not wrong to factor in that future, but if there's an immediate justification using even very reductive capitalist thinking then it should be easy to build a consensus. (It's still not easy to build a consensus, but that's because our civil society is running on automatic and we struggle at making even win-win decisions)

> Schools DO increase parent productivity, and that's one among many positive features of a school. It's not a bad thing!

It certainly isn't. What I'm saying is that:

- Your repeated statement that "Schools increase parent productivity" is far from proven in the first place (see the point about summer, which is not consider a major 'productivity hit' event at most companies, unlike Christmas or Thanksgiving).

- And even if it were true, it's an incidental factor, and not one that is planned for.

> ...if there's an immediate justification using even very reductive capitalist thinking then it should be easy to build a consensus.

Sure. All I'm saying is that the consensus which you're talking about should emerge from first principles, and should not just happen to fall close to "schools should stay open as usual, disregarding the pandemic sweeping the nation". If schools do indeed have a measurable effect on parental productivity, then the consensus could look like companies being required to enter into a profit sharing arrangement with all the schools of their employees' children.

>Schools increase parent productivity

I'm a parent, and I work-from-home. We just had winter break. I had 2 kids not in school and 2 kids not in day care. I definitely had a productivity drop.

I had a meeting where all 4 kids took turns interrupting me. I had things to do, and a daughter would "just appear" and ask me about some weird question. They would come in each afternoon and ask me when I was going to finish work amd play with them - and yes, I played with them (no regrets!).

Also, my oldest daughter tested positive for covid yesterday, so we kept all 4 home today. Even with my wife handling the "learning form home", I still got interrupted: how do I log in, what do I need to learn, where is the website, can I eat "this".

I'm not sure I follow your point of separating productivity hits from summer/Thanksgiving/Christmas. My points about these past 2 weeks hold for thr upcoming summer.

Sounds like work from home isn't working great for you, you should probably go into the office to work. Oh wait, but there are probably safety concerns preventing that.

You could also get professional childcare for your children to cover the day, but you probably don't want to pay the amount it costs. I am not sure why you don't have a friend or family member watch the kids for a day; few seem to be able to depend on close friends or family members in the US to do things like this that are considered simple favors in some other countries.

What I don't understand is why you think things are any different for teachers. People act as if teachers have the same training, PPE, and pay as medical professionals. They don't.

(I realize that I'm straying a bit from the point, but so is everyone else. There are far too many anecdotes in this thread that boil down to "I had a bad day with my child's education".)

You keep turning the discussion to teachers, but frankly, that's not germain to the initial comment in this thread, which simply stated that the costs of this pandemic to children may be much higher than we realize. No one has even argued for a specific policy like keeping schools open no matter the risks. But you seem unwilling to simply concede that this is an ongoing disaster for kids. I mean, remote learning has been a farce, particularly for young students whose parents can't work from home, are technologically or otherwise illiterate, or don't speak English. But I guess it's all our fault because we don't live near retired or underemployed friends or relatives who can take on childcare responsibilities for months on end?

> You keep turning the discussion to teachers, but frankly, that's not germain [sic] to the initial comment in this thread

Teachers do the the bulk of the work in keeping "schools" going. A majority of the essential employees in schools are teachers, but a very large margin (the next biggest is janitors and other support staff). Perhaps I am overreacting because discussion about this I have heard tends to descend into thinly veiled blame for the teachers. A typical disingenuous comment that I have heard repeated ad nauseam is "Oh, we are not blaming the teachers, we just want schools to be open". Well okay, we can throw open the doors then without enough teachers, and I guess the students can just...teach themselves?

> But you seem unwilling to simply concede that this is an ongoing disaster for kids. I mean, remote learning has been a farce...

Yeah, my statement would certainly be more nuanced than that. I would concede that:

- There is an ongoing pandemic that is a disaster, especially with the model of healthcare that we use in the US

- It has changed the fabric of our society in many ways, including expectations about "going to work" and childcare

- This change has affected children's learning in ways that are unpredictable

What I don't get is the isolation of these unpredictable changes to a simple, easily hurled "schools and learning are a disaster" comment. Society is a disaster right now, and unlikely to go back to normal in a hundred ways.

> it's all our fault because we don't live near retired or underemployed friends or relatives who can take on childcare responsibilities for months on end?

Certainly not, I feel bad for you. I'm just implying that the lack of these is a part of why society (not just "schools") is such a disaster right now. A society with more cohesion that balances responsibility of child rearing across multiple people would have done a much better job.

I don't know what you are going towards. I'll put aside (for the moment) any argument about school improving productivity for working parents.

You keep mentioning that there are ways to take care of kids that don't include "kids in schools with teachers" - you want teachers removed from the equation because they shouldn't be forced to be exposed to kids.

No matter how I think about the alternatives, I keep coming back to a building shaped like a school, staffed with people that look like teachers.

Example 1:

I get a retired person to watch my kids. Well, this person is still exposed to my kids (just like a teacher), and exposed to my house. Also, where am I going to find a retired person who is willing to be in my house, but not willing to go to the local school and do the exact same work?

Example 2: I get an underemployed friend to watch my kids. I don't know any underemployed people - they all have kids and jobs like me. Would I find someone on the internet? I'm certainly not going to let a stranger take care of my kids... not unless that person had similar qualifications as a teacher

Example 3: maybe I partner up with other families. We take turns watching our kids. 5 families, we watch our kids 1 day a week, we work 4 days a week. It's awesome. And I just invited homeschooling. If we are really good, we'll expand. And I just invented school.

You end with this

> A society with more cohesion that balances responsibility of child rearing across multiple people would have done a much better job

I'm pretty sure child rearing has been balanced across multiple people in our society. Many (not all) families have 2 parents. Their kids go to school with people. They may be involved in sports, coached by people. They may even go to places of worship, with more people.

The difference is that in all 3 of your examples you don't have the "Of course it's obvious that the other person should do this job during a pandemic" entitlement.

In your examples, you'd probably pay the retired person or underemployed friend extra during a pandemic. You'd probably make sure that the other families you were exposed to had adequate PPE and weren't exposed to unnecessary risk. If your kid misbehaved, you'd probably keep them at home instead of sending them to other families. You probably can't just abstract them into a "childcare unit" abstraction.

But with schools, you seem to be able to do this. The drumbeat seems to be "Kids should be in school come hell or high water", instead of "We would humbly request other people to take care of and teach our kids, and we understand that they are overworked and there's extreme health risks".

My suggestion for you is – if you really believe in Example 3, why not do it? Try it and see; I guarantee you'll run into the equivalent of staffing problems before long. If not, win-win – you just got free school!

Salaries aren’t determined by essential-ness, they’re determined by supply and demand.

Obviously a nursing home aid is a lot more “essential” than a FAANG engineer, but the latter is paid substantially more. It sounds flowery and noble to pay people based on how “important” their jobs are to society. But it’s simply no way to run an economy.

how about "salaries are determined by the amount of profit they can generate"?

In a market based economy, wage is determined by supply and demand. Then, high wages incentivize new people to enter the high wage field, and low wages disincentivize new entrants.

This is a societally productive outcome, because labor gets allocated to the most economically beneficial sectors naturally through fluctuations in wages. If we had 10x the number of engineers, wages would drop significantly. Imagine, for example, that the US allowed unlimited migration from China, India etc for engineer positions... wage situation would be much different. But also likely more societally beneficial due to lowering cost to provide software (which in a competitive market, will get passed down to consumers).

A big problem we have though is lack of education/direction given to college students so many of them aren't even really aware of wages of various fields and choose based on likability of the role rather than considering both likability and economics.

Unfortunately many people choose to be teachers regardless of low pay. Given that teachers are primarily government paid, we could elect to simply pay them more to attract higher caliber talent. But most fields aren't government employed, so not feasible for other roles.

Doctors in particular are problematic, because as I understand it the AMA limits number of new doctors creating an artificial shortage. That should be fixed/regulated against... it's pretty much monopoly power of labor to be able to decide number of doctors. Monopoly power on either the corporate or labor sides pretty much always leads to worse societal outcomes.

But yeah, generally in a free market wages will be set "fairly". You're free as a student to choose a career path that pays better. I'm hugely in favor of reducing barriers to role switching and doing away with the traditional 4 year college program. Could open up lots of doors for people.

Whole conversation around free college is starting from the wrong premise (that 4 year college should even be the baseline). College is largely just a signaling tool, and the long duration and requirement makes switching career paths very costly, and pretty much impossible for people who aren't in their 20s. Even if it were made free

> because labor gets allocated to the most economically beneficial sectors naturally through fluctuations in wages.

In a perfect market economy, yes. In an imperfect economy, where the value of each teacher is hard to measure, and where teachers cannot capture the full value of their work (e.g. a lifechanging middle school teacher can't charge much more than a normal teacher) this isn't true.

> Imagine, for example, that the US allowed unlimited migration from China, India etc for engineer positions... wage situation would be much different.

This is really not clear. First of all, as software engineering can be done remotely, there is already a fair level of global competition. Second, migration doesn't always decrease wages (see Mariel boatlift for a counterexample). And even with open borders I don't think the current top 10pct of SWEs would be paid more than 20% less.

> But yeah, generally in a free market wages will be set "fairly".

Again, assuming that the market is efficient, which it probably isn't.

You're right that the impact of teachers is hard to measure. But we can ask whether educational outcomes would improve by paying teachers more... and my feeling is that the answer is largely no. Most of educational outcome is cultural/determined by the student and their peers rather than the teacher.

An interesting experiment would be running two cohorts of students through the same school, with same curriculum but different set of teachers. And paying one set of teachers more than the other and measuring long term outcomes. I would be interested in seeing the results of this experiment. There was already something like this done as a result of a New Jersey lawsuit, but I would have to vet whether it impacted pay of the teachers. In that case there was no improvement in educational outcomes, despite greatly increased funding for the schools.

Yes, software could have always been done remotely. But it largely hasn't... and timezones become problematic. Show me where FAANG companies are hiring remote workers en masse for US based teams? Maybe it's happening, but I certainly haven't seen any evidence of that.

I worked for a company that primarily hired on H1B, and hiring was a lot easier when pulling people from Europe/India/China due to lower comp expectations. These people were paid the same as everybody else/native US people, but just culturally were less comp sensitive. But H1Bs are highly limited in quantity, of course.

Why suggest the economy is inefficient? In areas where the market has little intervention, it's largely efficient. Though I agree there are areas where there actually needs to be more government intervention to encourage a competitive market. Competitive markets are more important than free markets for a societally beneficial outcome. One example: competitive markets require that information is freely available. Companies can profit by hiding information which disadvantages consumers (e.g. cost of healthcare procedures, cost of enterprise software etc... relies on information asymmetry to enhance margins).

You don't have to explain to me how demand and supply works, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

> Unfortunately many people choose to be teachers regardless of low pay.

I don't think this statement is true any more. At least in the state where I live, teachers were quitting in large numbers before the pandemic, and the situation is far worse after. This is one factor that's not touched on in the article at all, and IMO is mainly responsible for why schools haven't returned "to normal".

> In a market based economy, wage is determined by supply and demand.

A 1973 letter to the editor in the journal Science describes the "famous story" about a physicist whose solution to a poultry farm's egg-production problems began with "Postulate a spherical chicken".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

> Whole conversation around free college is starting from the wrong premise (that 4 year college should even be the baseline). College is largely just a signaling tool,

Maybe signalling your ability to pay!

Making it tuition-free is a good step toward stopping some of that bullshit.

University system is a kind of self-governing guild system. The signal is approval from the older generation who satisfied the requirements of the system in their time. It may be a signal that the younger group has put up with their bullshit hazing. Or that they met some reasonable standards. The money requirement is more like the bullshit hazing.

> and the long duration and requirement makes switching career paths very costly, and pretty much impossible for people who aren't in their 20s. Even if it were made free

Not really. It requires no more time investment than a full-time job. For working age people seeking career advancement not a problem.

Replacing the income of a full-time job is part of the funding requirement that is more important for older people.

> Doctors in particular are problematic, because as I understand it the AMA limits number of new doctors creating an artificial shortage

Any degree system is "artificial scarcity" inherently. Even if the number of spots isn't fixed centrally, you have some social ("artificial") process for including and excluding people. The more exclusive the process, the higher prestige the degree can confer. You cannot remove the exclusivity while preserving the degree.

(And maybe we should get rid of a lot of the degrees and the social divisions they create... I don't especially feel that way for MDs though.)

Hello, American parent here. In non-COVID times, there are endless summer programs of all variety to provide childcare for kids during summer months. This is not the case during Thanksgiving / Winter Holiday and depending on where you are, Spring Break.

As an American parent, COVID has been rough. I love spending my time with my kids, but there’s also an endless debate of “am I going to take time off work today to properly raise my children, plop them in front a screen when that’s the last thing their young brains need, or try and parent and work simultaneously while simultaneously failing at both?”

If you want to work full time, and your partner wants to work full time too, there’s lots of childcare solutions to supplement school during non-COVID times. Without those options, it’s just a continuous unstable compromise with work, partner, sending your kid to school vs online learning, etc.

—-

I can’t explain the pay thing with teachers vs doctors. I don’t understand how my wife, a healthcare provider, was able to deliver a baby at a private, well-equipped clinic in Kenya for a total cost of $300 USD while having to pay >$6000 USD out-of-pocket after insurance for an uncomplicated birth of her own a few years later in a US hospital. Just the way capital, normal supply and demand, mixed with lobbying has distorted things over time I guess.

I also don’t really understand why people send their kids to private school instead of just putting that same monetary support directly into the public school system. Anyway, these are totally separate issues from the cultural reliance on schools as childcare providers.

I send my kid to private school to get an average class size of about 8 kids. If instead I sent him to public school and donated my tuition checks to the school, my son would have a class size of >20, and I have no idea where my money would be spent.

On some level, I’m a little ashamed of sending my kid to a better school than most kids get, but I’m giving you an honest answer.

The other aspect is that private schools are self-selecting first and selective second. Your kid either needs to be well behaved or fiendishly rich (enough to offset their problems with benefits for everyone). This isn’t the case in public - as it takes everyone as they are.

The reasons I’ve considered private school for my future children after talking to friends/parents who have put theirs in private has less to do with the quality of education but more to do with the peers they’ll have. They’ll likely be around decently behaved peers and I’ll be able to shape the discussion of how the school is run - whereas that’s not the case at public schools at all.

Having come from such poor schools where we couldn’t even afford five days a week education and only went 3-4 days/week, I know my kids will get an exceptional education compared to what I got - but I want them to have a good social life too and maybe that’ll work at a public school but maybe it’ll work at a private instead.

You'd be surprised how much parents can shape things, especially if they have time and money (mostly money).

Much appreciate you taking the time to provide an honest answer. I went through that thought process too. You make the best choice you can for your child.

I believe the research that says that, having a more diverse environment (for all senses of the word “diverse”) results in better learning outcomes. I’m sure that diverse classrooms are common in some private schools and not others, and that you also get access to a different kind of diversity.

I also believe the research that says that, after you account for socioeconomic background, public schools are high performing for kids from families with means. Private schools can select their student body in a way that lets them market a unified accomplishment of their students. Public schools must accept all students regardless of their circumstances, which makes their results appear worse in aggregate.

I also believe in supporting our public institutions.

I’m not trying to create an argument with your sincere response, just providing my own rational for not sending my kids to private school even though we can afford to. I do this to address my feeling of doubt in the same way that you did this to address your feeling of guilt.

GDP per capita in Kenya is 30-50x lower than USA. The provider and the facility are probably a large part of the total cost. Wages and land price are loosely correlated.

Doesn’t seem outlandish (without knowing your insurance covered) a 20x difference would occur.

Don't get me wrong, but where I am from parents simply don't work full-time when they have children they have to care about.

Why even have kids if you don't plan on having time for them?

I think that what you’re describing is a healthy way to do things. Impossible to answer your “why” question in anything close to a concise or complete way.

Why would anyone have kids? I adore my children and don’t want a life without them, but I also can’t provide any good rational reason to have children.

The cost-benefit is there regardless of whether the responsibility is there. Path A will have Path A costs and benefits, Path B will have Path B costs and benefits.

- Most parents I know (ourselves included) depend on summer camps.

- yes, teachers are severely underpaid and it makes little sense to me. Education is so important if not the most important matter for democracy but US messed it up so bad. I wish all teachers’ wages to double if not more.

> I don't understand the American blind spot that allows people to think of schools being as essential as hospitals; and requires them to both face Covid infections while paying teachers $40k and doctors $400k. Clearly the rates at which teachers are paid indicate that US society doesn't consider them as essential.

That's not how salaries work at all. Waste collection is extremely essential to society (without it, tens of millions would die of easily preventable diseases, and big cities would be unviable). Yet garbage collectors also earn around $40k.

And water is pennies a gallon while gold is $1,800/oz

Your numbers are completely off. The median salary for 10 months of work per year for high school teachers in 2020 was $62,870 and $60,970 for kindergarten and elementary teachers (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/home....). But this is a large underestimate of the total compensation because it doesn't take into account generous benefits and pensions. In Illinois, for example, 39% of all education spending goes to pensions: https://madisonrecord.com/stories/608526182-nearly-40-cents-.... There is also a very high job stability.

I don't mind the best teachers being paid more but we have to be honest with our numbers first.

Sweden apparently put the values of kids time in school very high, since schools were open all pandemic long for many kids, I believe up to ninth grade, and only high schoolers had some limited periods of online/home schooling. College/university was of course different so more like the recommendations for everyone else.

This article is a confidence trick.

By making it about COVID, the affluent readers of the New York Times can pat themselves on the back as if they weren't failing the youth prior to quarantine measures. Of course they were.

I've seen it. Everyone's seen it; even if they've chosen to believe they haven't. The secondary sources have to water it down like this article if they want to talk about it at all. And the primary sources where it's laid bare are a bit too dirty and undomesticated to mention in polite society. Not as if anyone wants to be caught cavorting with primaries at all these days, lest the blue checks turn their back on it (and you, by association).

It is that schooling has been not great, but COVID has made it much worse. Remote learning and kids not being able to socialize has been incredibly detremental.

I agree 100% that US public schools have been failing our kids for years, but I'm curious what these primary sources are that you refer to.

Would you mind citing some of those primary sources so people who aren't in the know (like me) can educate themselves?

You’re being a little too cryptic.

COVID procedures negatively impacted schooling, it follows that removing COVID restrictions and procedures will positively impact schooling. That's all fine and good so far... Let's posit going back to 2018-era schooling will provide 4 Units of School Improvement. 4 USI sounds great, right?

What if there was 40 USI just sitting on the shelf waiting to be picked up? But it's in a blind spot. It was there waiting in 2018 and never touched.

The 4 USI can be achieved by getting rid of the things we never wanted in the first place. Achieving that 40 USI will mean ruthlessly tearing into the status quo.

So, let's circle back and remind ourselves that this is an article using big words and statistics to state the obvious: schooling under covid sucks. No shit, that's not news, but it's in The Times. So let's look more carefully at what it does say. They're not learning enough, and the institutional socialization is producing people less well-adjusted than ever.

OK, technically true. But those were the most visible problems with schools before COVID too.

So, why is this specific article - written this way - in The Times? What purpose(es) - deliberate or not - does it serve?

This is no less cryptic. Either tell us what you think the solution is and point us to these primary sources that "lay it bare" or don't bother saying anything. Dancing around it like this is pointless.

While the whole world has experienced this pandemic, there is an incredible variety of pandemic experiences out there. Within the United States there are so many variables between states, counties, cities, school districts, and families. A common feature of COVID debate I have noticed is that it often seems like people are not even talking about the same thing.

I live in a state that has had a fairly restrictive approach to COVID - my kids were in remote learning for about a year and we had two periods which could arguably be called "shut downs." But our fortunate circumstances made it so that I do not feel like it was particularly difficult for our children. As a result I have not reacted very strongly to local authorities continuing very cautious policies regarding masks and cohorting in schools. I was initially perplexed by the very strong reactions against the same among my peers, but am coming to understand that, like what this article points out, it has been very difficult for other children.

> But our fortunate circumstances made it so that I do not feel like it was particularly difficult for our children. As a result I have not reacted very strongly to local authorities continuing very cautious policies regarding masks and cohorting in schools.

This has been my experience too among families I know. If anything it has been more difficult on parents than it has been on children. That may be another source of reaction towards school polices.

Early in the pandemic forewarnings were raised about the risks associated with school shutdowns. Drowned out by a cacophony of other opinions, the warnings went unheeded in the US.

Sweden was an outlier in keeping schools open, premised upon the rationale that social and mental wellbeing outweighed the risk covid posed to students[0].

I relocated from NYC to Stockholm early in the pandemic which gave me some interesting insights on comparative covid responses.

[0] https://www.gu.se/en/news/only-in-sweden-primary-school-rema...

And what is going to happen? Pass a bill to provide additional support to schools?

Hell, Anything? No. Nothing is ever done. Nothing ever happens except decay.

The United States is spinning down its governmental duties. The pendulum will swing right again, and that will be the death blow. They will continue to gut public and infrastructure programs. All 3 branches will finally truly be a jobs program for the upper class to suck the blood out of everyone else.

The roads will fall apart. Jails will continue to fill up. The homeless crisis will continue to not fix itself. Everyone but the most wealthy will live like dogs, and then obligingly die when they can't afford the "good" insurance.

It's a broken clock hanging on a moldy wall where the pendulum swings all the way right, stops in the center, back to the right.

>And what is going to happen? Pass a bill to provide additional support to schools?

Actually, a pediatric emergency was just declared [0]. And both Republicans and Democrats passed a $250 Million bill to provide rapid support for children's mental health. A Dr friend described it as "if I'm seeing a child and I'm concerned he/she is suffering from depression, I can be on the phone with one of the top 5 experts in the country in 30 minutes".

I'm aware, "mental health" for kids isn't the same as "education for kids" - but this is a big step in the right direction

[0]https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/zLatest_News/Pediatricians_CAPs_...

With 73 million children in the United States, that's $3.74 per child. I don't think a phone call with a doctor can actually solve the problems that most of these kids face, but even if it could, how much healthcare can you buy with pocket change?

That's around $5 per child age 5-11.

About $2 per person under age 18.

can be on the phone with one of the top 5 experts in the country

That seems like a less than scalable approach.

Five experts * 30 minutes means at most 240 kids/day assuming they works around the clock or it’s less than 30m to solve the problem.

Sounds unreasonably optimistic.

I find it funny how there is a separation between the ideas of mental health and peoples lives, as if there is no relation between the two.

That's kind of the entire premise of medicalizing "mental health."

A lot of people on this website, in my experience, do not take this seriously enough, preferring to put on blinders or tell stories about how it’s all for the better we just can’t tell why (thanks invisible hand of the market!).

That is a highly political, opinionated, and pessimistic take. You can just as easily say that the "pendulum swing" hard left has been causing our current issues, and that at least a balancing out could be a natural and needed correction.

How could you argue we have gone "hard left" exactly?

What is an event or piece of legislation that has been passed?

Some would say that spending $6 trillion in < 2 years on largely progressive programs is a pretty hard left swing. Others say that since the latest $4 trillion hasn’t passed yet we’re not left enough.

Ill leave the judgement to you, but it’s pretty obvious that things are not the same today as they were 3 years ago.

I mean why are we counting 2 years when the "left-leaning" party wasn't even in power 1 year ago?

Even those on the right were, at least temporarily, willing to accept unprecedented levels of government spending.

The right has not been truly fiscally conservative for decades. Maybe you are the anomalous one, as your party seems to have transitioned to cults of personality lacking any sort of coherent ideology.

Please show receipts here. You mean the infrastructure bill? That is only 1 trillion?

What do you think is going to happen if we stop maintaining our infrastructure?

The problem with the infrastructure bill is that the price tag was hidden with programs that needed to be renewed periodically.

It will survive for another decade or so, but without funding for maintenance and repair, at the point where it gets actually too unsafe to use or collapses during regular use it will be either a Democrat president getting under fire from Republicans for "not doing enough about infrastructure" or a Republican president blaming past Democrats for being "unwilling to fund infrastructure" - and the latter would actually be correct this time, given how Manchin acted.

Yeah, that might have something to do with a major global pandemic, the response to which we completely bothched in our country.

Let's see, who was the party in charge then, hmm...

Socially and culturally it's undeniable, it's now completely unacceptable in my professional and social circles to publicly support one of our two political parties.

Politically, outside of the obvious 2020 election, there has been unbridled and unprecedented government spending since at least the beginning of the pandemic. Whether it was justified is up for debate, we likely still haven't realized all of the effects, but it has been at levels typically only those further on the left would propose.

Which political party was in charge of the executive branch and presided over the unbridled and unprecedented government spending since the beginning of the pandemic?

Well, one of the parties has kind of gone off the rails with support for literal assaults on our democracy. You bet it's unacceptable.

I agree, it's the party who thinks our entire system is racist because it was built by the euro-centric male slave owning patriarchy. Thinking it needs to be torn down and made into a NWO by way of packing the supreme court, flooding in illegal immigrants to vote, letting riots happen, and pushing CRT and gender theory on elementary students is definitely an attack on democracy.

Forgive me if I'm not really that concerned about Qanon shaman taking selfies in the capital building or the FBI creating fake white supremacist groups.

How much TV do you watch?

How many people were killed Jan. 6th? How many citizens were under threat?

I know of one, but there aren't any statues of her going up anytime soon.

Yep that's my point. The only person hurt Jan. 6th was one of the "insurgents". So, why is mainstream media pushing this narrative so hard?

Politically, we're deadlocked as always.

Don’t think this is true empirically. Unless “always” means “sometime in the 2010s” vs the entire data set.

One small anecdote to avoid citing :), a biography of a US congressman said that in the 1950s Democratic and Republican Senators would sometimes vacation together at each other’s summer homes or during the annual recess. Not sure that happens anymore.

Since when is it just one party’s bag to spend loads of money? I’m not sure that the stopgap measures in the CARES Act qualify as “hard left” considering they were intended to provide aid to the country during a hudred-year catastrophe event. Distinct from the media monkey-dancing, both parties obliged those initial packages with little cross-party fuss. It seems as if you’re conflating “left” with “spending lots of tax-payer money.” That ship has sailed. I still have my first paper stimulus check with a very proud signature on it. This kind of my-favorite-flavor of picking and choosing what is “left” and what is “right” proves the intentional vagueness of American politics works perfectly in undoing any meaningful criticisms of the system as a whole. Both parties are one in the same. The differences between them are immaterial in the face of the problems we face. Red or blue, they will continue to burp their champagne at us as this magnificent shift drifts further toward the iceberg and they tell us from both sides of the aisle “we’re working on it, but the other guys won’t budge.” How many decades does this pattern play out with nothing getting better before the realization sets in that nothing is going to get better, and that’s the way it’s meant to be? No left or right, only wrong.

Could you explain that then, because honestly I can't fathom how a "hard left" pendulum swing has created our current issues. The US has arguably been swinging to the right for decades, and certainly is pretty right-wing compared to most other western democratic nations.

You probably won't get a good answer. The conception of political "wings" and the current FPTP party duopoly along those wings is hilariously narrow in the US. Our Overton window ranges from "genocidal fascists" to "okay maybe the government should build roads sometimes".

> The pendulum will swing right again

> Everyone but the most wealthy will live like dogs

These two points confict. Maybe the left should stop trying to raise the SALT tax deductions that the right reduced?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/22/democr...

And I say this as someone that would benefit from raising the SALT taxes. It is wrong for them to try to raise it

You think democrats are the left?

I love this talking point, because in comparision to basically every country, US Democrats are socially very far left. It's only fiscally where they are more moderate. Which is basically the opposite of what most Americans want, yet they seem confused on why they struggle.

And what is more important? Saying "nice" things, or actually passing legislation that affects the main lever of power in our country?

"They say things very far left( arguable ), but the way they govern is extremely moderate."

Far left on posturing, far right on policy.

> they seem confused on why they struggle

The politicians? They aren't confused. They understand the system.

In order to have political success they explicitly seek the backing of the wealthy elite.

It constrains the politics to never be leftist, and politicians to dodge policy and posture on culture wars.

> in comparision to basically every country, US Democrats are socially very far left

I'd really want to see the data on which you base this belief. Watching US politics from Europe I see the Democrats roughly matching the European center. European "left" has no voice in the US!

How are US Democrats socially far left? There are multiple countries with parties that are literally communists. There are sizable number of US Democrats (especially in the government) who support the death penalty, torture, nukes, a large military, interventionism and mass surveillance (look at the votes concerning the US Patriot act and the reauthorizations). How is any of this "very far left"? They may talk sometimes about socially left issues (homeless, healthcare, etc...), but in terms of actually fixing anything, very little is done, especially that would be considered "left" in any country. Like instead of getting universal healthcare, they just voted to "reform" healthcare companies.

This is an impressive rant and makes sense if you ignore the fact that more and more money is being sucked up by the government that seems to be providing less and less in return.

I mean San Francisco has a $1.1B budget for homelessness. That's a contribution of almost $1,300 for every man, woman and child resident of SF. And yet the problem is worse, not better.

Maybe it's not a money problem but the approach that's the issue.

The mistake you are making is that you think I consider our current administration and democratic leaders remotely competent or aligning with my values.

They do not. I agree they are useless on purpose. That is my point.

I gotta say the situation in politics in the US is so rancorous that no person with two brain cells to rub together would go into it unless they’re a pig that likes to wrestle in shit; who wants to go into that mess? Even Bernie gave into the identity politics out of necessity.

Our best and brightest are making money to buy fallout shelters in NZ or wherever.

Then the real question is whether you believe there is any hope or even precedent of efficient government administration and spending. I personally believe not and that government, especially on a broad federal level, will inherently tend to be inefficient, bureaucratic, and corrupt. If so, wouldn't a swing right towards small government be ideal?

Small government. So you are in favor of defunding the military?

Small doesn't mean non-existent. One of the few things even the most extreme anarcho-capitalists believe the government should do is protect it's people from a hostile takeover on behalf of a non-anarcho-capitalist nation.

I think that most anarcho-capitalists don't believe in a government or nation.

Anarcho-capitalists just want archipelagos of privately-owned governments.

Sure they do. They just call countries "collectives."

Well, I don't think any sane country will try to invade somewhere where the citizens have recreational nukes.

Nukes don't defend a country without a huge human force supporting and maintaining them.

In addition to that, you need to constantly evolve your delivery vehicles to overcome newly developed defense capabilities.

In even the most bare-bones defense scenario, the needed investment is fairly large, and it depends on how large of an investment adversaries make.

It is not possible to remake the USA given its legal structure and most importantly its culture. Federation in the USA is kind of fucked, but how do you fix it?

In reality, anyway, the social, economic and political system works pretty well for business and capital owners. Specially those at the very top. Governments are corrupt because the system is corrupt. The rules of society have been written, and this dates back to the foundation of the country, to benefit elites.

In order to change the rules major dissent is needed, and that will only come in a situation of complete collapse of the political system. I think it will happen, and I actually think things are getting really heated up... but it's not gonna be pretty.

It will be interesting to see what kind of economic, political and social models could be followed. But really, elites will never want to risk their current positions.

> That's a contribution of almost $1,300 for every man, woman and child resident of SF

If you are a property owner, then distributing the externalities and barbaric social harm of the insane NIMBYism and zoning laws that artificially protect your property's valuation to the majority renting population makes sense. A few thousand a year is nothing compared to real estate.

And obviously, that amount of money is easily enough to just give the unhoused the housing they need, if it weren't impossible to build affordable housing in the first place.

You’re wrong about San Francisco having a $1.1B budget for homelessness.

In fy2021-2022 the amount is $670M … over two years.

SF spends 1/4 of the amount you accuse it of.

Furthermore, it’s well known that other counties near and far send their homeless people here. So as a SF tax payer… I think you owe me many thanks for taking care of your homeless people.

https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/budget/

> The FY21-23 HSH budget leverages $1.2 billion over the next two years in federal, state, and local resources (including Prop C funds). In addition to HSH’s existing commitments

…wait, im seeing in here that they plan to add 4,000 new homes to addresss homelessness. Given the real estate pricing of SF it makes sense it would be expensive as fuck. Why are folks mad at SF govt? They should be mad at landowners for price gouging on rent.

SF rent isn't gouged: SF land prices are gouged by NIMBYs. For the price rent is SF should look like Manhattan. Instead it's more like Boise.

> Pass a bill to provide additional support to schools?

What do you suggest? More funding? The US has one of the most expensive public education systems per capita. We keep pouring more money into it and it keeps getting worse. I'm in favor of "providing additional support to schools" but it needs to be something other than throwing money at the problem.

I don't know if it's good or bad but I see hear more and more parents wanting to contribute in group for handpicked tutors and teachers and they're not doing it for religious reasons. Problem is, the government doesn't want to give back the taxes or support that (even if they do support private schools).

I am very thankful that my youngest graduated high school in 2020. The last couple of months were screwed up, but there wasn't much real education lost by then; most seniors pretty much check out after Spring Break anyway.

I really feel for the kids who are younger. The effects of this are going to be with us for decades.

Did your kid go on to college? My two kids did and it's a pretty lousy experience. Classes are mostly online still, cafeterias are take out only, socialization opportunities are mostly gone.

My last year of higher edu was remote and I really loved it in 80%

Finally I didn't have to waste time on commute and it was way easier to ignore doubtful profs/useless courses and focus on the right things.

but yea, things may be harder if you don't know people you're studying with

Why did you take useless classes? Colleges give students great leeway in course selection.

(not US)

I couldn't

I could only take "specialisation" - a few courses at the last year or something like that.

It could be software engineering / cybersecurity / something else

I'm sure you've heard of prerequisites, but maybe you haven't encountered any questionable requirements in the classes you took at the schools you attended?

Personally, I had to take classes like "Ancient Eastern Civilizations" while pursuing a degree in Audio Production. So while the term "useless" is a bit strong, I understand where they're coming from.

Caltech had a requirement for classes in social studies. This was a rather broad category, and included things like language, history, and even accounting. So there wasn't any reason for me to select a useless class.

There were specific required classes that I didn't like, but they weren't useless.

Prerequisites, of course, prevent one from wasting the professor's time from unprepared students.

>There were specific required classes that I didn't like, but they weren't useless.

Sure, course is never 100% useless, but when in one course you can learn "10 things" and on this one you can learn "1 thing" and have to spend similar amount of time on them meanwhile you're working full time, studying on weekends and trying to learn other things for your job/career, then things are tricky and you gotta pick - you put effort into some classes that aren't really efficent or maybe some OSS side project?

Yes. One was on-campus, and it wasn't ideal but he did OK with it. The other was all online and it didn't go well. He's taking time off now (working, not sitting idle) until he can be fully in-class, on campus.

On campus interactions may not be strictly needed for book learning but they are such a big part of the college experience in general.

I graduated from Michigan pre covid and all the cs classes are recorded so you only need to show up to discussion on Fridays. Wasn't a bad experience since you could skip past people's bad questions. Of course we could still meet on campus though.

Decades? I missed 3 months of 4th grade. The teacher said I should be stuck back in 3rd because 4th grade had moved along so quickly. My mom said no, and put me in the 4th grade class around Christmastime.

I wasn't a day behind. The class had not advanced at all.

But I'm sure the pandemic will be blamed for school unachievement for decades. It's a godsend to the school industrial complex.

> The effects of this are going to be with us for decades.

Unlikely. The evidence from kids who get sick enough to miss a lot of school is that at worst it takes three years for them to be indistinguishable from those with uninterrupted school attendance. Even unstructured homeschoolers, who have little to no explicit instruction of any kind, are only on average a grade level behind average children[1]. The last historically comparable school closures, for the 1918 flu pandemic, had no detectable long run effects[2].

[1] The Impact of Schooling on Academic Achievement: Evidence From Homeschooled and Traditionally Schooled Students

http://zoleerjemeer.nl/files/1313/9109/4391/The_Impact_of_Sc...

[2]School Closures During the 1918 Flu Pandemic https://www.nber.org/papers/w28246

> The evidence from kids who get sick enough to miss a lot of school is that at worst it takes three years for them to be indistinguishable from those with uninterrupted school attendance.

Is this really true if the entire class missed a few years? It is very different having one kid who missed a lot and then later interacts with kids who all didn't miss a lot, and a class where every kid is behind a couple of years.

It's not like every kid is falling behind though. Plus you only need to look at history, and probably within your own family to find a few examples, of generations of children who are educated throughout hard truths and stressful times like war or famine and go on to be alright. Zoom and a mask isn't ideal, but a lot less stressful in comparison to something that could easily have given you significant PTSD.

> It's not like every kid is falling behind though.

I wouldn't be surprised if kids who fell behind during remote school are clustered at the same schools.

> It's not like every kid is falling behind though.

Yes, in many places it really is. Look at what test results have been released - there is a tiny cohort of kids that managed to remain close to the normal level of achievement, and generally in areas where parents are heavily involved in schooling their kids.

I kinda agree that long term harms are overstated. I will even add they are overstated for ideological reasons.

> Plus you only need to look at history, and probably within your own family to find a few examples, of generations of children who are educated throughout hard truths and stressful times like war or famine and go on to be alright.

But, this is not true. If you look at generations that grew in hard times, they were doing worst. Generations that grew in war are more violent then peace generations. They have more mental health issues, drink more and so on. Famines have long term impact too. There were even studies about Holocaust survivors - even their children have more anxieties and similar mental health issues. The even affected parenting and communication of survivors enough to change children.

Education achievements now are better then they were in those generations.

If you read the second paper you cited, directly from the abstract, you'll see that they explicitly said that 1918 was "starkly different from today":

> Our results are not inconsistent with an emerging literature that finds negative short-run effects of COVID-19-related school closures on learning. The situation in 1918 was starkly different from today: (1) schools closed in 1918 for many fewer days on average, (2) the 1918 virus was much deadlier to young adults and children, boosting absenteeism even in schools that stayed open, and (3) the lack of effective remote learning platforms in 1918 may have reduced the scope for school closures to increase socioeconomic inequality.

Furthermore, from the paper:

> Another important contrast is that school closures in the 1918-19 pandemic were substantially shorter than current COVID-19 related school closures, potentially limiting their effects. In our sample of 1918-19 school closures, the average closure length was 36 days, and some cities decided to make up for missing school days by extending the school year.

Closing schools is just one of the many measures society has taken to steal the prime years of life from the young to give to the elderly.

Highly unlikely. My wife taught children who came out of Sarajevo in the mid-90s and many of them have gone on to excel in life.

Children are resilient. What is _hurting_ them is not the school closures, but the panic and uncertainty that some people have put around this.

That panic and uncertainty is hurting all of us.

>uncertainty is hurting all of us

Simply by observing those around me, I have learned SO much about humans.

We hate uncertainty. I hate it. I remember worrying myself into a frenzy looking at all of these tables predicting exposure and risk. "If we go to the grocery store, we can't see X friend... but if YOU go to the store and spend less than 15 minutes getting peanut butter and bread..." it was a mess.

I also learned that humans are bad at responding to highly unlikely events. All throughout this pandemic, I remind myself that people are making emotional decisions not logical - and they are doing that because we all are really bad at making logical decisions. And then I remind myself to show them love and grace.

What can I do to make your experience a little less frantic? Even if only for 1 minute.

It always surprises that left-leaning politicians and media were the most fervent advocates of school closures, because it has disproportionately affected kids from the poorest backgrounds. What I see around me is that educated couples invested the time to make up for the lack of school education (and were typically home working themselves), so those kids will probably do OK, other kids were left on their own all day.

I think it is more of a relative problem than an absolute problem.

Left leaning politicians were pushed by teachers unions whose job is to advocate for the safety of the teachers.

Left leaning politicians also send their kids to private schools which did not shut down.

They did in the UK

they did on the US

The pandemic is also affecting kids from poorest backgrounds. They are the most likely to loose caregiver due to it. They are more likely to be cared for by grandparents too. 1 in 500 kids lost caregiver overall. That affects them too.

I have some bad news for you: if your child is college bound then they are about to go into another environment that has been profoundly damaged by the pandemic: a college campus. Students at my university are angry and depressed about the fact that they're paying thousands of dollars for glorified university of Phoenix. The college social scene is also obviously heavily disrupted, which is probably an underappreciated factor in the development of young people.

If I were of college age and was able, I'd take a gap year or two without any hesitation.

You but how long… gap year seemed like a good move at pandemic start but is been 2 years now with no End in sight

I think you can start college pretty much at any age as long as you don't already have a degree. It's obviously a huge luxury to do so, but I think you're missing out on so much social and intellectual development if you do college now that it may be worth holding out for 3 years (or maybe more). I'm not saying that college now is completely worthless, but looking from the outside and listening to what students are saying, it seems severely diminished.

At some point you get too old and you outgrow your college peer group. I think 2 years is the most id recommend. College is like 30% study 30% social and 40% getting the initial experience that you can use to start that first job.

I finished my degree after returning from an enlistment, and was about 8-10 years older than the typical "college-aged" peer group. Though ages tended to skew older in the ECE department I attended, with at least a quarter of the EE majors being established over-30 professionals and veterans finishing their own degrees.

Variety in age in socialization is a healthy thing, and I feel cramming entire cohorts into a 24-month bloc isn't particularly amenable to how we've evolved.

Your experience isn’t likely common. Most people I went to college with at university were under the age of 25. The overwhelming majority so. I graduated at 23 and was consistently the oldest or tied for oldest in many of my classes. Outside of community college or graduate programs - people age 26+ are very uncommon.

You also spent enlistment time in a similar to college setting for the social aspects anyway, so you would be less impacted by the lack of it in actual college.

This doesn't pass the smell test to me. Plenty of seniors were friends with freshman and sophomores at my university. Maybe it's a bit rare to see an outgoing senior hanging out with a fresh out of high school freshman but less extreme examples were super common.

I just remember that there were some out of military guys in our program and they never really connected with the other under grads. They had more in common with grad students so perhaps they found more friends amongst that group.

I took four, most of that doing manual labour. Gave me lots of time to think about what I wanted my major to be, a decision I had no answer to at nineteen but had a good idea of at twenty-three. Definitely don't regret that delay.

Terrible advice. Gap year is a waste of time and is reserved for rich kids. You won’t be doing anything meaningful with your life due to COVID anyway. You have no employable skill set. You don’t have money because you’re a broke ass 18 year old. If your idea of fun is breaking your back bussing tables at a restaurant 40 hours a week then feel free to get a degree and do it after.

I wouldn’t bother and have seen the effects on people who did skip the last year or two. It’s been terrible for them. They’ve basically been stuck at home doing jack shit and watching years of their life disappear without any progress on literally any front.

You're only stuck at home if you decide to be.

Well HR and universities are going to you know actually do their damm job and make adjustments

So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better or do school boards just keep bumbling along like before?

Do zero-tolerance policies really work? Why are students falling behind in mathematics compared to the rest of the world? Does overloading of take home work produce better test scores, or does it just consume free time and stress out kids? Are teachers ever going to be paid more? What about later start times for high schools?

There's so many things that can be questioned.

It is obvious what will happen. The education system will crumble, inequality will grow, and to make up for having a poorly educated work force we will adopt more automation or AI-assisted tasks with very structured workflows to reduce cognitive requirements. Only elites will be able to afford giving their children strong educations and social experiences, presumably with other elite children. This will allow some children to pursue high status high skill careers while the rest must settle for whatever they can grab.

At the same time, children will increasingly grow to be emotionally underdeveloped, leading to poor romantic relationships filled with toxicity, leaving them perpetually unsatisfied with life and cynical of others. Poor quality breeding will become rampant and add to the problem.

>Only elites will be able to afford giving their children strong educations and social experiences

How about learning from the Internet?

Doesn’t work very well with young children.

Today I learned how to alt-tab into Minecraft all day while still getting marked as attending!

It works for 10-year-olds, and I'd say it works for younger children too. The problem is needing supervision (curiosity leads to doing some very harmful things, and that's not even considering bouts of malice…).

If children want to learn, and they can learn, there's no stopping them (except with video games, television, toys, a field, a garden, a paved area, a woodland, the fact that books make a loud noise every time you close them, other children… but apart from the first two, I see no problem with that).

> It works for 10-year-olds

No. It works for some 10-year-olds. Few, even. The school system is not intended to educate a few children, it is intended to educate all the children in the country. Even the poorest and least motivated. You cannot just throw children into a room with an adult and computers and tell them to learn.

It could well be selection bias, but I've seen the least-interested (middling-motivated) 10-year-olds rapidly learn when something that interests them is placed in front of them, and they're not expected to do anything with it. (Specifically, Scratch, with a “you could make a game” directive, after a quick back-and-forth game design session.) The existing school system isn't doing a particularly great job of educating those kids.

Is the goal for kids to pass exams and then forget most of it by adulthood? Or is it for kids to gain basic life skills, find out what interests them, and have the environment to pursue their interests? (Almost everyone finds some “work”-type things interesting.)

Note: I'm not saying that my system would work for everyone; I'm challenging the suggestion that the existing system works for most people. Some people require interactive (rather than book) teachers to learn well, but that doesn't mean that “You Must Learn This, Then This, Then This” is an effective approach.

I was with you until you got to the... breeding... thing.

Humans breed like any other animal, not sure why people take offense to pointing out biological processes. Mates get selected based on environmental factors and fitness, and increasingly, social status. In the future, rich girls still won’t marry poor boys.

Feels to me like you're completely discounting an "Uptown girl" scenario. There are many instances where one might be looking for a downtown man (disclosure: That's what I am.)

Are you sure? The definitions of fitness are very vague here, and not just measured on wealth. There are plenty of wealthy women with less-wealthy boytoys and trophy husbands. There are increasingly plenty of hardworking breadwinning women with stay at home dads. A man who lives to work and has no real domestic skill is increasingly unattractive.

Humans are by an OOM or more the most complex creatures to arise from raw natural selection; about us we have constructed a fractal diversity of society and culture.

Humans are animals, yes, but they have long transcended the ordinary pressures of environment and selection. In a stupor, trying to comprehend our exceptionalism, we intuitively and nonsensically describe much human behavior as "unnatural."

Your crude reduction of human reproductive choice denies myriad past choices made in free will, subsuming both the terror of power and the rare true love to biochemical animism. Go far enough down this path and you will assign to animal spirits the abstract free will you deny, accidentally recreating primitive religion & symbolic thought, thus elaborately disproving yourself.

We're obviously animals. That's a place to start, but not an insight. Contending otherwise is insight to the soul and pain of the speaker, not their society.

The end, the ur-insight: a universal theory which succinctly predicts homosexuality, Dennis Kuchinich's marriage, the Ptolemaic family tree, the fate of the Sabine women, and Kate Upton's romance.

Your first paragraph is the set-up to the novel Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

You have described, accurately if glibly, the situation in the West prior to the Industrial Revolution and globalization, which have brought world-historical growth in economic, educational, and spiritual quality-of-life for non-elites.

Over the past ~150 years, our society has been remade; higher education is hardly the esoteric province of the aristocracy and clergy it was ~700 years ago in Europe, and as you imagine it will "obviously" soon again be.

There's no doubt the elite retain advantages of birth. Perfect meritocracy seems at odds with humans' intuitive creation of entrenched hierarchy and autonomic drive to empower and extend one's specific genetic legacy. But even when beset by imperfection, corruption, hypocrisy, etc, a Western non-elite human's life is not likely to turn out "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," as is it would have in almost any other age. A peasant in Lancashire c. 1350 could reasonably bet many of his children would die, and those that did not would live almost entirely the same life as his own. A working-class American can make the opposite bets just as reasonably.

All this to say: I'm no Whig historian, but it is impossible to deny tangible and massive improvements in the average human's access to education and general quality of life over the past several generations. It is therefore absurd to make "obvious" predictions such as you have, contrary to a pervasive, macro trend, without providing some insightful analysis. (William Gibson's Cassandra cries should not be used as primary evidence...)

We rich, lucky ones, likely as not great-grandchildren of semi-literate factory peons, seem, generally, to exist in a cynical milieu which thoughtlessly assumes inevitable dystopia (an anti-Whig history!). But recent negative trends in, for instance, the Gini co-efficient, are minuscule vibrations within a relentlessly positive curve [https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality].

>So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better or do school boards just keep bumbling along like before?

The type of conservatives that wield the most power in the US Senate are skeptical of public education. This is their golden chance to finally dismantle it, creating a patchwork of federally funded religious private schools.

No. You have 1st world America and 3rd world America.

The 1st world kids will be fine. Some of them will struggle and carry some emotional baggage forward.

The ones who have nothing will have a little less. Society will hold them in as much regard as they do now, maybe a little less if helping them requires more taxes.

I think COVID is the inflection point that puts the U.S. behind compared to other countries who have a more collective culture and less extremism in politics.

I have seen nearly every aspect of life in the U.S. take a major hit. Nearly no one cares about anything, and the attitude of taking care of me myself and I seems rampant.

I have been worried about children since day one, from social disorders to education. We have several generations that basically missed out on two years of schooling from pre-school through university levels. That can't be good in one to three decades time, even if we i prove the issues tomorrow.

China seems to be doing great. Economy is way up, Covid cases almost non-existent, decisive education reforms, strong new military alliances.

Based on the news being fed to me, it’s almost as if the pandemic didn’t even happen to them.

"So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better"

I don't really see how this would happen, or even how they connect. Covid is keeping our schools from even being schools. It's displaying the flaws in our larger system, but it doesn't really speak at all to what's good or bad in the classroom itself. EXCEPT that we've had a natural experiment where kids are removed from the classroom, and it turns out classrooms are pretty good educational environments compared to remote school or ad hoc home school! If anything this indicates we don't need to reinvent our schools, we just need to reinvent our school HVAC.

(We also aren't reinventing school HVAC, which is disappointing because of all the options in front of us that's about the easiest.)

The connection to covid is pretty loose but when people are driven to questioning what the very purpose of schools are (education or state sponsored childcare so both parents can work and contribute to the economy?), I think connection is fair.

> and it turns out classrooms are pretty good educational environments compared to remote school or ad hoc home school!

I'm not sure that was ever in doubt, but it doesn't mean classrooms are good environments for learning. "It's better than (almost) nothing" is where we're at now.

I'm not sure I like this article. They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim.

For example the article says

> Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances.

But when you go to the study they link, it says

> Although school closures reduce the number of contacts children have, and may decrease transmission, a study of 12 million adults in the UK found no difference in the risk of death from covid-19 in households with or without children.

There's a big difference between, "You're just as likely to die from COVID if you have children" and "Children going to school doesn't increase the spread of COVID". The study even points out that closing schools "may decrease transmission", but the article completely ignores that.

This is an attempt at manufacturing consensus by making it seem like these arguments are coming “from the adults in the room” because it’s in the NYTimes. They’re so good at gaslighting their readers (and I say this coming from the left of the NYT, not the right).

You’ll start to see liberal politicians using these same talking points in the coming weeks, guaranteed.

Yes its an argument, yes its in a well known newspaper. That's not what "manufacturing consensus" means.

>You’ll start to see liberal politicians using these same talking points in the coming weeks, guaranteed.

Well, there's no federal solution, so we gotta do something different, right?

Exactly. The NYTimes is the worst, it’s like the paternalistic dad-figure of the media.

In this case I think they’re right; omicron is a super spreading variant that is less lethal and impossible to control. Their audience is sick of lockdowns and employers are tightening the screws.

> (and I say this coming from the left of the NYT, not the right)

If politics is one-dimensional, that suggests that there is only one (main) political issue. History suggests that there's more to politics than one main issue, so what were you trying to convey by saying this?

"You’ll start to see liberal politicians using these same talking points in the coming weeks, guaranteed." This article's position seems to be more in line with the Republican's general stance on the pandemic. So isn't it a good thing of the left can revise its position?

It’s not the left; it’s the biden administration feeding meat into the machine. They have absolutely betrayed their voter base in favor of their corporate donors and they will pay for it in the next election when that base simply doesn’t show up.

This is trying to manufacture Consensus on giving up and do natural immunity from the left

I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with the actual content of the article. My statement was purely about the criticism on liberal politicians adapting something they read in the NYT. I think it's in general a positive if someone is able to change their views and revise their position when me information gets presented. Ideally we'd all be open to that regardless of the source. I know I'd be positively surprised if FoxNews were to publish a piece slamming refusal to take vaccines. The last thing I'd complain about is Republican politicians adopting that stance.

NYT ist so much liberal as it is corporate democrat. As such they have way more in common with the Republican Party (pre trump) than they do with say Bernie or actual liberals. So it’s not at all surprising to see what would traditionally be republican ideas come from them.

There appears to be a weird blind-spot when discussing COVID outcomes - anything short of death appears to be discounted or ignored. So hospital issues, long COVID, etc. just don't exist, so catching it either didn't matter or you're dead.

On a planet where that was true, that sort of reasoning would make sense. (As it does if you're trying to encourage other people to ignore risks.) What I don't understand is why so many people seem to view it that way.

It's the human tendency to optimise the quantifiable and ignore the unquantified. (The unquantified is often partially quantifiable, but that would take effort, and the statistics aren't currently on the dashboard…)

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

> It's the human tendency to optimise the quantifiable and ignore the unquantified.

Are you sure that isn’t just a modern trend now that we are able to quantify so much stuff?

Modern society is just the result of countless generations of the human tendency to quantify. We just have so many things quantified now that our problems tend to be more "using the wrong quantifications" rather than "not having the right quantifications."

> Modern society is just the result of countless generations of the human tendency to quantify.

Is it? I see no evidence to justify this statement at all. Care to show some?

The vast majority of how society is organized seems to eschew quantification in favor of descriptive qualification. Most laws, and governance, for example are formed that way.

The use of metrics in governance has been dramatically increasing as our methods of quantification have developed, but that is definitely a modern development.

> The vast majority of how society is organized seems to eschew quantification in favor of descriptive qualification.

> The use of metrics in governance has been dramatically increasing as our methods of quantification have developed, but that is definitely a modern development.

These two statements seem slightly contradictory. If quantified metrics in governance has increased as our ability to quantify things has increased, then it would seem that laws did not favor descriptive qualification, they merely relied on it due to lack of ability to quantify.

Or put another way: The only times we don't quantify things is when we cannot.

> The only times we don't quantify things is when we cannot.

Just because something has increased recently doesn’t mean there is an inbuilt human tendency for it.

For example the wearing of lounge suits for business is a modern development.

I don’t think you are going to claim that means there was a ‘human tendency’ for lounge suits all along.

> Just because something has increased recently doesn’t mean there is an inbuilt human tendency for it.

Sure, but that wasn't my point. I was just showing the flaw in logic of the two quotes given. My original claim was not that we definitely quantify when we can, but that the reasonings given do not support your claim.

Sure but the reasonings don’t support the opposing claim, and that’s all that matters for this purpose. I don’t need to prove that we don’t have a built in tendency, only, that there is no proof that we do.

It's a matter of framing. We have different standards for what the null hypothesis should be. My perspective is to assume human behavior as a relatively broad constant until proven otherwise.

Descriptive qualification is a necessary stepping stone to qualification though, so of course society built on it first. Something must be described and defined before it can be counted. Modernity emerges from humanity first; influences it second.

So what?

Weaving is a necessary stepping stone to making lounge suits. That doesn’t mean humanity has been destined to wear lounge suits all along.

The lounge-suit example is so much more specific than the topic at hand, that's just a farcical comparison. Any sort of broad logic will break down if you try and stretch it 1:1 to more narrow situations.

I'm not much of a history buff, but I can't recall a good example of cultures or societal periods with emphasis on optimizing the unquantifiable (Or having no optimization preference at all). The only decent examples that I can think are in laws, and that only seems to be favored because things are difficult to be quantified, not because the unquantifiable was more preferred.

Can you think of a historical period in the distant part where there is evidence of a preference for quantification?

It seem like you are simply assuming that was present.

Assuming we are talking about innate and not cultural qualities:

If I do not assume we optimize for the quantifiable, I must assume either (1) we optimize for the unquantifiable, (2) we do not favor one way or the other (innately), or (3) human nature has changed over a very short (few thousand year) time period.

I was trying to rule out (1). (3) Seems pretty easy to rule out purely on our understanding of evolution. And (2) would follow after ruling out (1) and accepting the original assumption.

But onto this:

> Can you think of a historical period in the distant part where there is evidence of a preference for quantification?

Tax law.

‘Tax law’ is not a historical period, nor is it evidence of a preference for quantification in general.

Given your apparent desire to be logical about this, it seems almost absurd that you would give this answer.

Tax law throughout all time. I didn't think it was necessary to clarify that point.

Fine. What also isn't on the dashboard is the lost QALYs which is pretty much the point of TFA.

> What I don't understand is why so many people seem to view it that way.

It's classic minimization. You see it all the time when someone is motivated to ignore reality, or is suffering from a condition that makes it hard to accept reality. A heroin addict might say that shooting heroin isn't a big deal because they haven't died from it yet, even if they have a history of overdosing.

I don't think anyone is ignoring long COVID and hospital issues. Hospital capacity is discussed front and center daily and is the primary justification given for lockdowns.

Also, please see this recent meta-analysis which found that when you actually add a control group, most "long COVID" symptoms disappear in children. A higher study quality was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms.

Original tweet: https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876

Link to study: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...

How many hospitalizations are due to covid and how many just happen to test positive?

Appears to be very very common (as high as 2/3 'with' covid vs 'for' covid). See: https://twitter.com/MonicaGandhi9/status/1478401273317654528

Surely it can't be a pure binary split of 'for' covid vs 'with' covid.

Having covid presumably worsens outcomes for unrelated causes, in some cases turning a non emergency condition into an emergency condition.

You can say the opposite about the other side as well... Anything short of eradication (which is impossible) means nonstop lockdowns, masking, vaccine mandates and making the unvaccinated pariahs.

What I don't understand is why you would shut down schools and enforce silly unhelpful mask mandates on them when the science shows children do not spread the disease in any meaningful way and are not badly affected by it. This is the "blind" spot I see.

Schools in my district are shut down because there aren’t enough substitute teachers to fill in for sick or retired faculty. The older ones are getting sick and dying, or quitting before they do. The younger ones don’t want to be paid $35k a year to be screamed at by parents for not teaching subjects the way parents want them to be taught.

Browse /r/teachers some time. It used to be a sub full of teachers venting steam about their students and sharing helpful tips. These days it’s just one post after another about teachers who are fed up and either quitting or planning to quit. They are proposing a new subreddit to handle the influx of complaints.

If your “stay open” analysis begins and ends with the immune system and virus response of the students, then your analysis is incomplete because you are missing a huge dynamic that is at play here.

Good point. Also flights are cancelled not because of a government mandate but because personnel to fly the planes are sick with Covid.

It would be bad business to fly with a sick crew.

My mother was a teacher for 20+ years and my wife is a teacher. I know exactly how schools are handling this.

They're quarantining people that aren't sick, that's why they don't have staff. They've scared away substitutes with unscientific fear mongering about super spreader events in school. This is a problem of over-testing and unnecessary quarantining not a shortage.

Just curious then, how does your wife's school handle the case of a faculty member dying of Covid and not being able to find a replacement or sub? Do they just put more work on everyone else? In my district, they replaced the history teacher with the music teacher because she died right before the holidays due to Covid (if you're wondering, the history teacher doesn't have a background in music). They manage this by siphoning teacher prep time, which means the history teacher is covering music instead of prepping for history class. What is your district's protocol?

> They're quarantining people that aren't sick, that's why they don't have staff.

Is your position that no one has been quarantined who legitimately needed to be? Or hospitalized? Or died? Or retired? It's 100% people who aren't sick being quarantined, and that's why schools don't have enough faculty and staff?

> They've scared away substitutes with unscientific fear mongering about super spreader events in school.

Coming from a family of teachers, I'm sure you're aware that many if not most substitute teachers are older, retired, and often have multiple comorbidities related to Covid. Some of them are immunocompromised and can't even get vaccinated. Couple this with the fact that many schools do not have vaccination, testing, or masking requirements. Do you think it's unreasonable for such people to not want to subject themselves to a school environment at this time?

> This is a problem of over-testing and unnecessary quarantining not a shortage.

I understand you think this is fear mongering and people being quarantined who are healthy, but at the same time people are also actually dying and being hospitalized with very severe illness. You can call it a problem of quarantining healthy people and over testing, but that doesn't relate to the fact that vacancies are being created by Covid, and they aren't being filled because people look at the shitshow that education has become with Qanon craziness infiltrating school boards, and the demonization that they are getting online (being called lazy and that they should all be fired) and they nope out real quick. Why bother?

I don't see how lifting quarantine requirements and testing less makes things better for teachers. It doesn't make the field more attractive for new teachers. It doesn't help retention. It doesn't give kids a better environment for education. An alternative solution might be to impose a vaccination mandate, increase testing, better facilities with improved ventilation, and hazard pay for teachers along with a big freaking raise. But that seems to be a non starter.

Instead we've chosen a path of disrespect, and that's actually a big component of this. Coming from a family of teachers, I'm sure you've heard this. Moreso than feeling afraid, teachers feel disrespected and disillusioned. They are ostensibly front-line essential workers, but they are called lazy, called unpatriotic, are underpaid, and overworked. There is a huge gap between the rhetoric/reality about how essential teachers are to managing this pandemic, and the attitudes and compensation they receive.

Also, it's pretty condescending to suggest that this is all in teachers' heads, and they are just the victims of a fear mongering campaign. Stopping testing doesn't prevent teachers from being hospitalized or dying (and teachers are indeed dying). It also doesn't prevent their family members from being hospitalized or dying and teachers having to leave their jobs to take care of their family. It doesn't take many vacancies due to deaths or hospitalizations or retirements to completely throw a school into disarray -- especially considering the massive class sizes that many have to deal with. There's no extra slack other teachers can pick up. They are already stretched to the extreme when things are fully staffed.

>faculty member dying of Covid and not being able to find a replacement or sub?

Hasn't happened, and the numbers show that would be rare.

>Is your position that no one has been quarantined who legitimately needed to be? Or hospitalized? Or died? Or retired? It's 100% people who aren't sick being quarantined, and that's why schools don't have enough faculty and staff?

Nope, didn't say that. Strawman.

>Do you think it's unreasonable for such people to not want to subject themselves to a school environment at this time?

Maybe they should focus on why they're only able to get old immuno-compromised individuals to substitute.

>I don't see how lifting quarantine requirements and testing less makes things better for teachers.

By allowing staff that's not actually sick to teach, therefore you're not loading extra burden on fewer teachers. By also allowing students in the classroom, lessening the need to make lessons for quarantined individuals.

>I don't see how lifting quarantine requirements and testing less makes things better for teachers.

School isn't for teachers, it's for educating kids to be productive members of society. Any teacher worth their salt knows this.

>They are ostensibly front-line essential workers

You're right, so they need to start acting like it instead of following the lead of their unions (e.g. Chicago) and completely shutting down the system for what's essentially a cold at this point. I don't see nurses, emt's, or firefighters doing these things.

The entire problem here is that you're basing your stance off of false assumptions. COVID has never been an issue in schools because children do not contract it at a high rate and they do not spread it at a high rate. So, going to remote learning was never a good solution to begin with. You know what the biggest burden my wife had was during all of this? Creating multiple lesson plans to try and teach to remote kids who were sitting in their rooms pretending to pay attention in Google Classroom while actually playing video games not giving a shit about school for a year. She 100% would have preferred being in person and reiterated that daily to me.

> Hasn't happened, and the numbers show that would be rare.

Okay, but it has happened to other people, and even if it is a rare occurrence, it can throw an entire school district off axis. That's been shown to be true even if it hasn't happened in your wife's particular school.

> Nope, didn't say that. Strawman.

What you said was "They're quarantining people that aren't sick, that's why they don't have staff". So now you're telling me now you are open to other possibilities. For instance the possibility that they don't have faculty/staff because sick people are being quarantined, or that many teachers are retiring and not being replaced?

> By allowing staff that's not actually sick to teach, therefore you're not loading extra burden on fewer teachers.

Okay, but what about in the cases where teachers are too sick to teach? Or when they have to take care of others who are sick?

> School isn't for teachers, it's for educating kids to be productive members of society. Any teacher worth their salt knows this.

School isn't for teachers, but you still need teachers to teach school. And if things aren't good for teachers, you're not going to be able to hire new ones. This is the very attitude that is causing so many to leave the field or avoid it entirely. Any teacher worth their salt also knows their worth, and they know when they're being exploited and disrespected.

> You're right, so they need to start acting like it

Well they have been acting like it for a very long time throughout this pandemic. Teachers have been teaching in person all year. They have actually died in service of their discipline and the nation due to this diseases despite the fact that you don't know any personally. They have done so at great cost to themselves financially, emotionally, and mentally while around them others, who are neither essential nor workers, have profited massively. What they are asking for now is to be supported and listened to, and not be called lazy, unpatriotic, un-American, traitors who deserve to be fired.

> The entire problem here is that you're basing your stance off of false assumptions.

I'm not basing my stance off of assumptions, I'm basing it off of experience. I am a teacher and what you say about students is just plain wrong. Maybe for small children it's true, but the kids I teach are teenagers and they spread covid just fine. The first week in class there was a massive outbreak as students mixed together after summer break -- over 250 cases were recorded. Some people got very sick. We went remote for a week, cases died down, and then we were back in the classroom. The rest of the semester went on uneventful.

This only worked because we had proper precautions. We had a vaccination mandate with 90% compliance. We had mandatory masks, mandatory and available testing, and mandatory quarantine. These are the kinds of measures that are nonstarters at public schools, but experience has shown they are needed to keep things open and running and teachers happy. Teachers were giving the requested tools, and they got the job done. In other cases teachers are being disrespected, minimized, even demonized, and in those cases teachers aren't getting the job done, because they can't.

Yes it's true that young children don't spread it according to the statistics. That's a relief! But I don't know how many times it needs to be said that children are not the only human beings in a school community, and the school is not a closed system. When community spread is as high as it is right now, it really doesn't matter how much children do or don't spread Covid!

> You know what the biggest burden my wife had was during all of this? Creating multiple lesson plans

Very true, I had that same problem! Based on my experience, I think there are approximately 0 teachers I know who would prefer teaching online to teaching in the classroom -- teaching to children in person is the entire joy of the profession. Without that, it's really not that rewarding of a job. But that's another issue of a lack of administrative support for teachers. Technology support staff could have been hired to help essential teaching workers through this time, but that never happened.

You make several strong claims in your post:

1. Shutting down schools does not help prevent the spread

2. Mask-mandates do not help (prevent the spread)

3. Science shows children don't spread the disease in any meaningful way

4. Children are not badly affected

5. Mask-mandates are "silly"

Can you give us links to data that shows each of your five (5) claims to be correct?

https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/7/618

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200710100934.h...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32430964/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32914746/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmv.26394

Yep and that's just a handful of easily found studies showing that children aren't in very low risk of COVID infecting them and/or causing any serious ailment. Therefore, the rest of your points are moot.

And also the abnormally high ratio of people who die within 1 year of catching Covid from other reasons: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-survivors...

233% increase in chance of death for people less than 65...

183% increase for people 65+: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.77843...

The article actually says it's 233% increase in chance of death for people younger than 65, which is even scarier:

> For people younger than 65 who were hospitalized with COVID-19, the risk of death in the 12 months after the infection was 233% higher than it was for people who did not have the disease, results published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine have shown.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.77843...

Thanks for the correction!

My mistake - but I would argue it's WAY less scary.

Chance of death is already high when you're 80 (4%). An extra 133% is 5.32% chance of death.

If you're 16 is 0.02%. An extra 133% is a rounding error.

Extra 133%, not extra 33%.

So from 4% to 9.33%, not 5.33%

But if that extra 133% risk is kept throughout your lifetime then back to being scary :/

It's an extra ~1,400 deaths in the 15-18 age group.

This is comparing the risk of death for people who are hospitalized to the risk for their age group, which is missing the major confounding factor that those who are hospitalized for Covid (especially in younger cohorts) are very disproportionately sick (from diabetes, obesity, immune issues from transplants, etc).

There's no evidence that Covid infects diabetics (or other "unhealthy" people) at a higher rate. Hospitalizes them, sure.

The negative group should've had a correct proportion of "unhealthy" people.

Again - even if it is only increasing chance of death in "unhealthy" people... It's still increasing chance of death!

> Hospitalizes them, sure.

Re-read the citation, it's specifically looking at hospitalization.

Why do you keep putting quotes around "unhealthy"? If someone has diabetes they are, by definition, unhealthy.

From the linked article:

"The 12-month risk of mortality was assessed in unadjusted Cox regressions and those adjusted for age, sex, race and comorbidities."

They controlled for comorbidities.

Specifically, they use the Charlson Comorbidity Index:

https://www.mdcalc.com/charlson-comorbidity-index-cci

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3818341/ - a peer-reviewed proof demonstrating how comorbidity indices are effective

The researchers found a strong positive correlation between severe COVID-19 (defined as a COVID-19 hospitalization) and chance of death for any reason.

There're obvious reasons why people of all ages with preexisting health issues are likely to get severe COVID-19 as opposed to asymptomatic, mild or moderate one, and the same people are also more likely to die from other health-related reasons. This would explain the correlation they found.

However, in the "Discussion" section they wrote this:

Based on the evidence that contracting severe COVID-19 infection increases the risk of death after surviving the episode, it is clear that prevention of significant COVID-19 infection is the most effective way to decrease the risk of death following COVID-19

Does anyone understands why exactly is it clear?

Note the graph in the same article shows people with mild COVID-19 have lower risk of death compared to people with no COVID at all.

If you get hospitalized from covid, you're already a sickly person, so this isn't surprising. More of a correlation than a cause.

Correlation is not causation. Can you think of any confounding factors here?

The quora answer [1] by Franklin Veaux to question "How can a disease with 1% mortality shut down the United States?" explains nicely that it is not binary live/die at all. Mind though that this was written in the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't have the same information as now, so numbers may be imprecise, but the explanation still stands.

https://www.quora.com/How-can-a-disease-with-1-mortality-shu...

Even if no one died and people only went to the hospital, a huge issue is that they are there in the hospital in need of care and there are finite trained hands in the hospital. Not to mention you still have everyone else coming in with their car accidents and heart attacks at the same time.

Better questions to think about are why the U.S. medical system supporting the words largest economy can't trivially expand its capacity to treat a relatively benign respiratory virus on top of its usual duties, or why there is a shortage in the training pipeline, or why people need ER care for other things in the first place.

Nobody wants to get the disease which POSSIBLY could kill them or put them to hospital and perhaps financially bankrupt them and or give them bad long-term health outcomes. That has an effect on the behavior of everybody, except of course those who believe Covid is a "democratic hoax".

Also with an evolving disease you don't know what its death-rate will be and it will depend on the preventive measures you and the government take, one of which is "shutting down" another being vaccination, which was not available at the beginning. If there had been no vaccine surely the death-rate had been larger.

According to data below the mortality rate is 7.5% in Mexico. In US it is 1.5%, not 1% as implied by whoever posed the question.

"Shutting down" will affect the mortality-rate because presumably it will protect the most vulnerable population more. If they don't get infected the mortality rate will be smaller.

And as far as I can tell US was never really "shut down" was it? Everybody still got their groceries. Many died of Covid, nobody died of hunger I believe. Subways and buses were running.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

> mortality rate is 7.5% in Mexico

That is probably the CFR (case fatality rate). This depends on actually testing. If you don't test mild or asymptomatic cases, the mortality will look way larger.

But we know the actual global mortality, is about 0.7%.

A link to that data would be nice thanks

You appear to be confused about the true mortality rate. The page you linked gives case fatality rates, which are irrelevant due to lack of testing. The vast majority of infections were never tested, and thus never counted as cases. The CDC estimated the real fatality rate at 0.6%. Vaccines and other improved therapies are now pushing that fatality rate lower.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Everyone will get infected. Shutting down can only delay that.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

Shutting down can prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed so they can also take care of other emergencies besides Covid.

Let's say you get to a serious car accident. But the hospital can not take you because it is full of Covid patients.

How many serious car accidents do you typically get into per year?

Times have changed, we are more sensitive now to death.

In the past it was considered normal to lose 50k soldiers in a war, have 3 of your kids die as infants, ...

Also note that COVID has killed more people than combat deaths in all U.S. wars combined. U.S. COVID death toll is now 826K, combat death toll for major U.S. wars is a total of 666K: 291K for WW2, 214K for the Civil War, 53K for WW1, 47K for Vietnam, 33K for Korea, and then numbers start getting negligible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

It's also passed the death toll in the U.S. from the Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed about 675K (although this was out of a smaller total population).

It doesn't take a very large death toll to have a major impact on American society.

It's already widely recognized that death toll figure is died 'with' COVID, not died 'from' COVID, which is okay as a number in itself. However direct comparison using such figure is disingenuous.

Died from COVID is likely even higher than the official death toll. The best metric for this is 2020-2021 excess deaths, subtracting the expected death rate from actual observed deaths. This number is 936K, so about 110K more than I suggested.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

You also can view the weekly totals for observed and predicted deaths on that site. You'll see that deaths from non-COVID causes track the predicted value quite well, but when you add in deaths from COVID, the curve follows the timing of COVID cases quite well.

COVID has averaged a “9/11” amount of deaths every 2-3 days for what, 21 months? The actual single 9/11 event caused us to panic, pass the Patriot Act, and invade two random middle eastern countries. But somehow Americans are fine with a 9/11 sized catastrophe over and over.

We have and we haven't. There's been a lot of apathy about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, interventions in Syria and Libya etc which have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands probably millions of people. Millions of children dying of easily preventable diseases. If we dismiss that and say oh well we're not sensitive to deaths of others, only our fellow countrymen that's also not true. Deaths caused tobacco, obesity, alcohol, and drugs cause an entire COVID pandemic of deaths every 9 months or so, ongoing, forever (in the US). Even deaths caused by flu kill one of those 50k wars worth of people every couple of years and people are pretty blase about that. Staggering gun murder rates among black American communities (often times I see these discussed it's dismissed with "oh that's mostly gang related"!!).

So I don't think we're necessarily all that sensitive to death, although we I suppose if it's highly publicized and pushed (like war deaths or non-gang-related murders). We're much more sensitive to fear, which is perception of risk (which obviously includes mortality), but it is also very strongly driven by the amount and tone of news coverage, politicians, social media, etc.

Not to comment on the merits of the response to covid or any of these other issues or whether fear is justified, but the reason why economies were shut down for covid was because of fear not deaths.

Well, the ideal outcome is to use the QALYs (or NHS Adjusted QALYs) to inform discussion, but it is considered a bit gauche (perhaps unfortunately for informed policy making) to identify that maybe the whole and absolute death of an 80 year old with emphysema isn't nearly as significant as some amount of disability to a 25 year old.

i.e. there is a one-way ratchet on these measures since one direction is gated by the "trade grandma for a dollar" line.

Where are you seeing this?

I'm seeing the opposite. Most public officials and news articles seem to only care about case numbers, which have very little meaning these days.

The reason people care about death is that its a clear signal and would likely scale linearly with the harm covid is doing to society.

For instance, more positive tests could be due to testing. Hospitalizations are affected by different policies. I don't even know how you would measure long covid.

Most any serious viral infection can potentially cause post-viral fatigue syndrome. We've known that for decades. COVID-19 is nothing special in that regard.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3063394/

But many cases of "long COVID" appear to be psychosomatic.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

And none of that is really relevant to school closure policy anyway. All of us will eventually get infected. At most closing schools again would only delay the inevitable. Instead we should focus on reducing risk factors by encouraging more people to get vaccinated and aggressively treating chronic metabolic diseases.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

I've yet to see any convincing evidence that long covid even exists, moreso than long flu exists.

I think the article does a good job at looking at this as a trade-off. No where in the article do they state outright that there is no change to transmission. The main point is to ask the question "Is avoiding the damage to those that are older worth the damage to those that are younger?"

The question only ever asked by people in no danger (or who believe they're in no danger) of the consequences of what they propose.

No. Everyone with children asks that question, because they see the damage happening. Some reach different conclusions about the trade-off, but no parents take your absolutist position that doesn't even question the damage.

I'm sure they do: and they do from the position of being able to talk about the consequences but not actually grok the consequences. You're doing it right here: think of the children! Well sure, but okay what about the teachers, the janitorial staff, the administrative staff? Schools aren't a machine children go into and then with no other inputs, education comes out.

Nobody is forcing teachers, janitors or administrative staff to keep working. If they find the risk personally unsuitable they’re free to find another job. Plenty of other jobs are hiring.

There will always be some level of danger. Insisting on eliminating danger is irrational.

It's good that no-one is insisting we eliminate danger then.

Are you saying people who don't ask these questions are selfish and myopically focused on the benefits of mandates and lockdowns to themselves?

That's pretty harsh. I can see where you're coming from it sometimes seems this way especially if you're discussing it on the internet. But I have found there are a few of these people who have thought about this and do have concern for the consequences and are willing to have reasonable discussions about it. So I don't think it is very constructive to generalize so negatively about people.

Seconding @wayouthere. I saw this sentence:

> They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim.

And thought, "Right, yeah, it's the NYT." They're not fake news like Breitbart, but I seem to catch them 'pushing the envelope' on the truth a lot. And I like/agree with a fair amount of what they publish.

Hm, I found David Leonhardt's summary of that article to be fairly sound – it even opens with "School closures have been implemented internationally with insufficient evidence for their role in minimising covid-19 transmission."

"[A]ccumulating evidence shows that teachers and school staff are not at higher risk of hospital admission or death from covid-19 compared with other workers" quote seems most pertinent. Other quotes that certainly back the paraphrase include "teacher absence decreased in tier 3 regions during the November lockdown despite schools remaining open" and "Teacher absence because of confirmed covid-19 in England was similar in primary and secondary schools in the autumn term."

Finally, the "Transmission" section explicitly casts doubt on studies that did show a reduction in transmission. Overall, "skeptical," as the linked NYT article states, seems dead on.

Were there other sources from the article that you took issue with?

I actually agree with the summary you provided, but I think the article it self way over steps that and I don't think their sources back up a lot of the claims they make inside the article.

The one I quoted above is the most obvious, but the other two things I take issue with are:

1. They seem to attribute the rising gun violence to covid, but when you look at the data they provided on school shootings, it's been rising since 2015. The number we're at now just looks like a continuation of that trend.

2. The fact about a third of their sources are just other NYT articles written by their colleagues. Chasing down the true source behind some of their claims is near impossible since it's often multiple levels of people interpreting the data.

"For the past two years, large parts of American society have decided harming children was an unavoidable side effect of Covid-19."

This sentence also implied that there had been consensus about what the trade-off is which I don't think everyone would agree with. I definitely know some parents who are afraid if their children returning to badly ventilated classrooms

Also parents are the caretakers of children. If they're sick or incapacitated or die, that's going to have a negative impact on children. As will having a greater number of essential workers becoming sick or dying.

How is that relevant? The parents will all inevitably be exposed eventually. It doesn't matter whether the exposure happens through one of their children or someone else.

It doesn't matter how. It matters when.

No, it doesn't matter when, a parent dying when a kid is 10 is no different than when the kid is 11.

Let's not pretend people are avoiding covid for multiple years here, because statistically they aren't.

Mortality rates are creeping down and new therapeutics are coming in, though.

Mortality rates are going down because of the vaccine and natural immunity. I wouldn't hold my breath on any ground breaking therapeutics, we have plenty as it stands today.

It does matter when.

Outcomes are dramatically better if your local healthcare system isn't overloaded.

US staffed beds are down 7% for the year, what makes you think it's not getting worse?

For one, I don’t live in the US

Well that really doesn't have anything to do with this conversation.

It feels like it's directly relevant to your claims about US hositpal beds

I don't think I communicated my point well. A first world country is struggling to not decrease its capacity in hospitals, what makes you think the rest of the world won't have similar struggles?

A parent catching covid after they are vaccinated and/or after there are better treatments is a parent far less likely to die. A parent catching covid with and without the hospitals currently being overrun is also a huge difference.

It'll be years before anything truly game changing hits the market. As for hospital capacity, we're down 7% from last year, there's no reason to believe we haven't screwed our economy/healthcare to the point it won't just get worse.

There's already far better treatments now than existed at the start. Look for all the small things that add up, not one silver bullet.

Then there's vaccines which _are_ game changing.

There's also new drug(s) coming in already, Pfizer's pill for instance.

yeah we've heard miracle therapeutics for a year now, look at remdesivir, made more headlines than anything else and ended up doing nothing.

Sacrificing months of life for the unlikely possibility of a therapeutic from a disease that's unlikely to do lasting harm isn't something I would do and I certainly would never sacrifice anyone else's months of life or demand that they do in order to give me that "off-chance". We have vaccines, that's what we planned on having, they are here now. Time to stop pretending we've not spent the past year and change screwing over poor people and move on with life.

oh yeah, not to mention monoclonal antibodies are being denied by the federal government now, looks like even therapeutics might be dwindling in numbers.

sounds crazy right? Yeah, yeah it does.

ECMO shortage

ECMO is a salvage therapy. Even if there were an infinite number of ECMO machines and trained operators that wouldn't significantly increase survival rates.

The US is down 7% on staffed beds since last year, exactly what makes you think shortages are getting better with time?

If it was not possible to establish a clear link between school class surges and infection rates in 2 years, then there is no link. The CDC does have a list on which places transmit the virus and restaurants/cafe/bar/dancing/... were 3 of the top 5 entries if memory serves. The remaining 2 were hospitals and doctors’ offices.

Many places that people think would spread the virus don’t. For example anything outside is very safe, as are swimming pools. Outside it takes rock concert like crowd densities before clusters form. Viruses cannot deal, even for milliseconds, with uv light or rapid temperature changes and many places are already hardened against infection, and therefore quite safe, even with many people without face masks. Again, there’s a density limit, but it’s pretty high.

One study did point out that risks in school and hospital settings are closely related to the quality of the ventilation system. And yet, I haven’t read even once about attempts to identify substandard facilities for kids/patients or money for improving them being allocated. And obviously, all data suggests smaller classes drastically reduce risk.

Can’t find the list but here’s a study. Schools are not mentioned. Restaurants and any setting with on-site eating or drinking are the big vectors of infection it seems.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6936a5.htm

And what harms a child more, in a rational compromising world: part of the family dead or losing revenue due to hard sickness, or staying away from school for a while?

This writer may not have children, im terrified to leave my toddler behind, am I selfish? What is this fake dichotomy...

The probability of a vaccinated person young enough to have primary aged children dying from Covid is less than the flu.

If you’ve got kids in grade school, you’re likely in your 30s. And if you’re afraid, you’re likely vaccinated.

Do yourself a favor and look up the mortality rate for vaccinated people in their 30s. It’s exceedingly low.

You are likely damaging your kid because of an irrational fear.

There have been large districts that have been open almost the entire time. The impact between those and other communities where schools have remained closed / virtual for nearly two years is minimal. My nieces went to a lower income Atlanta area public school. In March of 2020 when they switched to virtual leaning my niece was one of 6 children who ever logged in to do virtual assignments... from her entire grade!

Some districts simply weren't able to do virtual learning, and almost every parent their was an essential worker. They did a ton of outreach over the summer distributing Chromebooks getting people internet access etc but it still had a dismal turnout and had to go to modified in person in fall of 2020 for a couple weeks and then just full time regular school after a month or so. Even then they had a record number of non-returning students, and we are talking elementary school, first and 3rd grade. They can't find these kids, the official line is that they left the district, but there's no reason so many low income families would move in a single year.

They did masks, plexiglass, spacing and all the other stuff to start with, but it made instruction nearly impossible and they had so many problems with students bringing contraband including guns to school that they basically removed anything COVID related and had to ban book bags and made lunch free for everyone and no outside food without written persmission for allergies. They sent letters pleading for parents to please remind children not to bring guns or drugs to school. Delta 8 gummies have been a major problem. Again this is a school of about 1200 students that only goes to 3rd grade.

I think those on the outside of low income communities are really under estimating how a certain segment of the population is being drastically negatively impacted. Despite my families commitment to public education by nieces were sent to private school. There are still issues in their public schools and if you go to Walmart or just ride around their are school age children everywhere all day long even though full time in person instruction has been going on since Fall of 2020.

Like I'm not even sure how some communities will recover. This is an area that already had around 70% graduation rate now the pace of instruction is significantly reduced and 2nd grade is basically a repeat of 1st grade.

>and they had so many problems with students bringing contraband including guns to school

covid measures caused... kids to bring guns to school? wtf?

My wife is a teacher in a low income school. Many of her kids went to CPS and some simply vanished just like you mentioned.

people don’t realize the level of support an elementary school provides to many children.

I’d say my son and most (but not all) of his classmates in elementary school did as good with virtual learning as they did with in person.

Of course, there’s the huge asterisk. This is all because most of those children had at least one parent who could and did actively take part in the virtual learning. Very lucky.

What it tells me though, is that the issue of virtual learning is not one of pedagogy or whatever, but simply one of money. It’s expensive to keep one person at home to teach kids on an ad-hoc basis.

We don’t want to really invest in education, so the other unavoidable choice is to “let er rip” through schools.

Welcome to link "citations". Journalists use links as a way to back up their statements because almost no one will click on a the link and even less will actually read it. Link "citations" are used a lot.

Yep, between that and twitter "citations" which make me want to scream. I don't care what NateDog2244 said on twitter, that could be the "reporter" for all I know. You can find someone defending/attacking ANY position online so you can cherry-pick like crazy.

I'll admit I'm much less likely to follow links when my confirmation bias is kicking up into high gear but I've been trying to force myself to do it more after I received an article from a parent that I knew was full of BS and after following the links (the ones that weren't dead) I found the studies linked actually refuted the position the original article took. For way too much of my life I took "Blue text with underline" (or whatever color the style it to) meant "fact"/"cited"/"backed up", that couldn't be further from the truth.

I encourage everyone to follow links even if you are "sure" the article is 100% true, it can be very eye opening. At the very least you will get a better understanding.

It worked though. OP clicked on the link and proceeded to talk about it here on this forum. Would you have seen that study otherwise? I would not. Regardless if it doesn't work on everyone, that shouldn't be the goal. The links should be there for those of us who click on them.

Not just journalists. There's a handful of people around here who are highly prolific at that behavior.

Isn’t “may decrease transmission” the operative part of the citation?

No. They're saying it "may decrease transmission" because there isn't evidence one way or another. They study they linked to didn't test that. Later in the first study, they even say "The role of children in community transmission is not clear".

The study that they're citing (https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n628.short) tests whether living with children increases chances of death from COVID (it doesn't).

There is a dangerous level of cognitive dissonance around school closures that effects nearly everyone. I have to filter arguments by finding out if the people making them have or do not have kids in school. People with kids in school just want schools open. Teachers and administrators want schools open. ...and therefore politicians want schools open.

There are a lot of vested interests that bias toward opening schools.

Honestly I do not think we are capable of weighing particulars to make a scientific determination. We need policies around school closure that are rigidly followed in the course of a pandemic.

>Teachers and administrators want schools open. ...and therefore politicians want schools open.

This is just false. The largest teacher unions in the country have been pushing school closures. This means many teachers, administrators and politicians also want school closures.

Until like the last week politicians have been reluctant to even suggest schools reopen

https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-teachers-unions-odds-over-20482...

You could be right about that, but re: your link, Fauci is not a politician, he's a bureaucrat. No doubt they are subject to politicization / political bias and pressure too, but he doesn't seem completely partisan and one sided, he "has acted as an advisor to every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan"[wikipedia], so it's hard to gauge the political response to the mood of constituents based on what he's saying, in my opinion.

Biden has been parroting the same stance since he's been in office. They're not about to go against a large part of their voting base. When the teacher's unions want something they usually bow to it.

I have kids in school. I don’t want them open during this kind of Covid surge. I also think the attribution of poor learning in the previous surges to remote learning, ignores a whole set of coincident factors and has more to do with wanting everyone to get back to work with kids in care.

“But our schools are safe!” say the administrators! “The virus doesn’t spread in schools! We’ll keep them masked!”

I’m planning my work schedule to get sick this week.

Where are the kids going to go when you shut down schools? You end up upping the care taker to kid ratio from 30:1 to like 2:1 when you pull kids out of school so you have to pull an equivalent number of adults out of the work force to handle that responsibility.

School closures making it so people in those households are no more likely to die of COVID sounds like school closures are wildly effective. The most relevant comparison is not households with vs without children, but among households with children, outcomes with and without school closures.

You're cherry picking from the study.

>They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim.

With a title like this, I think they are understating what the source claims.

Closing schools is not evidence based and harms children https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n521

The part about the under-20-year-old children who fell to gun violence in Chicago raised my eye. Thats a problem but I don't know it's a covid problem, and I'm not certain that people over 18 count as children.

Given how many gun deaths are suicide I wouldn't be surprised if it's a result of social isolation in response to Covid.

I strongly agree with your second point... I'm all for a longer exploratory phase of life before people settle on a career, but that seems like it should involve a more gradual adoption of adult responsibilities, not delaying them ever more.

Suicides went down during Covid.

Wow, you're right! I find that quite counterintuitive, I wonder what the mechanism was.

I'd wager a fair number of 19 year olds are still in high school, though. At least for part of their 19th year.

My view is there is a strong “anchoring effect” at play. Because so many vulnerable actually died at the outset, and indeed since, it’s become a yardstick for damage.

Even the qualifiers of long covid and life altering conditions seems a heavy bar to set. A new rapidly spreading severe flu with low death risk is damaging enough to families and economies to take broad action.

With schools, there has been a strange preoccupation on only the health of the child. For many (like me), the risk is to the child’s parents and family where it is a major vector. I’d say 95%+ of my risk comes from the school risk. Maybe there are not enough of us to show in stats? But the logic is sound. The lack of any improvement in school ventilation in my country has been so terribly disappointing.

>There's a big difference between, "You're just as likely to die from COVID if you have children" and "Children going to school doesn't increase the spread of COVID".

Is there? Because I fail to see it.

If "You're just as likely to die from COVID if you have children" (most of which, that is ages 5-to-17, go to school), then "children going to school doesn't increase the spread of COVID".

What would the alternative be? That children going to school does increase the spread of covid, but for some mysterious reason their own families are spared disproportionally from being infected by them?

(a) parents and non-parents would have mostly equal chances of dying if they contact covid.

(b) children going to school increased the spread of covid

one would expect their own families they co-live with, to be mostly affected by this.

Else what explains (b)? It's their teachers that increase the spread - and children going to school are not the carriers of these increased spread?

What's the "big difference" that you take issue with?

IMO it's just as good an argument that children and their activities don't affect adults and covid mortality, so by extension opening schools shouldn't be a problem.

Sure, closing schools may "slow the spread", but what does that matter among a population that is ultimately very safe from the effects of covid?

I think you're focusing on the wrong sentence in the cited article. It goes on to say:

> International modelling studies which estimate that school closures have a meaningful effect on reducing transmission rates are all confounded by the near simultaneous introduction of multiple interventions (including lockdowns, curfews, closures of bars and restaurants). Moreover, they do not account for indirect effects of school closures which prevent parents from working outside the home. A systematic review of observational studies showed that in those studies with lowest risk of bias, school closures had no discernible effect on SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

The title of the cited article is "Closing schools is not evidence based and harms children", which I think gives a pretty clear picture of the researcher's conclusion. And that in turn matches what the New York Times wrote: "Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances."

When I was a kid there was a big earthquake where I lived and my life was disrupted for a few weeks. Many decades later I still have latent trauma from that incident.

Children involved in situations like accidents, wars, disasters and abuse need years and sometimes lifelong therapy to deal with it. We are kidding ourselves if we think that the long list of behavioral changes we are starting to see in kids is simply attributed to keeping them at home, and when school reopens they will magically get back to normal. They have been exposed to non-stop disruption, illness, death and uncertainty for two years now.

Whether the covid pandemic goes away or not, a mental health one is upon us soon.

> When I was a kid there was a big earthquake where I lived and my life was disrupted for a few weeks. Many decades later I still have latent trauma from that incident.

From the earthquake, or from the disruption?

It's an important distinction in the COVID case. Are kids being traumatized by having to attend school via Zoom, or are they being traumatized by living through a global pandemic?

I don't think the distinction is important in any scenario. It's always the disruption.

Put another way: if an earthquake happens, but nobody notices except the Richter scale, does it impact anyone? Of course it's not the pandemic term itself, it's the first-, second-, third-order effects of covid and the term pandemic. Zoom school, masks, vaccines, media coverage, political shifts, fights, worrying about family members getting sick (possibly dying), seeing your friends less, fewer/smaller gatherings, longer periods of isolation, etc.

> worrying about family members getting sick (possibly dying)

That was my point. Is what's hurting the kids having to stay home, and have Zoom meetings? Or is it the fact that they're literally living through a catastrophe? The former is nothing compared to the latter.

Most people haven't really been affected by the disease itself, and instead were basically entirely affected by the measures put in place to try to slow its spread.

I'd say that fear of infection, and your family members falling ill or dying, is separate from the measures put in place, and is a very real concern for folks of all ages.

I'd think most kids don't actually worry about family members getting sick. They generally feel worry when their parents worry about family getting sick. So, they are being impacted by the social and emotional change in their environment, much less by disease itself.

> literally living through a catastrophe

Relax a bit.

No doubt some are long term traumatized by this. But a brief look at history shows that such things happening during childhood are normal, not exceptional. If most people need therapy to get back to normal, the human race would have died out.

In my grandparents' generation, it was normal for a family to lose a third of their children before adulthood.

The US has had devastating epidemics before, like the 1918 flu, and the polio epidemics.

> If most people need therapy to get back to normal, the human race would have died out.

I don't think "normal" and "human race died out" are the only options. Your grandparents' generation may not have ever had or gotten back to what we'd consider normal today.

We always hope to make the world a little better for our kids than it was for generations before. Our kids will grow into adults, and they'll find their normal. But how different will that be from a world in which there was no pandemic? I don't know the answer.

The survivors of the pandemic will be, by and large, just fine. Like has happened with every other disaster.

When your standards are the human race dying out or not, of course they'll be fine, and the survivors of all the other disasters have been too. But as a parent of young kids, my standards are clearly higher than that. As I said before, I want the world to be better for them than it was for the survivors of all those other disasters.

On this forum, you're well-known and rightly get a lot of respect. You're a great technologist. If you were to just tell me something about programming language design, I'd generally assume you're right. If you gave rationale and sources, that's a bonus for my education.

But on this thread...how do I put this nicely. As far as I know, you're not an expert in early childhood development, you're not a public school teacher, etc. I don't even know if you've been around children going through this. It doesn't comfort me much when you say they'll be fine. You're just some guy on the Internet.

I know kids who've gone through this are struggling in many ways. My kids will probably be fine in the long run because I have the resources to help them. That still won't happen without considerable angst and effort on my part, that of their teachers, etc. Many other kids might be fine by your standards but not by mine. I'm not an expert in early childhood development either, but my understanding is there are certain critical years for language and social development that are golden opportunities. If those opportunities are missed, it's hard to fully replace them.

> It doesn't comfort me much when you say they'll be fine.

As for me, I personally know people who went through WW2. They would not talk about what they went through. But I know, from reading many accounts of WW2, that what millions of people went through is worse than can be imagined. And yes, the children suffered terribly. In Britain, where the children were separated from their parents for the duration of the war, and sent to live with strangers in the countryside. It was much, much, MUCH worse for the children on the continent.

And yet they grew up to be, by and large, ordinary, productive citizens. If you did not know their history, you would not see any difference in their behavior from people who did not go through such experiences.

I also personally know Vietnam boat people who live in my neighborhood. I also know an Afghanistan person who escaped the collapse last summer and arrived here safely with his whole family. He's doing fine rebuilding his life here.

No, you don't have to believe me. I agree, you shouldn't believe some guy on the internet. But there are people all around you who have survived major trauma, and are doing well. You just may not recognize them, because they are doing well.

Yes, some people are broken by trauma. Most are not. We live in a time that is so free of trauma that we need to invent trauma. We live in a golden age of security, health, and plenty. But this is, historically speaking, highly abnormal.

> Children involved in situations like accidents, wars, disasters and abuse need years and sometimes lifelong therapy to deal with it.

These situations have been very common throughout history, and are still prevalent in many developing nations, and yet somehow those countries generally have better mental health, at least by metrics of depression and anxiety.

Previous generations endured wars and much more deadly pandemics. Do you have any idea how difficult it was and how long it took for black children to be able to go to school, at all?

Man, it sucks that kids have to deal with this pandemic. But my grandparents had to deal with a whole lot worse than Zoom. The kids will be alright.

It seems like this is a case where science doesn't tell the whole story. The pro-science stance is very numbers-focused, but ignores hard-to-quantify things that really do matter.

People see their kids suffering. Masks do have a cost. Millions of years of evolution say that facial expressions are really important, especially for adolescents. Fear has a cost. And quality of life matters.

Everyone knows this. Even the most pro-lockdown politicians are seen enjoying ordinary life among people. The ones who can't escape are the kids, because the adults tell them what to do 24/7 and punish them instantly when out of compliance.

It doesn't help that we label people who happen to see the real costs to children as some kind of science deniers. You don't have to deny science to realize that other things also matter.

[Edited for clarity.]

> The pro-science stance is very numbers-focused, but ignores hard-to-quantify things that really do matter.

To me it feels like the numbers are focused on one metric: deaths from covid (per capita).

It seems obvious that that is what we should be focusing on. But I think most humans accept some risk of death in everyday choices. For example, driving to meet your friends to have dinner or "watch the game" or whatever brings some risk of death that "staying home alone" wouldn't.

For two years now, people have been in various states of behavioral modification to avoid "deaths from covid". During that time, children have suffered reduced learning; businesses have died or been killed; single people have gotten increasingly depressed; the country has increased anxiety. None of those things show up in "deaths from covid".

I don't know what the right answer is. But I do think that I personally am ready to "get back to normal" as much as possible.

Literally no one in my child’s class have problems wearing masks. They’re making friends, learning social skills, thriving, etc. I have seen kids grow socially over the past few months.

I don’t think you’re a science denier, I don’t see in real life what you seem to take as fact.

Are there any teachers who can really talk about solutions to the problems covid presents? Rather seriously, of what I can find anecdotally online (as I know no teachers IRL) that even trying to have in-person classes haven't really helped, because parents pull their kids out of class or a significant chunk misses school due to being out sick/quarantine and now the entire lesson plan is screwed up.

There's a lot of talk about this in parent's groups on FB. Basically, parents all want their kids in school as daycare. Schools have logistics problems due to students/teachers/support staff/bus drivers/etc. being sick. I think if some parents could enlist the police to drag sick teachers to school, they would do that.

In my area, schools are combining classes across grade levels because teachers are sick but parents are demanding that schools be open. This accomplishes the daycare aspect of school, but to pretend it's about enhancing learning is fanciful.

The person you’re responding to asked only about teachers though.

Teachers and administrators participate in some of those groups. Some people even manage to be teachers and parents simultaneously. School board members sometimes have kids in their districts. The discussions tend to cover a lot of bases.

The parents don't create that pressure though. Americans use school as childcare because we don't have adequate childcare. People don't have leave, paid or otherwise, to take care of their children at home, but they must go to work anyway.

This is a labor issue, not an "individuals are mean" problem.

Granted, but it’s not a “schools run poorly” issue as it is frequently positioned in the Covid era.

Yeah it is. Schools are run poorly because they fail to acknowledge that they are child care and as such it needs to be consistent and reliable. If school closes for 6 months where is childcare plan b going to come from. How do you replace a skilled teacher that can handle 20-30 kids with one that does 2-3 and not cause huge pain for a family’s finances?

I'm only 40, but for my entire life school systems have been told that their number 1 job is education. Every time they're given performance metrics to hit, they're in regards to education. We as a society are telling our school system that they're an educational institution, not a child care one, and if the school system started to behave like a child care institution, we'd collectively be pissed off at them.

Sorry, but you're dead wrong. It is a larger society problem, not the school system being poorly run. They're being run with the goals that we give them in mind.

The performance metric always includes number of open days. That’s why they add days if you get too many snow days. Those extra days have no impact on education.

The goal is set with the legacy expectation that women will stay home and do childcare but that isn’t a reality for many folks. So schools have an equally important child care role. For many folks the problem of unreliable child care can be worse than no child care. If i knew there wasn’t going to be school for 3 months I can plan for that business can open that provider the service. If schools randomly open and close for 3 months nobody knows what to do and few new business will risk start up costs too fill the gap.

Here's the situation on Day 1 return from vacation in my district:

- ~20% of the teachers at one school out sick

- classrooms being combined due to low staff. Some classrooms combined across grade levels.

- Substitutes in many classrooms. Administration staff being used as substitutes.

This is all before we are passed the median incubation period for New Year's Eve infections, so I would expect staffing levels to continue to deteriorate. (Also keep in mind that some teachers will be out because their children are sick, so kids being infected this week will lead to future staffing pressures.)

In that context, I'm glad you mentioned snow days. Our district is really small; many kids walk to school. However, many teachers & other staff live in other districts and so do not walk to work. When it snows here, the schools generally close on the basis of teachers & staff not being able to make it to school. Parents do not usually throw tantrums on those snow days. This week/month is going to be like snow days in that school staff will not be able to make it to work. Parents are trying to ignore that reality and not being realistic about making alternate plans.

That sounds like a terrible situation. Sorry you have to deal with that. When things are that dire I guess you have to prioritize what’s important. From what you describe they are prioritizing for child care. The older kids probably need more education focus the k-5 kids need the child care. That’s probably administratively hard to pull off though.

To add to our situation, the major hospitals in our metro area area are doing "diversion," which means e.g. there is no room at the trauma center for auto accident victims. "Elective" surgeries like cancer treatments are being deferred.

Nobody expects this wave to continue indefinitely. From what I can see, the peak of the wave may pass in a 1-2 weeks (this is my layperson's understanding). A few years back when storms caused damage to some schools, naturally the kids were out for some time and everybody was fine. But now many parents (pressured by their jobs) are in dire need of childcare, so everything must continue as normal. IMHO better would be for the kids to take at least the week off. It would suck for everybody, but it also seems like the kind of intervention that could save a life or two somewhere in our city.

> Americans use school as childcare because we don't have adequate childcare

This doesn't make any sense. What would it look like to have "adequate childcare" for third graders? You wake up and decide whether your kid was going to school or child care that day?

This one is complicated.

Until relatively recently, married women didn't really work, not at the rate they do now. So, if the child was home, there'd be a parent, typically the mother.

But the public school system isn't all that old either. From about the early 1900s. Before that, there was no compulsory schooling. Kids would be home. Once again, typically with family as life itself was very different. Children living on a farm did not have daily interaction with large groups of children. You'd have your siblings and that's it for the most part.

And none of these changes happened in a vacuum. So the school thing and the work thing and the child care thing, they all happen because of each other and around each other. And now we've put ourselves in a situation where we use school as child care. And we realize that we've painted ourselves in a corner.

Schools are child care… but you can’t just remove it and leave folks with nothing. There isn’t enough private capacity if you zero out schools

I'm a parent, not a teacher, but my public school has gone through three phases of the pandemic since my son entered kindergarten:

1. Beginning of last school year: entirely remote. (Except for some children of essential workers; they were in a computer lab-like setting. In many cases they were in their regular school's classrooms, but not the same ones as their teachers, and the other kids in the room would be in different Zoom classes.) This was awful for the standpoint of learning or child care. Adults can barely stand Zoom for that long. I did my best to help my son keep focused, but it didn't work that well, and it came at the expense of my focus on my own work. I have a friend who just pulled her kids from public school for this time and went full-on home-schooling. She said the whole family's mental health and the educational experience greatly improved.

2. End of last school year: most kids in the classroom most days, a few unlucky ones still fully remote due to classroom size limits not actually recommended by the CDC, everyone on Zoom. The classroom is basically a computer lab, but now at least everyone in the room is doing the same thing. Obviously this was better for (most of) the parents, and a little better socially for (most of) the kids, but I think still pretty lousy for learning. The experience wasn't as engaging for the kids as it'd normally be, and the teacher has lost the parents who to varying extents helped keep the kids focused in phase #1.

3. This school year: kids in the classroom, wearing masks, getting weekly pooled COVID tests. If the pool tests positive, everyone gets tested individually and (for 10 days) goes into a "modified quarantine". Under those rules, kids who haven't individually tested positive can be in the classroom with the kids who have already been exposed to the same thing, but no after-school programs or extracurriculars or the like.

I of course hated phase #1 and #2, and I think they far outlasted any reasonable belief they were worthwhile. Phase #3 seems like a more reasonable compromise. I'm sure learning would be better if everything were normal, but this isn't as obviously harmful as phases #1 and #2 were. My son is definitely learning things at school. I don't know how much compared to a normal year. I too would love to hear a frank teacher's perspective on this.

I live in an area where the case rates have been relatively low, which obviously helps. Less disruption due to sickness/quarantine.

I wouldn't mind moving on to phase #4 where school-aged kids must have the COVID vaccine (along with the many other vaccines that are already required) and school goes back to normal. Schools should be fully open before restaurants and bars and the like.

My daughter's pre-K and too young for the vaccine but that's another story.

The solution is to stop testing and quarantining. People don't want to hear it, but that's it. Omicron is a cold. Stop quarantining students and teachers who are around someone who's sick. If you have symptoms stay home, if you don't then go to school. In a few months it'll burn through the population and problem solved.

A lot of the student and teachers being kept home are symptom free.

In 30 years these kids will be running the world. I can only hope they'll understand why this happened to them, so the next generation will be a bit wiser.

Hope sure. But any optimism should be tempered by observing how adults who had less coddled childhoods 30 years ago are raising their kids today. What have they understood?

Yeah I really hope they’ll learn to understand the infinite wisdom our government had during covid.

Unfortunately, through advances in medical technology, the 70 year olds who run the world right now will probably still be running the world in 30 years.

Wow that's dystopian.

The 'elites are harvesting children's adrenal glands to extend their lifespans' story is of course absurd and over the top, but I think we recognise it on a mythological level as a useful metaphor for our times. Probably why we frame covid measures as a decision of harming the very young or the very old.

The boomers will still be running things in 3000 years.

Not in the US but I recently helped my niece in math (7th grade) remotely since they now do fractions and also negative numbers. When I tested if she could calculate a random sum with unequal denominators she tried to add them up like someone who never saw fractions before. Also the school teaching sounds like chaos, classes are split and they apparently didn't even have an opportunity to go through the test in class together. My sister is worried since her grades dropped this year and considers putting her into another school because other subjects aren't great either. Luckily she's now going to in-person tutoring.

You can't have a years-long pandemic without consequences, good and bad. My state of Texas has had schools open almost all of this time--and we're not doing better than the other states. Where are all the folks in the United States who say that parents are the best teachers of their children, that home-schooling should rule the day, that the best care comes from families? That would imply that children would be better than ever, right? They will never believe that it takes a village.

Pandemic homeschooling is definitely not homeschooling at its best.

Homeschooling by choice has a great academic record with students doing well on standardized exams and in college. Kids who were sent home for “virtual school” on the other hand have a lot of learning loss on average.

Especially when parents still had to work and just put their kid in front of a TV, that’s not home schooling.

Parents aren't home-schooling... they're trying to keep working full-time while their kids sit on the computer and try to learn over zoom. There's no comparison.

I'm not in the US, but the home-schooling comparison is not fair from my Australian experience of it.

In home schooling a parent teaches the kids, full time, with no pressure from their day job.

In pandemic home schooling, the parent probably is trying to do a job at the same time (or do a shift to suit or something?) is stressed out, and is not setting the curriculum - instead the teacher is setting the day's agenda via a zoom call or two, and the kids have to follow the exercises after. Some of these exercises may not make sense to the parents.

The parents don't get any advance "teachers notes" or inkling of what is coming, the exercises appear and if the kid is stuck you need to figure out how to help them.

In summary pandemic remote schooling is not home schooling for 2 reasons. One is the parents probably have their main job to do. Two is the parents are not teaching, they are at best a teachers assistant who is badly prepped.

Why are parents being expected to teach at all during remote education?

> Why are parents being expected to teach at all during remote education?

Because an enormous amount education is classroom management and behavioral conditioning, neither of which are easy to do remotely.

This is sometimes talked about pejoratively. E.g., "so much of school is just babysitting". It's true in content. But the dismissive tone ignores the reality that for a vast majority of children, learning how to stay on task, especially in a suboptimal environment like a classroom or open office, is much more difficult than learning the actual content of any particular lesson.

I am asking specifically about the teaching parts. A parent doesn't need to be intimately familiar with the curriculum just to manage behavior, which of course is an obvious thing a parent would have to do if the kid is home.

In the comment I replied to, it sounded like teachers are basically just giving kids agendas for the day. I know it's a tough life right now and that remote anything with kids is orders of magnitude harder than with adults, but that doesn't sound good.

That's the difficulty, isn't it? There ISN'T a clear separation between the behavioral/classroom management tasks and content-teaching tasks. They are different and distinct but inseparable in practice. You can't have one person do one thing and another do the other.

Also, the behavioral thing is the thing you need a full-time person for. But parents can't teach full time. So the thin you most need a full-timer for is the thing that's impossible to do remotely! Which was kind of OP's whole point.

> In the comment I replied to, it sounded like teachers are basically just giving kids agendas for the day. I know it's a tough life right now and that remote anything with kids is orders of magnitude harder than with adults, but that doesn't sound good.

1. There's a lot more structure to it than that. Not to say it works or it's good, but there is more structure. Kids are often required to log into zoom for face time and so on, but it's at best marginally helpful. There's genuinely no way to manage 20+ little boxes on a screen.

2. More importantly, I don't think that is what OP was saying! They were drawing an important distinction between having a full-time homeschooling teacher and relying on a person in a box who's managing 20 other kids in boxes.

Again, if you accept on face that the behavior management side of teaching and the conveying knowledge side of teaching are basically inseparable, then OP's observation is an important one. Homeschooling can work well; remote schooling through zoom, not so much.

Because kids are the responsibility of their parents, and parents are not the responsibility of their kid (well, until those kids are adults themselves at least). Why would you expect a 5-year-old to take care of their adult parents? And why wouldn't you expect an adult parent to take care of their 5-year-old?

If it wasn’t clear, that was meant hyperbolically. Sometimes things aren’t always clear in text, so I removed it since it isn’t even important at all to my actual question.

You have your groups backwards. Those of us who homeschool (or whose children attend small, alternative private schools) understand fully that it takes a village. That's why we went to great pains to keep that village active, pandemic or no pandemic. Our specific community has accepted the additional risk to us adults in order to keep some level of normalcy for our children.

This article is about the other kids. The kindergartners who haven't seen a teacher's face in 24 months. The grade schoolers forced to eat outside in the cold. The high schoolers who unofficially "dropped out" when their schools closed and will never return to receive their diploma. Those kids have suffered greatly in the name of reducing risk to adults.

So Perfectly said. We are in the exact same situation with our children. I would happily accept a nasty bout of COVID (and did so last week in fact!) in exchange for letting my children experience a proper childhood, complete with friends, education and experiences.

- The kindergartners who haven't seen a teacher's face in 24 months

What is that even supposed to mean?

- The grade schoolers forced to eat outside in the cold.

This is not harmful, but is also not universal. I have not seen that personally. Hell, in Nordic countries people leave their infants outside in freezing temperatures to nap.

- The high schoolers who unofficially "dropped out" when their schools closed and will never return to receive their diploma.

No one cared about high school drop outs before. Why the sudden concern now?

For a child (and arguably everyone honestly) a face on a screen !== seeing someone in real life. It’s not even comparable.

Lots of people cared (and continue to care) about the high school drop out rate. I would be such a person.

College dropouts on the other hand…

1. Viewing faces is extremely important for cognitive development. With teachers masked 24/7 young children are not getting important information from their educators and caretakers throughout a critical period of their development. I don't have time to pull all the studies on this, but here's one focused on babies: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7598570/

2. Speak for yourself. If my young child was forced to eat lunch outside of the cafeteria in freezing temperatures I'd be furious. And infants left outside are bundled up—they're not manipulating food and placing it into their mouths.

3. I tend to care about all people and seek the best outcomes for everyone whenever possible. My bad, I guess.

This is all we need.

I have two kids just out of college, and they already have the attitude that they're defeated, the world is out to get them, if everyone older would just die, why can't we buy a new car for $4000 or a house for $20K?

Try multiplying by 10-20…

Yeah, just like wages.

I personally know healthy people not in the "old" age groups who have permanent nerve damage from mild cases of unvaccinated (pre-vaccine) Covid. We have known from the beginning that Covid sometimes causes nerve and/or brain damage (sensory loss) that may be permanent. As I am not a virologist any more than the author of this piece, I am not comfortable making blanket pronouncements like this from TFA:

> For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults.

There is already precedent for other acute respiratory infections (Scarlet Fever, influenza) causing cardiac damage that persists for decades. I don't understand how so many people are willing to make conclusions about long-term complications from pediatric Covid in the absence of long-term studies.

I also don't understand how one could write about tradeoffs for children without mentioning the growing ranks of Covid orphans, some of whom will be adrift in our anemic social services system for the coming decades. Besides that, losing a parent is one of the most traumatic events a child can experience. Discounting to zero that trauma given the scale of death in American is not doing the reader a service.

Honest question: At what point do we give up?

I'm in the Bay Area and it'll be coming up on 2 years soon of what basically amounts to a social shut down.

-- Many social groups are just not getting together anymore, including most of mine.

-- Concerts, sporting events, parties of most sizes, crowded bars/clubs just seem off the table at this point.

-- Masks for the majority of it, which makes gym going and working out, especially cardio, uncomfortable enough to not bother.

-- It's been so long that I've now never met, in person, anyone on my team at work.

Like yeah, technically we're not shut down. Technically you can do most things with masks/vaxxes. But for a lot of us things are still essentially shut down. Especially the social aspects.

At what point can we give up? If at 4 years in with Variant #3242, are we still going to be doing what we're doing now? There's zero sign that this thing is going to stop any time soon.

I read somewhere that a pandemic becomes an endemic when we agree on how many people we can accept dying each year.

The answer is simple: it will stop when people decide it is over. Only non-compliance on massive scale will solve this. Science clearly said that Covid will be with us forever. We know that vaccines didn't stop the spread in even a single country. There is nothing else to wait. Take back your freedom now.

Yeah see this is why we can't have a real conversation about this. Every time I bring up this topic I'm bombarded with "ThEy'Re tAkInG YoUr FreEdOm!!" and "VaCcInEs DoN'T EvEn WorK" type people.

I'm not part of that group.

I didn't say they don't work. They clearly work to significantly reduce deaths and hospitalizations. I totally agree on this. But they didn't stop the spread anywhere in the world. If you want to paint me with your stereotypes, go ahead.

In fairness, you are using the stereotypical language of anti-science vaccine deniers: "Non-compliance", "Take back your freedom."

Being anti-mandate doesn't make you anti-vax. It's not GP's fault if you can't tell the difference.

They weren't even talking about the vaccine. They were talking about restrictions on (or general unwillingness to participate in) events and social gatherings.

This pattern of thinking "if you believe X, you probably believe completely different thing Y, because a lot of people who believe X also believe Y" is a huge part of the problem with contemporary political discourse.

They absolutely slowed the spread before Delta and Omicron hit the scene.

Where did the person you're replying to claim vaccines don't work?

You're projecting onto people with totally reasonable takes your own prejudices about what other, unreasonable, opinions you think they probably also hold.

> I'm not part of that group.

If you're not part of the group that believes that freedom is more important than decreasing the spread of Covid, then you've answered your own question. You will be living as you do now for the rest of your life, because Covid is obviously never going away.

You sound like you're describing a foreign country from my experiences in New York, Arizona, and Nevada.

Why not move out of the Bay Area?

"Just move" is not actually a useful response to someone's regional concern.

His concern doesn't reflect reality in this region.

> Concerts, sporting events, parties of most sizes, crowded bars/clubs

Here in Chicago all of these things have been on the table since early summer, albeit masked. Omicron has shut things down again to an extent, but I doubt that'll last through January.

It's been on the table since early summer in the Bay Area too. I have no idea what this dude is on about. There are more concerts and events than I remember there being in 2019 and they are frequently sold out.

Of course they're still around, legally. I said they're not really on the table because the vast majority of experts are still saying not to gather in large groups. You have to go out of your way to ignore those experts in order to go to these concerts and events.

Yeah, that's their job. Their job isn't to make sure you live a fulfilling and happy life. They're warning you but after that it's up to you to weigh the risks and make decisions within the law of your jurisdiction. Personally, I've had the best time of my life last year and I plan on doing even better this year. You do you.

Do you generally take no responsibility for your happiness and life trajectory, merely marching to orders from faceless strangers, or is that a recent development?

When a doctor tells you to keep off your feet and go to x weeks of physical therapy, do you ignore them because it won't make you happy?

When a doctor tells you to take an antibiotic until the bottle is empty, do you ignore them because you've started to feel fine after half the bottle?

When a doctor tells you that you need to lose 50lbs, which will significantly change your lifestyle and in the short-term make you unhappy, do you ignore them?

I don't ignore them. I listen to them, and follow their advice. Is this me merely marching to orders from strangers? Is this me taking "no responsibility for [my] happiness and life trajectory"?

Why is this Covid situation any different?

> When a doctor tells you to keep off your feet and go to x weeks of physical therapy, do you ignore them because it won't make you happy?

If X is 2+ years, and my feet feel fine, and being off my feet is miserable, then yes I do ignore them. At some point you are responsible for your own life, and that point was a while ago. I hope you realize this before you waste any more of it.

If a doctor tells me that I'm allergic to a bunch of foods, and I avoid them for years, I don't turn around and say "you know what, it's been 2+ years. I need to just live my best life. I'm just going to ignore the doctors now and eat those foods".

It sounds like everyone is just desperately trying to make excuses to ignore the experts here.

So I assume you don't eat red meat or butter? The experts always warn about the health risks of that, too. There's more to life. You don't need an excuse to ignore an expert. It's your own life. You have the full autonomous right and privilege to ignore any advice for any reason you deem worthwhile. I'm eating a sausage literally right now, despite every expert telling me not to. I made this choice.

You are in a cage, but the door is open. We are outside the cage urging you to leave. The experts say not to. Will you live? Or remain locked away? I don't care which you choose, but please understand that the consequence of either action is yours. You lose the right to complain about the cage when you choose to be in it.

You keep comparing things of wildly different scales.

Forgoing normal (i.e. unmasked, undistanced, etc.) social interaction is, for most people, a _much_ bigger sacrifice than giving up a few foods you're allergic to.

On the other side, the risk of death or long-term life-altering consequences is _much_ smaller from ignoring Covid precautions than from eating foods you're severely allergic to.

(If you didn't mean severely allergic, but only mildly intolerant, then, well, people can and do eat stuff like that all the time.)

I think there are several differences here. Experts can give a ton of useful information, but they unfortunately can't answer everything for everyone for something as unprecedented and complex as Covid. In particular:

1. Experts speaking publicly are often warning of risks rather than saying "don't do X." It's a subtle but important distinction, and is very different from personal medical advice. Publicly stated guidance often leans very conservative, and there's more room for an individual to decide it doesn't apply to them than a doctor specifically telling you how to a heal your injury.

2. It's unclear which experts you're referring to and what exactly you're hearing from them. The restrictions in your original post aren't what I've been hearing, for example. Either we listen to different experts, or we're interpreting their words differently (per point 1) - or both!

3. Nobody is quite an expert in "solving Covid" the way they can be for healing an injury, and on top of that one can have reasonable yet fundamental differences with experts on Covid that don't exist for healing a broken bone (e.g. how you value the impact of mental health problems vs Covid illness; or what your level of risk tolerance is; or even the morality of potentially spreading covid, which is less bad than in 2020 since vaccines are widely available, but is it less-bad enough?). Experts can inform you of the risks of Covid, and how to reduce those risks, but it's much harder for them to tell you the negative consequences isolation: you know better than they do what those effects are on you, and so you have to weigh the risks yourself.

4. As you pointed out in your original post, there isn't a clear goal right now for Covid mandates. Healing a broken bone has an end goal that you and your doctor won't disagree about. But Covid currently doesn't, because there's sadly no expert with who has a really good answer to this: the vaccines worked, but not perfectly, so what's next? Nobody really knows, so you have to apply your own judgment (whether it's "lift mandates because we have vaccines and no clear next step" or "keep mandates to further contain Covid risks till we figure out a better strategy"), and hold your local politicians accountable to that.

> Experts speaking publicly are often warning of risks rather than saying "don't do X."

> The restrictions in your original post aren't what I've been hearing, for example.

"Avoid crowded, poorly ventilated spaces." - https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/gather...

Not sure how you can misinterpret that. Indoor concerts, sporting events, bars, parties, etc. all fall into that category.

> Why is this Covid situation any different?

Because the downsides of the things you listed are of a much smaller magnitude than the upsides.

A much better example would be, for example, someone telling you "don't eat red meat, because it increases your risk of colon cancer". If you really like steak, and the risk of colon cancer is small, you might choose that the tradeoff is worth it.

Health experts can only tell you whether a particular course of action increases or decreases the risk of health issues. They can't tell you whether that's worth the cost of that course of action, because that's subjective.

Regular in-person social interaction is extremely important for most people's happiness, and it's perfectly reasonable for them to think that going back to 2019 normal is worth the risk of a slightly increased chance of being killed or maimed by Covid.

For one, when I go to a doctor, it's to get their advice/treatment so yes, I will listen to them. Whereas I didn't really ask for experts' opinions on this, they just made it known because that's their job. I take it under advisement but will ultimately do what I think is best considering all the factors, not just the factor of catching the virus. They're not the ones that bear the cost of me wasting my life sitting around.

I know it's intimidating to go places alone and try to make friends there, it's what a lot of us have had to do any time we moved away from our social groups.

Finding a new group of friends who disregard health experts isn't exactly a great long-term plan.

It's amazing that everyone's responses are basically, "the answer is simple! we just completely ignore the experts! we've been doing it all along!"

I'm wondering when even the experts start saying "Damn this isn't worth it". What year of masking, remote learning, social distancing, etc. do they start to give up too? 3 years? 4 years?

I got hints of it reading some doctors who have been hardened proponents of masks, vaccine mandates, etc. over the holidays where they were basically like "yeah the holidays are going to be a shit show but I'm still going to see family, even if it's not a good idea". Paraphrasing of course.

Have you considered that maybe at some point, especially 6+ months after a highly effective vaccine has been available to everyone that wants it, that people are going to want to go back to living their lives? Get vaccinated, get boosted, take precautions if it makes you feel better, but the show will go on.

Who are we to make that decision? I'm not an immunologist or infectious disease expert, and I'm assuming you're not either.

I don't need to be.

It is ok to have critical thinking. Especially after the experts have shown time and again that they aren’t great at making sociopolitical choices. The experts were telling you not to wear masks in March and not to get booster shots in August and not to vaccinate children in September.

You live your life. You are the one to make your own choices. COVID is on its way to being flu 2.0 (the experts will tell you this if you ask the right questions). Compare it to the flu (especially if vaccinated) and ask yourself if not living your life for a minuscule risk is really worth it. Especially when most of the people actually at risk of death (the unvaccinated in the rich world) have been going out of their way to be at risk for many months.

There is no "we" here. There is personal choice about your own body. If you are scared then stay home and isolate. If you are not then go about your normal life. No once is forcing you to do anything.

At some point you need to take personal responsibility and make your own decisions instead of waiting for some "expert" to tell you how to live.

What do you want? Someone to whisper soothing words and tell you to just wait until X, it'll all be ok?

That's not how life works.

Where do you get that it's a personal choice? It's not.

I'm not afraid of Covid. I just don't want to contribute to the spread and death.

>I'm not afraid of Covid. I just don't want to contribute to the spread and death.

This is doublespeak.

No one is being forced out in public around people. Anyone doing so has a made a personal decision and they have accepted the consequences. You are not responsible for other people's decisions.

Giving up is the long term plan, what makes it worse if your new friends are there already?

Is it more comfortable to wait for your current friends to decide that it’s not worth it to social distance so they socialize more?

BTW School is open, kids are in-person. Indoor masking is here to stay wherever there are humans.

> Indoor masking is here to stay wherever there are humans.

Huh? Indoor mask usage is low to zero in many parts of the US (and I assume the rest of the world too).

I should say "wherever most humans live". Here in the states, businesses within city limits require masking except for last June and July. Are the many parts you are talking about the low-population outskirts that never required masking? That's true I guess and they add up to a lot of people and businesses but not compared to where most of the population lives.

> Here in the states, businesses within city limits require masking except for last June and July.

This simply isn't true across the board anywhere except the West Coast. It's not even true in NYC which is relatively cautious about Covid. It's _certainly_ not true in Arizona, Florida, Texas, etc.

Am I correct in guessing that you live in the Bay Area or Seattle?

Now is good for me!

> Concerts, sporting events, parties of most sizes, crowded bars/clubs just seem off the table at this point.

All of these things have been happening and filled to capacity since June. It's time to go outside and not rely on your coworkers for social interaction.

Sounds like you need to make some new friends who aren't so neurotic. People without anxiety issues are in fact still socializing. Concerts, bars, restaurants are full. Your problem is with you.

Except that real solutions never seem to be on the table.

For example, how about atomizing school into pods of smaller numbers of students with teachers scattered around the district instead of 30+ students per teacher with 1000+ students crammed into a building or campus? This would be especially effective for the youngest students. And a "Covid Outbreak" would shut down less than a dozen students and a teacher for a week or two and be done with it.

But, you see, that would take money. And everybody likes to bitch about education but nobody wants to spend actual cash.

And, by the way, if you think its been bad on kids, the teachers have had it bad, too. Unlike the kids, the teachers had a much higher probability of dying. And they get the joy of being on the frontlines with the anti-vax idiots. Any teachers I know of who can exit have been running for the doors.

The schools are funded with rivers of cash. It's simply squandered. More money won't help (that's been tried many times).

To make schools safe is simple - hold classes outside. It won't work everywhere everytime, but it can work enough. It'll work fine in California, Arizona, Seattle most of the time, etc.

> The schools are funded with rivers of cash. It's simply squandered. More money won't help (that's been tried many times).

Sigh. This simply isn't true. I'm no fan of the Gates Foundation as I think they helicopter in, muck everything up, and then leave picking up the pieces to the locals after they leave again. However, their transparency was at least useful.

If you want effective education in younger students, it takes 2 adults in the room (both certified), less than 15 kids in the room, and costs about $15K per student (it's been a while since the study so this number has likely gone up).

We spend nowhere near this in education. All initiatives that did this have all been shut down in spite of their documented success.

We know what works. We tried it. We have the data.

It simply costs more than the political will to implement it.

As of 2018, 16 states in the US spend over $15K per student[1]. The US average is either nearly 13k[1] in 2018 or over 14k[2] in 2017.

Only 3 countries in the OECD spend $15k or more[2].

1: https://ncses.nsf.gov/indicators/states/indicator/public-sch...

2: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

And I've had this discussion before, as well.

Comparing the numbers to countries we would like to emulate implies that there is a maximum $1,500 overspend. Maybe. This is far from some magic windfall.

Part of the problem with comparing the US to the OECD is the fact that socialized support systems means that auxiliary things like breakfast, lunches, learning disability support, nurses, etc. come out of a different budgetary bucket.

This means that Norway, Sweden, etc., for example, actually spend more per student than is recorded because of the auxiliary expenses that are part of their socialized support system. And Norway and Austria already outspend the US (I wonder if they have something that's in the "education" bucket that we don't).

If, however, you would like to argue that this being a function of the school budget is a bad thing and that school lunches and medical support should be a fundamental part of universal healthcare for children, I'm all ears.

> Sigh. This simply isn't true.

Yes it is. Compare per-student education spending in the US to any other country.

The WA teachers' union demanded "fully funded schools" for at least a decade. They finally got it.

There was no measurable improvement whatsoever in education.

Here is the original link to the Gates Foundation report from 2014: "Lessons from Research and the Classroom: Implementing High-Quality Pre-K that Makes a Difference for Young Children"

https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/documents/Lessons%20from%20...

Everything in the report is 2012 dollars. Scale appropriately for today. Boston Pre-K is about $15K now while New Jersey would be about $18K now. These are minimums. More money doesn't guarantee success, but less money almost guarantees failure.

And here is a link talking about Martin Walsh (Mayor of Boston) trying to get the money to pay for what that report calls an "exemplar program": https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/22/metro/eight-years-aft...

All of the other exemplar programs were cancelled for lack of funding.

You can persist in believing that there is some magic pot of money flying around education, or you can simply observe cancelled successful programs and teachers asking for donations to buy school supplies.

Your call.

> teachers asking for donations to buy school supplies.

Around here, the school district has razed the local schools and built fancy new buildings. Then they ask for donations to buy pencils, at what, 5 cents apiece?

Does something seem wrong with this picture?

Let's put it another way. $15,000 per student. 30 students per class. This is $450,000 per classroom per year.

No, lack of funding is not the problem.

> Around here, the school district has razed the local schools and built fancy new buildings.

I see this too. Might I suggest that the school board get voted out?

Part of the reason why new buildings get built is because it's easier to get the funding for a new building than to get the funding for 10 more teachers. A new building is normally a simple bond proposition on the ballot and it's off and running. Hiring 10 extra teachers requires that the superintendent go to the school board (who will oppose it because "muh taxes"), then the local political entity (who will oppose it because "muh taxes") and maybe have to file a justification with the state.

And don't get me started about how funding can always be found for new sports facilities but God help you if you need a new lab.

(I would also point out that $500K gets you probably 10 teachers for a single year. You are thinking that $500K is some big amount of money when it doesn't even pay for a single teacher for 30 years (roughly $1.5 million)).

$450k/class/year needs to pay for only one teacher for one year.

2 teachers per BSDer's original comment, but it does sound like he missed the "per year" part of the $450k.

I did miss it. I, for some reason, thought that $450K was referring to the new buildings.

However, I would like to point out that even if I take only $12K, that's $360K and that's what other good countries think is perfectly reasonably for that classroom.

I do agree that if you allocated that $360K, you get roughly 2 teachers per 15 (4 per 30) students which is right at what you need.

So, effectively wipe out the administration and we're good? Unfortunately, I never see that as a solution to "educational problems" either.

I don't see how $500k gets you even 10 teachers for a single year; that covers the median salary, but in many places government employees have pensions and in most places full-time teachers get benefits. I would assume that even for the 50% of teachers below that median rate, the other costs of employing them puts them over $50k

I suppose that's another point for "expenses in US that don't apply to OECD countries" from a sibling thread assuming that teachers' health-care expenses are not included in per-student spending for OECD countries.

For the first half of your comment I just kept say "that takes money" in my head over and over and then you said it. Pure and simple, this comes down to money or rather the lack thereof. When I was younger I had heavily considered going into teaching until I learned how little they make and how shitty parents are to them (not all, but enough to make their jobs hell if they want). After the last two years I cannot imagine why anyone would go into teaching (or nursing for that matter). Both groups bent over backwards (by and large, obviously you are going to always have a few duds) to continue to provide the best service they could and were treated terribly (and paid terribly) in return.

Plenty of people (including some in these comments) want to wax poetic about "think of the children" or "the children are our future" but I have a hard time those same people are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Why we aren't shoveling money into education (before the pandemic as well) is completely beyond me and that's coming from someone who is childless. I'm more than happy to see my taxes go up if the money is going towards education.

I’m inquiry: do we have enough educators for that plan?

Almost certainly not. I suspect we don't even have enough teachers for the old system at this point.

But money can fix the problem given time. Lack of money can, of course, fix nothing over time.

I just want to know where the money is going to schools these days. Per-capita, inflation-adjusted public funding for schools in the US varies from flat to way up depending on which US state you choose over my lifetime.

Similarly the US spends the 4th most per capita, and about 1/3 more than the average of OECD countries.

I don't think money alone will fix this problem, judging by the number of quality teachers I know that leave for lower paying positions at private schools...

> Children fell far behind in school during the first year of the pandemic and have not caught up. Among third through eighth graders, math and reading levels were all lower than normal this fall

Educational television (which taught letters and phonics) and parents reading to me is what taught me to read. (Then I got a library card and checked out tons of books.)

I also learned basic arithmetic from television. (And simple algebra from teaching myself computer programming - which is probably backwards.)

Perhaps the remote instruction and home learning methods we adopted during the pandemic were not the right ones to emphasize.

> "For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults."

The overall tone and style of this article is just... I don't know.

As a parent of elementary school children, I spent 2020 and 2021 seeing this stuff first-hand. Having arguments with other (non-parent) liberal friends on social media. Once they discovered that I was out of step on this one item of the current moment's orthodoxy, suddenly I was "voted off the island" altogether.

It was surreal. People who I thought were personal friends, a lot of their minds just flipped like a switch, and suddenly I was immediately and completely shifted over into the "right-winger" mental bucket. It wasn't just the "you think of school as free daycare" ignorant assumptions. I had friends assume that my views had changed on abortion, climate change, etc.

I still can't wrap my head around some of those conversations. I have completely abandoned social media, cut myself off from the vast majority of what I thought was my social support system, and discarded any delusions about political or cultural identity fundamentally having any bearing on human nature.

The New York Times was ONE OF THE PRIMARY DRIVERS of my social cohort's orthodoxy, to which I had become a heretic and outcast. To go through all of that, and then read an article from the same New York Times, echoing the same heresy? FUCK YOU. It's just too much.

I've noticed over the past few weeks that this article's main thrust is taking shape and being established all over the place as the new orthodoxy of the current moment. All of these harms were seen and known even at the time, a year and a half ago (my children aren't seeing a therapist for nothing), and were downplayed or dismissed outright. It seems unfathomable that the narrative has flipped around 180-degree so abruptly. I believe that the focus on harms seen in minority children is the loophole, or "new information", that seems to give people mental "permission" to change their viewpoint now.

The brutal truth is that in Year 3, even most progressives are reaching the point of being "over" the pandemic. So they are able to open their eyes and minds a bit. I don't know whether that enough for people to revisit the attitudes and assumptions that they were making back at the time. I don't know whether I even want to reconcile with most of those old friends even if they do. But it makes me sick to my stomach watching the NYT shift and slither from one zeitgeist to the next.

The game-changer here is Omicron. It kills far less grandmothers and elderly teachers -- arguably a manageable / acceptable number of them. Hence, keeping schools remote in an Omicron-dominant world doesn't make sense.

I feel your pain about the political binary we've developed though. I hold varying positions on a number of issues and would have formerly been called an 'independent' but now I'm just on the opposite side of anyone I talk to

We've had the lagged death rates from Omicron in South Africa over a week ago. It's apparent that Omicron is the most contagious, least deadly variant and it cuts through vaccinations. Vaccinations and boosters are preventing severe hospitalizations but not strong enough to confer herd immunity. Omicron has also shown how previous infection natural immunity confers a broader protection in this case. The Democratic government and media is slowly pivoting the messaging so there's not too much cognitive dissonance for your antagonists. Everyone is getting Omicron, we'll mostly be ok, the pandemic will be over, welcome to another influenza like virus.

> "The New York Times ... FUCK YOU."

i'm so glad more and more people are coming to this realization. the nytimes is an awful news source, npr as well, for their unadulterated power bias: they want, and want to support, (democrat) power, and will run with any democrat narrative that meets that objective. it simply doesn't matter if the narrative has factual basis, or if a 180° reversal is required, as repetition will be used to ingrain it in sympathetic minds to be broadcast into enclaves and social groups all over.

it literally feels like 1984's "ministry of truth" being actualized. we need more independent thinkers cutting through this bullshit.

I'm depressed it's taken so long...

>Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults.

That's almost an improvement! Usually we accept more harm to children in exchange for less mild annoyance to adults.

It’s interesting. Our actions have been too weak to stop the pandemic, but strong enough to destabilize our economy and social systems.

I imagine our response to climate change will be the same. Either we won’t do anything, or we’ll do enough to hurt ourselves, but not enough to solve the problem.

This is probably the consequence of our half-assed faux democracy. Power is neither concentrated enough to have an autocrat make decisions, nor distributed enough for crowd-wisdom to take direct action.

I sympathize with the author but I find many of these arguments lack a middle ground for trade offs that ultimately neglect the fact that the situation today is vastly different from the situation in march 2020. We have pharmaceutical interventions and know how to treat and prevent COVID. There’s no excuse for 99.9% of schools to go to near normal or at minimum be in person.

> For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults.

Finally someone said it. This is where "follow the science" doesn't make any sense. Science can't and decide what is really important in life. Do we give nurses less work and grandma a few more years or we harm our children?

Switzerland has made a series of decisions to protect children from the consequences of the pandemic and I'm grateful.

I honestly, really do despair at reading this sort of stuff.

We knew. We knew in March. We knew _straight away_, we knew that supply chains would fail, all sorts of cascading failures would happen, prices would rise, there would be all manner of mental health effects, people quitting their jobs, etc

We bloody knew. And we still know. And we've been screaming it.

But the opinion in "educated" circles is that lockdowns and restrictions are worth it no matter the cost because life has infinite value.

Even here, on Hacker News, people used to dealing in the trillions will look at e.g. coronavirus deaths in the UK and act as if they're enormous when they're just not. In 2 years (150k) coronavirus has claimed about as much as pneumonia/flu would in 5 (30k a year).

But well, yeah. My career has still disappeared, we're still intentionally depriving children of their development, we're still intentionally causing labour shortages.

And people wonder why no-one gives a toss about society any more. Because at scale you're bloody lunatics, that's why.

We did homeschooling for 5 years here is my conclusion:

- school is 90% daycare

- 30min of real learning at the level of the child is more than a day at a regular school

- Give your kids real challenges with motivating reward and get out of the way

- What they miss most is connection with kids at the same level (That one is hard to fix)

The last half century or so was not as calm as all these rose-colored articles would have you believe -- at least on a global scale. Even still, we need to realign our expectations to a world that's going to be much more turbulent than we'd like.

This article is about the impact on kids of partially shutting down schools for two years due to covid. What part of the article is your comment responding to?

Are there places in the US which have had schools partially shut down for two years? I have not heard of anywhere being remote for more than 1 year.

> For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults.

At first we didn't know how much harm the virus would cause to children. But now that we see it is much less dangerous for them we shouldn't be preventing them from learning because we are afraid of getting sick. The children are the future, and in order to secure a positive growth in society it is our obligation to give them their very important education.

Human nature. Harm through inaction is more palatable than risky action.

This cannot be mentioned enough. It's such a weird bias. Just repeated again with the bizarre delay of the critical Pfizer medication that statement was unethical to not give to the control group but ok to delay approval for months.

Counterpoint: at first it was extremely obvious that this virus was affecting you harder the older you are, with 60+ populations starting to be at risk. Nobody thought it was harming children.

The reasoning here is flawed: we had early positive evidence that COVID-19 was particularly dangerous for the elderly and those with a variety of medical preconditions. We didn't have positive or negative evidence that children weren't an at-risk group (for any number of reasons: lack of case evidence, the fact that children can't be modeled medically as adults, etc.).

Instead, we applied the lessons of the common flu[1]: children do get more sick from the common flu than young and middle-aged adults and so, in light of a novel severe respiratory disease, it doesn't make sense to take chances.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm

>We didn't have positive or negative evidence that children weren't an at-risk group

Why aren't the low death rates for the 0-17 cohort enough?

Because people are experiencing long-term effects besides death.

How good is this data? How does it compare to long term effects of other common viral infections?

But how many, and is it more than other respiratory illness?

Actually, a recent meta-analysis found that when you actually add a control group, most of the "long COVID" symptoms disappear. Higher quality studies were was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms. "Long COVID" appears to be almost entirely an artifact of bad science (and bad science reporting)

See https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876 and https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...

Glad to see that. Appears to be just for children, do you know of similar studies on adults?

Because, again, children's health is not accurately reflected in adult models. "Kills adults" can be correspond to almost anything in children, and telling people to bet their children's health on an unknown respiratory disease isn't good politics or good public health policy.

It's a blood/brain pathogen that is infectious via respiratory means.

A lot of the "varied issues" that long-COVID sufferers deal with are more easily explained by the disruption of the circulatory system (esp. as it affects the brain - when the body's defenses kill COVID-infected brain cells en-masse that results in the "brain fog").

No. As the article explains, this uncertainty might explain at most a couple months of the initial response. It was very obvious, very early, that the risk to children was low and did not fit the age profile of the flu. Nearly all the debate around closing schools was in regards to their role as general transmission hubs (many argued that kids didn't even transmit COVID enough to worry about) and the risk to teachers. Nobody who was paying attention thought going to school was going to kill lots of kids relative to historically normal levels of child mortality.

If you're having a hard time remembering how things actually played out in 2020, just ask yourself: did you hear about pediatric wards filling up with COVID patients? No, you did not. You heard about an extremely rare multisystem inflammatory disorder and that's about it.

You've performed a very subtle conversational pivot here: I didn't assert that COVID is more deadly to children, or that public policy was structured around that hypothesis. I said that we didn't know how dangerous it was and that, among other things, treating COVID as potentially flu-like in young children was a reasonable policy.

When it became clear that children weren't dying in large numbers from COVID, keeping them out of school throughout 2020 because of the transmission theory was (and may still be, depending on other circumstances) sufficient justification.

I did not pivot. And to anyone reading my post, it should be so obvious that I did not pivot that your claim that I did verges on flatly dishonest.

We knew COVID was not dangerous to children by early summer 2020. The article says this and the article is correct. I simply and plainly repeated this.

It was never the case that anyone who was paying attention believed school closures might be the only thing standing between COVID and mass death of children. That did not happen. It did not happen. It never happened.

Please dispense with any further nonsense about subtlety. Speak plainly and without subtlety, as I am doing.

> It was never the case that anyone who was paying attention believed school closures might be the only thing standing between COVID and mass death of children. That did not happen. It did not happen. It never happened.

This is the aforementioned pivot. Nobody made this claim.

The claim is that, early in the pandemic, unknowns about the dangers of COVID to children were one among many sufficient conditions for closing schools. Once we learned what we currently know, that condition lost its sufficiency. But that didn't change the sufficiency of the other conditions (read: community transmission, teacher health, &c.), which remain.

Putting away the continued nonsense about subtle pivots - it's not even the same claimed pivot, and I explained from my very first sentence that the early uncertainty could make closing schools understandable, if only for a couple months - it is extremely untrue that the other conditions were widely considered sufficient.

That's why TFA was written. Tons of people still deeply disagree with this risk calculus.

Counterpoint: It was extremely obvious that this virus was hitting old folks hard because nursing homes were concentrating them in recirculated air. It wasn't completely obvious that the same thing wouldn't happen in schools.

It should be obvious by now, however.

From the very start children were considered essentially immune to COVID. I remember in 2020, well into the pandemic, that there was huge news coverage the first time a kid ended up hospitalized.

Before vaccines the major concern was children as a vector for spreading it (especially because they were more often asymptomatic), anyone with school age kids know how quickly they spread illness.

There was some secondary concern of long-term side-effects ("long covid") cases in children as well, and I recall some talk of MIS-C and Kawasaki disease... but even early on those seemed fairly rare.

> The children are the future, and in order to secure a positive growth in society it is our obligation to give them their very important education.

Great, so just set up a fund to compensate teachers and daycare workers who get long covid in order to pay their salary and medical expenses for the rest of their lives if they're unable to work.

Our taxation system is already set up for these kinds of transactions, and we definitely should be putting more money into teacher salaries and education.

No we should not. They all get a pension. Do you know how much pensions cost? There are people on waiting lists to fill teacher positions. The benefits make up for the low bank deposit.

Maybe it is time we start to rethink the benefits then? If it is not financially viable then its time for something new. Maybe the government could take after how the private sector pays

People don't get this. In Illinois, multiple thousands of my annual property tax dollars directly fund the pensions of local teachers. And then I have to self-fund my 401K to have a chance at retirement - one that could fail to grow or evaporate in the market at exactly the wrong time. Theirs is guaranteed. They will get their salary for life.

My district is short on teachers. Here, it takes 10 years of service to vest into a pension, and most teachers burn out way before then. I’d love to see an example of the waiting list you’re talking about. Maybe my district can advertise there to find help.

> They all get a pension. Do you know how much pensions cost? There are people on waiting lists to fill teacher positions.

This might be the case in some specific jurisdiction you are in, but is patently not true across the United States. The state I'm in stopped pensions for teachers in the nineties.

The problem isn’t the kids getting sick, it’s the adults teaching them getting sick and dying. We’ve treated teachers like shit for so long that many are just saying “nope, not dying for a job” because they can go make more money doing literally anything else. We were scraping the bottom of the barrel even before Covid.

If kids education were really a priority, the right time to invest was 20 years ago. The system has been broken for a long time already.

> the right time to invest was 20 years ago

The second best time to plant a tree is today

It’s probably too late, this country is about to fracture. All the indicators point to a coup coming in the next few years which will launch us into an unknown realm of violence. We’re way deep into “the cool zone” now.

I highly disagree. It is never too late. I will continue to roll up my sleeves and work for change and I hope you join me.

As a member of a marginalized community, I don’t have that luxury. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. I’m doing my part in my own way.

Best of luck to you on your journey, friend

This sentiment seems strange in 2022. Vaccines for teachers have been widely available for almost a year now.

> Vaccines for teachers have been widely available for almost a year now.

You appear to have missed the news around the Omicron variant being much better at vaccine evasion than Delta. You can't compare the situation a year ago with the one now, which is unique and unprecedented, just like the pandemic was initially.

I thought it was pretty much understood the vaccines weren't doing much for contraction of Delta already. We've moved on to "prevents serious illness and death" which is still true for Omicron and ought to be enough for teachers to return to work.

In that case, shouldn't it be enough for everyone to return to work? I wonder why top companies in the S&P 500 are delaying return to work then.

Clearly they must be operating under the same mysterious constraints that are keeping schools closed.

Top companies in the S&P 500 are delaying return to work because many tried it and were met with absolute mutiny. The vast majority of people got a taste of the remote life and don't want to return.

> The vast majority of people got a taste of the remote life and don't want to return.

Certainly this couldn't be the case for teachers teaching remotely – they probably enjoy their 10 hour workdays where they are standing most of the time and wearing a mask.

Very true, teachers unions are fighting the return to schools hard. I was referring more to your typical white collar office job, i.e. those employed by the S&P 500.

I have Omicron right now. I’m vaccinated and had my booster in November. I’m young, healthy, I work remotely and I’m struggling to make it through half a day. My symptoms aren’t even that bad, I’m just exhausted all the time. There is no way I could do a job where I had to be on my feet all day. I can barely carry on a conversation.

The problem right now where I live is that everyone is sick. Grocery stores, restaurants, delivery services and even fucking Walmart are closed because they don’t have enough employees to operate. The schools tried to open but it was a disaster with half the teachers out sick so they just postponed opening them a week in hopes it will go away.

This wave will be over, but without lasting immunity in the population the next mutation could be worse. We could very well be dealing with this the rest of our lives and there is no return to “normal”. We’re in the new normal.

> My symptoms aren’t even that bad, I’m just exhausted all the time.

There are 30-40M symptomatic cases of the flu each year in the US, with the same or worse symptoms as what you just described. There is no "new" normal, cold & flu season just got more complex.

I’ve had the flu. Covid is way worse.

We’re already in the new normal; nobody is going back into the office if they don’t have to and that alone will force a realignment of American life. We were slowly headed that way before Covid anyway, the pandemic just made it happen. Companies requiring knowledge workers to be onsite are having huge levels of attrition because the employees have options.

One of my clients who was very eager to get back into the office and tried forcing the issue in Q3 last year has seen 40% of their engineering staff quit over the last 6 months, and are having a hard time finding replacements. They made the decision just before the holidays to switch to a remote-first model and downsize their offices. This is happening, and it’s going to crush commercial real estate.

I've had both. In 2009 my wife and I both got Swine Flu while in University. That was far and above the worst illness I've ever had. Covid was like a bad cold.

I completely agree with you on the new normal regarding in office, but that wasn't what we were talking about. We were discussing a new normal regarding seasonal infectious disease and the social and economic burden it causes. As COVID becomes endemic, there won't be anything "new" about that normal, it'll look almost identical to the burden caused by the cold and flu prior to 2020.

I couldn't agree with you more. Teachers and other school workers were not even mentioned in this article.

Not mentioned in the article - but definitely already being prioritized for 2 years based on most policy decisions.

I see where you're coming from, but, as a first grade teacher, I can say that remote learning doesn't prioritize teachers' needs either. Rather, it reflects the minimal investment a school or district could possibly make. For these past two years, we could have invested in PPE, filtration, and reducing class sizes. We could have prioritized approving vaccines for children. Instead, we're now expecting adults and children to sacrifice their safety in order to go to schools that are roughly the same as they were in 2019.

"The problem isn’t the kids getting sick, it’s the adults teaching them getting sick and dying"

Isn't this exactly what the article is talking about? I think recognizing that we are doing this trade is a step in the right direction. Only then can we proceed to discuss how we should make that trade, instead of throwing kids whom have no say, and their future, right under the bus.

We can have this discussion until we’re blue in the face, but unless the state is willing to send police to round up teachers and force them to work, teachers will look out for their own health and not go to work when Covid numbers are this high. Most major city school districts had planned to reopen on schedule, but the decision to close was made for them by their staff.

Chinese deaths stats by age were available from March 2020. It is just the media decided to ignore them.

We've all heard about the children numbers, no one is ignoring anything.

I find it offensive to use "the media" when describing other's positions in a debate. You're basically saying your opponents are brainwashed by evil media while you are completely objective. And ignoring all the media that you consume that backs up your position.

Chinese stats about anything should be taken with a healthy dose of salt. According to them, zero people have died since April 2020.

"Children are our future and you should be prepared to accept arbitrary Covid consequences for them" might be a compelling argument on an orange web site, but it is not going to be one when you present it to over-worked, under-appreciated teachers who have families of their own and their futures to worry about.

Bringing back pensions and providing free post-retirement healthcare for teachers and their families will back up grandiose statements like yours with actions. With the current right-wing thinking in vogue in the US, I suspect there is vanishingly little chance of that happening.

Hell, increase their current healthcare benefits if they're to teach during this crisis.

Having dead or sick parents and teachers is also a terrible outcome for children.

How are we so sure that the declines these years won't be easily made back up after they return to normal schooling in the coming years? Also, are these test results really indicative of important value that the kids aren't getting?

Gun violence in schools has increased so we should be sending children to school? There were school shootings before the pandemic and there are school shootings now. Nothing has been done to address either the mental health issues or access to guns.

What has this got to do with covid? Also, guns have been more easily available in the past than they are now.

Access to guns isn’t causing the uptick in school shootings. If we knew what was causing it, perhaps we could address the problem.

We pretty much do know what causes school shootings though? I mean the causes are complex and there is much disagreement about which ones contribute what and how much, but the broad strokes are known.

The issue is that 1) this information comes from the hn-accursed social sciences, 2) people don't like the answers and 3) we aren't willing to solve the problem anyway so why proselytize it?

> but the broad strokes are known.

I’ve rarely seen any broad brush stroke other than ‘guns’ being blamed.

2) people don't like the answers

Don’t they? Or do they simply not agree with the answers.

Social science results are in fact very weak, as is constantly being shown.

That is because it’s hard to do social science and the disciplines are relatively new. The way to improve this is not to pretend social science is better than it is, nor is it to ignore social science altogether, but to recognize its shortcomings and critique it.

Also, your account is only 12 days old. I don’t think that is long enough to determine what is ‘accursed’ on HN. HN goes through trends and shifts over time.

> 3) we aren't willing to solve the problem anyway so why proselytize it?

Are we not? So we give up and to do something unrelated, in the name of solving the problem? That seems even worse.

It doesn’t seem like we’re going to get rid of guns, so we may as well proselytize the real solutions.

The school openings vs closings is so obviously political opportunism. School shootings and climate crisis is no way to grow up but we aren't willing to solve those problems.

I mean, if there were no access to guns it would probably take care of the problem. We'd probably end up with stabbings or bombings, though. My opinion is that American culture has a problem, guns or no guns. Lack of social cohesion, and a government that is more interested in increasing military budgets than finding ways to help its cash strapped population.

I agree that adults have failed kids during the pandemic, but the agenda that this article is pushing is deeply, deeply flawed. The consequences the pandemic is having on kids is not due to schools being closed, it's due to kids growing up in the middle of a society collapsing under the weight of a pandemic.

To argue that we shouldn't have closed schools, or should have made things more normal for the kids is to say that our half-assed mealy-mouthed nothing of a response to the pandemic didn't work, so we should have done even less, tried to spread the virus even harder, and that would have made things better. No. What would have made things better is a real, collective, and effective response to the pandemic. Modeling a real, pro-social, collaborative, and reasonable response to the pandemic.

Of course it's not _fair_ that kids are being kept away from school while hoards of adults are too obsessed with proving they have freedom to consider how to use their freedom to act appropriately. It's not fair that they can't get an education, but hoards of the unmasked, unvaxxed, and unconcerned can huff and puff their way through bars, restaurants, gyms, clubs, and every other super spreader event they care to name without a concern for the costs of their actions to them or anyone else.

Fair would have been for everyone to do their part, to exercise a modicum of self control, and work together to actually contain things, keep them to a reasonable level, and then let things get back to normal in the ways we can, and have a clear plan for how to monitor and react to changes in the future. Fair would be everyone working together to make this thing actually be over, at least for some periods of time, rather than making the reasonable people pay the entire burden for the whims of the hoards of pro-plague cultists.

> kids growing up in the middle of a society collapsing under the weight of a pandemic

Society is collapsing under the weight of our reaction to the pandemic, not under the weight of a pandemic itself.

There is no reason why a pandemic that kills fewer than 1% of people would cause anything to collapse. (That's about how many people die every year anyway, of normal causes).

> Fair would have been for everyone to do their part

The current variant spreading like wildfire in the US came from South Africa (or maybe Botswana). The previous one came from India. The original one came from China. Even if we had 100% compliance in the US with whatever measures you want, it wouldn't stop covid, unless we could somehow force everybody in the world to do the same thing, which is impossible.

Nobody has ever satisfyingly explained to me how this meme of "if everybody did the right thing it would all be over by now" makes any sense. Australia, New Zealand, and China are not back to normal yet.

> Society is collapsing under the weight of our reaction to the pandemic, not under the weight of a pandemic itself.

What restrictions? We've barely done anything to contain the pandemic. We had, what, a month or two of restaurant dining closed at best. The mildest possible hint of a suggestion that maybe you should cover your mouth instead of directly huffing air from strangers?

> There is no reason why a pandemic that kills fewer than 1% of people would cause anything to collapse. (That's about how many people die every year anyway, of normal causes).

This is completely wrong. For one thing, even at the best of times the death rate of covid is a bit over 1%, and the number was likely somewhat under-reported. The death rate is much worse when hospitals are overwhelmed (as they are just about everywhere now, and have been in large parts of the US for most of the pandemic).

And that's _only the excess deaths from covid_. There are also excess deaths from all of the other things people can't get treatment for, or can't get good treatment for. Injuries, cancers, heart attacks, and other diseases are going undignosed and untreated or undertreated due to the load that covid is imposing on the hospital. Someone need not die of covid in the hospital to kill someone else whose bed they were taking up.

And of course that says nothing about the number of people becoming disabled because of covid. We don't know yet exactly how many people are getting long-term disabilities because of covid, or how long long-term will be, but the numbers don't look good.

> The current variant spreading like wildfire in the US came from South Africa (or maybe Botswana). The previous one came from India. The original one came from China. Even if we had 100% compliance in the US with whatever measures you want, it wouldn't stop covid, unless we could somehow force everybody in the world to do the same thing, which is impossible.

For one thing, we don't actually know if that's where those variants came from. The countries that are doing a better job of sequencing infections and monitoring the course of the pandemic are more likely to spot a variant early. But let's set that aside for the moment. I agree that a zero-covid strategy relies on world-wide cooperation, but there are much better approaches that we could take than what we have been. A sensible approach to travel related quarantining rather than nonsensical travel bans would be a good start. Demonstrating leadership in how to handle a pandemic in general would be another. Contract tracing, regular testing, and better responses to localized outbreaks would all help. The US in particular is probably better positioned than a lot of the world to contain ongoing outbreaks to be more regional simply because of the size and low population density here.

> Nobody has ever satisfyingly explained to me how this meme of "if everybody did the right thing it would all be over by now" makes any sense. Australia, New Zealand, and China are not back to normal yet.

Even countries with better responses than the US are going to have imperfect responses, and people are still people everywhere you go. There's plenty of room to do better, but on average the places with a better response have had more time with lower levels of infection. There's no closing pandora's box now, and normal will have to include continually re-evaluating the situation and adapting, but we can have a better time with a better response.

That's the point of my original post too. Maybe nothing would have kept kids from having periods of remote schooling, and missing other social events (or, in places that have continued to have no restrictions, maybe nothing _should_ have actually justified a pro-covid attitude that's been adopted). Better planning and better responses, and more responsible behavior overall, could have given kids more certainty, more safe days in class, and a clearer understanding of how to live in the world as it exists today.

If you think the restrictions in the US were just a month or two of restaurant dining being closed, we live in such completely different realities that it's not worth engaging with you.

I live in NYC and describing what happened in that way is an almost comical understatement.

I read articles like this that are so naive about the symptoms of societal collapse and think "some people have absolutely no idea what the coming decades are going to be like"

Vote appropriately next time and not necessarily for your ‘usual’ party.

this is horse shit. the overall well-being of children has been declining for decades. now it has reached its precipice and snobby NYT says its because of the virus. its just a way to deflect from the truth which is that we have created a culture that enables kids to be shitty. the inmates have been running the asylum for a decade plus at our public schools. the environment that kids grow up in now is one where nobody is in control of what they experience. i remember when facebook first came out and i saw all my friends invest into it 100%. nobody ever asked, wait a second, isnt this unhealthy? isnt creating a points system for socializing a bit unfair to the less popular kids? isnt it sort of crazy to give facebook all of this information? i did my part and never made an account but nobody else did their part and nobody ever asked whether or not it was a good idea to make facebook a default entity in the lives of our children. something that everyone uses "because" and you cant choose to opt out without serious consequences for you social life which is a huge deal at that age. that was the contribution of the millennials to the the environment for our children. good job! children need an environment that is deliberately and thoughtfully controlled. not micro-managed, but controlled. soon the damage will be so great that even the dumbest people will realize this finally.

At least for us, in the early days, I understood the school closures to be about protecting the sometimes elderly staff, and the children from unknowns.

Now that vaccinations are widely available to both the staff and kids, I would like to see a more rigorous adherence to the rigor of the before times.

Regular bus schedules, and regular lunch times, and generally doing sports and activities, within the bounds of circumstantially necessary restrictions, would do my kids a world of good.

My 9yo has developed mildly concerning anxiety and night-terrors over this.

Nearly everyone is experiencing more baseline stress these days. I doubt a more predictable daily schedule would be all that reassuring against a backdrop of cascading supply chain disruptions and spiralling political dialogue.

I'm not a parent but I like the sentiment behind the saying, 'Talk to your kids about the changing world order, before someone else does'.

> I'm not a parent

This is clear. Predictable daily schedules are quite reassuring for kids. Supply chain disruptions and politics are not even on their radar.

Adults being nervous without telling them why certainly is. I'm not saying the disruption to your child's schedule is helping things, but I know plenty of people who aren't nine, haven't had a significant disruption in their routine, and are still constantly anxious because everyone else is. I'd just caution against seeing a fixed routine as a magic bullet.

It's amazing to me that this article presents the "hard choices" as mostly "should we trade off harming children against harming adults?", rather than "should we trade off not harming anyone against people's freedom to choose to go about their normal lives while unvaccinated?" and only mentions the unvaccinated offhandedly.

It's less that the US has chosen to prioritize adults over children and thus children are suffering, and more that the US has chosen to prioritize the freedom to be selfish and ignorant over both adults and children, and thus everyone is suffering. Make vaccination a requirement for (both foreign and) domestic flights. Make it a requirement for attending any public event. Make it a requirement for eating at any restaurant. Make it a requirement for parents who want to send their kids to school. Make a process whereby those relatively few adults who legitimately can't be vaccinated due to e.g. medical reasons have an exception (other countries have already done so). Make the willfully unvaccinated have to stay at home because society is closed to those who care more about making a point about "freedom" than about harming everyone else in it.

Will it even help? In what country did it help? France mandated vaxx passports literally everywhere (pretty much like you suggest) and yet they reported, what, 270k cases just today? Why do you expect a different result in the US from the very same policy?

I believe that the comment you're replying to is meaning to imply that remote learning mandates are primarily to protect the unvaccinated (who are at a considerably greater risk of death due to COVID complications).

That is to say: if there were more vaccinated people there would be less need for remote learning since the risk calculus would be very different.

(My science isn't strong enough to take a stance here, I'm merely providing my understanding of the comment you're replying to)

I don't know what exactly France did and why it does or doesn't work for them, but the article was less about the net number of new cases, and more about the impact of shutting down schools/society.

We know that, if you're vaccinated, you're both less likely to get COVID (not necessarily unlikely, with the new super-infectious variants, but less likely), and once you have it, are less likely to have a high viral load and thus spread it, especially if you don't have symptoms. If we knew that, for example, all of the diners and all of the staff at a restaurant were fully vaccinated, then the likelihood of catching COVID at that restaurant would be drastically reduced -- we'd still be exposed to the odd symptomless-but-contagious person as well as to the occasional person who has symptoms but decided to dine out anyhow, but it'd be very different math than "anyone working or dining here may not be vaccinated in the first place and may have attended an unvaxxed 300-person indoor wedding two days ago".

Same with schools: today, you can be an anti-vaxxer and send your kids to the same school as mine. Being an anti-vaxxer not only means that you're not vaccinated, but also that you're more likely to discount the entire pandemic and spend time in large gatherings with other unvaccinated people. And of course your children go with you. And you pick them up from school, and go to their basketball practice, and attend meetings.

By allowing willfully-unvaccinated people to seamlessly mingle with the rest of society, we're increasing everyone's risk. No one claims that by doing this we'll bring the number of cases down to zero, that's not actually the point. The point is that we'll be far less likely to catch COVID at any regulated place.

It is funny how much you are talking math. Can you put any hard numbers on your intuition about "risk drastically reduced"? Or is it your own psychological feeling of safety similar to the one when people are scared of airplanes, but don't think twice before driving?

Here is a recent omicron case study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268021v...

Two thirds of the gathering was infected. Everybody, every single one of them, was triple-vaccinated and negative tested beforehand. And yet, here we are. This is in line with previous superspreader events back in early 2020. At this point I am highly skeptical that there is any reduced transmission with current outdated vaccines and new variants we have. It is difficult to know now if these vaccines prevented the transmission of the original strain. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, it doesn't matter now, it is extinct anyway. But the data shows that vaccines' effect on transmission right now is fairly minimal.

The article mentions increased suicide rates, especially among adolescent females, as part of "The Toll", but the study linked to specifically says: "(6). Finally, this analysis was not designed to determine whether a causal link existed between these trends and the COVID-19 pandemic."

I don't think its much of a stretch. Besides, what are you going to do, ask them why they committed suicide?

Yeah, strikes me as one of those things that should be accepted without that “link” - like really, the suicide rate just went up that much, and we’re gonna assume it was _not_ related to COVID/quarantine?

Feels like it should be accepted.

I also don't think it is much of a stretch, but I think it is too much of a stretch to include in reporting from the NYT. I'm not familiar with "THE MORNING NEWSLETTER", maybe it is more of an opinion section than actual journalism from the NYT?

Why not blame Tik-Tok, which rapidly increased in popularity among 12-17 year old females at pretty much the same time COVID was hitting?

I don't really agree with this article.

That said, I don't think schools are necessarily the problem. Parenting, and the ability to be proper parents, is the problem.

most parents don't have time to be parents. They're either working double jobs, which leaves little to no time for kids, or they're just putting kids in school to avoid parenting.

I feel like it's a two-way street here. I also think parents are puling kids out of school because they don't want kids to catch Covid, not because the parents _don't_ want to catch Covid. Good parents will do what's best for their kid, and I feel like many parents are trying to be good parents!

It doesn't help that parents are given bad information. There's no trustworthy source of information anymore, outside of your doctors, at least regarding health. But, doctors don't have time to tell every parent what they should / shouldn't do.

Eh, TLDR, the whole system is effed, and people are blaming the easiest targets.

I wonder if this pandemic will change our views on the pace of vaccine testing in children. There might be a willingness to begin testing in children sooner though I doubt we would ever test in children at the same time as adults.

The audacity. The NYT have been constantly supportive of more restrictions and barely asked a single journalistic question with regards to if they actually work and the impacts of them. “No Way To Grow Up”? You don’t say!

Here’s a thought with less hot air than the NYT: If Covid doesn’t impact kids and the vaccine barely moves the needle on transmission, how about let them go to school, remove the masks, stop jabbing them etc and let them live a normal life. It’s disgusting what we have done to them and the US seems to be one of the worst offenders.

This is a great idea and I fully support it. But I notice you didn’t say anything about teachers and the wider school community. There are many more people who are part of a school community than just children.

As a teacher, I love the imagery of children just living their lives, free from the weight and realities of this pandemic. I can picture them in the classroom, eager to learn, raising their hands, playing in the playground. It warms my heart.

But the flip side is that I can also picture the teachers and administrators. I see unmasked, unvaxxed, infected parents interacting directly with teachers. I see immunocompromised teachers dying.

I also see their surviving coworkers unable to emotionally handle being in school, with little to no support. Remember, teachers are also simultaneously dealing with the threat of school shootings ever lurking in America. This may sound glib, but have you checked out the price of bullet proof armor? This is a thing teachers and students buy now, along with the other school supplies they buy out of their own pockets. Pens, check; notebook, check; bullet proof backpack, check. Ready for school!

After two years of extra work, pay cuts, staffing shortages, budget cuts, dozens of school shootings, being screamed at by parents, being called traitors to America for teaching its history accurately, many are fed up with it.

If this keeps up, you’re going to end up with Qanon believers teaching your kids. They’re sure that school shootings are staged by crisis actors, and covid isn’t even real, so they’re going to be the only ones left willing to apply for the job. Maybe that’s something you want, but I sure as hell don’t.

The US is an outlier on this topic, and I really don't understand why. I think I know why, but it would be politically unpopular to say the reason.

These kids will eventually grow up and remember what Trust The Science ™ did to their childhood development. It will be a much different world then.

[RANT]

At this point I've lost faith in my generation, my parents' generation, and everything in between and outside of that. I don't care what your degree says or does not say. I don't care about your credentials. I don't care about your politics. Everyone has been wrong. MY YOUNG CHILDREN SHOULD NOT HAVE TO CONTINUE WEARING MASKS AT SCHOOL WHEN THEY ARE VACCINATED. That is no way to grow up indeed.

> At this point I've lost faith in my generation, my parents' generation, and everything in between and outside of that. I don't care what your degree says or does not say. I don't care about your credentials. I don't care about your politics. Everyone has been wrong. MY YOUNG CHILDREN SHOULD NOT HAVE TO CONTINUE WEARING MASKS AT SCHOOL WHEN THEY ARE VACCINATED. That is no way to grow up indeed.

And I don't want my kid anywhere near yours then. Mask are not to protect them. Mask are to protect others. Just because someone is vaccinated does not mean they can't spread viruses.

Viruses are not new. The article is about when we move on from a 2 year pandemic. I hope you’re not suggesting kids always wear masks because viruses.

I'm fascinated by this kind of response from other parents. My kids don't really mind the masks. It's just not a big deal to them. I mean, I obviously hope we can go back to normal before too much longer, but the mask itself isn't actively harming them.

On the other hand, not being able to interact with classmates during school-from-home last year... that had a big effect on their social lives. But now, they see and hang out with their friends (and frenemies) every day. There's a mask on their face -- not a big deal.

Well one my kids has had an open sore on his mouth for months because of the mask.

Im equally as fascinated by parents who find masking their children to be totally fine. They don’t really have a say in this and I don’t believe for one second that kids would rather wear a mask than not.

> Im equally as fascinated by parents who find masking their children to be totally fine.

It's not "totally fine." We're all tired of the masks, sure. I just don't think they're actively harmful.

> They don’t really have a say in this and I don’t believe for one second that kids would rather wear a mask than not.

Heh, I don't have to tell you, I'm sure, but there's a lot of things kids would rather not do.

Anyone that is in a situation that is trying to establish new relationships with people and understand each other emotions during so in as contentious a situation as figuring a new person out would have found a mask hugely inhibiting.

Grown-up that have never change their social circles for year will not be able to empathize. Nomads definitely do and understand what kids have to go through as they are trying to navigate the world and understand other human being from scratch.

Exactly. I volunteered at my son’s kindergarten class one day and saw how difficult it was for them to interact with each other let alone pronounce words. I was not the same dad after that.

I’m curious if the parents of young children that feel masks are NBD have spent time in the classroom.

> Heh, I don't have to tell you, I'm sure, but there's a lot of things kids would rather not do.

Indeed, but in your previous comment you said “masks on their face not a big deal”. I take it that is how you feel about it and not how they feel about it. Maybe we should think about them a little more is the point - adults have clearly been wrong about everything.

So, from the OP NYT article, Covid is causing the schools and student learning to suffer.

I question if the suffering is necessary:

For Covid, I'm old enough to be at risk of death if I got Covid, but I've had both shots of the Moderna vaccine and also its booster. I may be wrong, but with these shots I f'get about Covid -- I assume I can't get it or transmit it. Again I would hope that others would do the same. Again I may be wrong but I assume that then we could all f'get about Covid, masks, mandates, lock downs, closings, etc. at work, in restaurants, airplanes, schools, etc.

But, for education, hmm .... Dad was pretty good at that, got about the best Master's in education available when he was in college. Then one of his points was that could get a good education in a one room school house with all grades in the one room with just one teacher.

One of the lessons I got from a lot of years in school and some years of teaching is "Learning is not a spectator sport". That is, learning happens mostly from work between the ears of the learner.

To me, these are very special, especially good, times for learning -- we have the Internet. Darned near anything anyone might want to learn is on the Internet as text or videos, including in organized full courses.

I know a family with three kids, 10, 7, and 2. They go to a private school, three short days a week and then study at home. It appears that Covid has not hurt their education and that they are doing fine. At the school, each mother volunteers one day a month. Since there are only about 12 school days a month, it takes only 12 students to have a mother there each school day.

I would hope that parents could do well with their kids educations through (a) reading and writing essays, (b) math through graphing data, compound interest, exponententials, areas, and volumes, (c) other topics such as literature, geography, history, music, etc.

Then somewhere about age 10-12, the kids should be able to do well learning, with some guidance and standardized testing, essentially on their own from materials on the Internet or, in some cases, from books. Uh, some kids, even in some of the worst schools, somehow do really well learning basketball, baseball, football, soccer, auto mechanics, and more -- properly motivated they should also be able to learn chemistry, biology, calculus, physics, computer programming, etc.

Really compare that to my dad and my uncles having to evacuated as the family house got hit by the Luftwaffe (lived near the biggest spitfire plant in the UK)

Oh and my Paternal Grandfather was a headmaster and had to evacuate his entire dam school.

I think a lot of right wing commentators and journalists have got to close to the hard right.

I graduated in 2008. I feel those who graduate during covid. The good thing about 2008 is that we had the names of all the people that were to be held accountable. the bad news is that no one has been jailed and that we all started our career at the worst time possible in recent history.

Now is same. we definitely sacrified our youth mental health,jobs, starting a family dreams, starting salary, hopes, future retirement, cost of renting an apartment, never ever hopes of buying a place and confined them in small third-rate boomer-owned apartment so that old people don't die from covid. many more healthy young people will die from this than they could have died from covid.

it is our western society and leaders that made this choice for us because our olds own all the power (just look at trump and biden pelosi age). and western leaders made this decision just like japan elderly people made the choice to go clean fukushima reactor so that their youth doesn't die from doing it.

I guess people need to make a choice. what kind of society do we wish to live in.

>it is our western society and leaders that made this choice for us because our olds own all the power

This is true right up until one is old enough to vote. One of the most frustrating realizations as I've gotten older (I graduated during the great recession too) is that younger people don't vote while older people do. Most of what you listed could be fixed or at least vastly improved if younger demographics actually bothered to address issues that impact them, because older people certainly do.

- Expensive housing could be addressed by younger voters pressing their local council to permit more units. Instead we have wealthy and older people pressing for the opposite.

- Starter jobs/salary etc. could be helped if younger people pressed their politicians to update minimum wage/paid leave etc. Yet we don't.

- Healthcare etc. could be universal, instead it's only universal for people of a certain age (read: the demographic that votes).

I get that not all issues are solvable by young people, and pinning all their issues on them isn't productive, but there's so much that could be improved if they simply looked after themselves the way older people do.

Mainstream media continues to dance around the word "adultism."

Why is that a useful term here?

Is it useful for succinctly highlighting how we've made a world and numerous societies that ignore the voices of the young and exclude them from decision-making or having access to systems that govern their lives?

what did everyone expect to happen? There were plenty sounding this alarm early on in lockdown.

Anyone sounding this alarm, or any other anti-lockdown alarm, was instantly labeled a “Right wing nut” if you recall

true. good to see we've opened up to contrarians. oh wait…

Too little, too late NY Times. I won't forgive you.

For real. Their front page is still fear mongering "Omicron" to people who never try to learn what "Omicron" even is or why they should be afraid of it

Were you a subscriber and you cancelled your subscription? Or are you simply withholding future subscriptions?

I had subscribed for almost 20 years.

Aaaaand there’s the consensus manufacturing the NYT is famous for.

I think so, too. Reversal of policies at the start of the new year! Expect more of these articles and a slow move to a Sweden approach this year.

Of course the NYT omits that schools were open in several states, but that would be too much reality in a single dose.

Even here, remember when just the suggestion that Sweden’s streets were not going to run red with blood was met with almost violent opposition?

None of the people worried about "Omicron" could explain what the hell it is

What gives you that impression? Do you suggest the article should have started with a detailed explanation of what the Omicron variant is?

Not the article; the people panic-reacting to it. 99% of them have no idea why they are scared of it

If kids have to save the grown ups, then they have a strong bargaining position to e.g. fix the climate ASAP.

=> Why don't they use it?

Because they have neither power nor authority. First, kids don't have a vote so they really have no direct influence in a democratic/representative republic system. Second, they have no money, so they have limited ability to exert financial/economic pressure.

What are they supposed to bargain with? They are (as a population, individuals may be exceptions to this) fundamentally dependent upon the adult population for their existence. Food, shelter, clothing, transportation is all (in the US) provided by adults for the vast majority of kids, at least below age 16, and still the majority for most 16/17 year olds. If we permit 18-20 year olds to still be counted as "kids", they are still poor and a very small voting bloc that is notorious for not showing up to vote, even if they are increasingly independent.

The main problem I see is that kids are not (yet) organized.

There is a pandemic going on. Kids can "vote" with their behavior.

> There is a pandemic going on. Kids can "vote" with their behavior.

So, is your suggestion the kids should get organized to deliberately spread or threaten to spread COVID in order to control adult behavior?

No, I'm sure there are more diplomatic ways.

Then:

1. What power do kids have with which to influence adults?

2. Why does the pandemic have anything to do with anything? It's a weird non sequitur if your intent wasn't to suggest bioterrorism.

> Why does the pandemic have anything to do with anything?

Pandemic versus climate is basically the adult's future versus children's future.

That's why I'm saying children should take a stand here.

They are called children for a reason. It's adult's responsibility to look out for them because they are not grown up enough to fend for themselves.

We adults have been failing them miserably and we should be ashamed of ourselves.

The audacity to tell them that they should bargain with us for their future. Unbelievable.

In what way do kids have any sort of bargaining position? They hold no power to use as bargaining. They do no control whether or how they go to school.

I wonder how all those kids with long covid will view decisions to physically disable them potentially for life so the state could force their parents to work.

I wonder how kids mental health copes with the idea that adults will intentionally expose them and others to a deadly disease with no mitigations to make money.

> kids with long covid ... physically disable them potentially for life

At what point do we decide that totally evidence-free hysterical claims like this are as much misinformation as anti-vaxx posting is?

I wonder how we'll look back at this in 10 years.

Given that evidence of Post Viral syndrome exists for most other viruses, probably about the same as we look at those today.

Not that we have lingering/longer term effects of other viruses to observe though..

The clinical picture is still evolving. There is much less information than for adults, but here's the first google link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/

> The clinical picture is still evolving. There is much less information than for adults

We're nearing 300,000,000 cases worldwide. How is it still an open question? Maybe the reason there's "much less information" is simply because kids are not (by and large) getting majorly sick from it.

If kids were dying from covid in any significant numbers, I have no doubt I'd be seeing the stories on CNN and everywhere else by now.

In the article I posted, one justification given for the paucity of data other than gross cases and deaths is that it's much harder to set up a study due to the issues around consent.

> If kids were dying from covid in any significant numbers, I have no doubt I'd be seeing the stories on CNN and everywhere else by now.

Well, pediatric admissions are the highest they've ever been. I would not rely on the major media, you have to look for the data yourself. Media are big businesses in the pocket of bigger business that want adults to go to work and kids to go to school. They will only report issues that are so large and obvious they can't be ignored.

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1477663737511297024

Please share some stats on long covid in kids. e.g. effects that persist more than a few months out that can be reasonably expected to be permanent

Surely they exist if you're making a comment like this, right?

The research in kids is much sparser than in adults, but when I looked into this, I saw far smaller, more biased sample sizes than in adults, but very similar PET scans showing hypometabolism in kids brains as has been shown in adults. This first article popped up too discussing long covid in kids when I googled it just now.

"Children with long covid" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/

"Similar patterns of [18F]-FDG brain PET hypometabolism in paediatric and adult patients with long COVID: a paediatric case series" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00259-021-05528...

I think you all should learn to respect the enemy rather than dismissing it because it makes you feel bad.

took a look at the first link, it points to doi.org/fv9t

they asked kids 6-16, after having covid, if in the following 3 months they experienced muscle or joint aches, headaches, or several other things.

of course half the kids self report that. How many of them had growing pains? Stayed up too late and didn't hydrate enough? Etc. I don't think this study is anything to give much weight to

The first link was just google, the second link I actually read and thought about.

FFS man, less than 1k kids (0-17) have ever died from covid.

Get in line behind gun violence, vehicle accidents, and drowning at the beach.

Force them to work, huh?

Does it really need explaining that besides making money, work is also used to keep our society running?

Do you like things such as...say, FOOD?

China figured it out.

I furiously disagree with anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, but I'm very disappointing that the "official" Covid guidance mostly glosses over the (apparent) fact that children simply don't suffer major effects, except for a very small number of them (comparable to other common seasonal viruses).

After two years and 300,000,000 cases worldwide, don't we have enough data by now to know that Covid isn't a major health risk for children?

You have a good point, but I also think it will take more time to get the full picture of long covid in children (number affected, symptoms etc).

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4...

Because of the lack of data, it seems like I am running an experiment on my child either way :

- if I send her to school where she will most likely catch covid (1st generation of kids to catch covid at a young age)

- by getting a vaccine studied on such a small test group and short period of time (1st generation of kids get this vaccine at a young age)

I am on the vaccine side but my ex is not.

sorry for the rant(ish) reply, it is a sensitive personal topic and just needed to lay my thoughts bare I guess

P.S : vaccine not available for child in her age group where she lives

They really didn’t want to push vaccines on children since there were early studies they would develop myocarditis and inflammations. Really the vaccine isn’t made to prevent you from getting covid. It’s so you won’t die. Children don’t really need that since they don’t have significant symptoms. That being the case, what’s the point of them getting vaccinated if it presents risks.

vaccination sure present a risk. so does a covid infection, they are both negligible in terms of odds but both real.

> They really didn’t want to push vaccines on children

who is "they" because when I read guidance from several countries, it does recommend the vaccine in age group 5-11

In the stuff I'm reading lately, it seems vaccines might not have much effect on long covid from mild cases. Covid is a systematic disease that triggers auto-immunity.

For kids, my gut says its better to get the vaccine, but I could be persuaded that it won't do much for them as the data come out. This would place greater emphasis on NPI (distancing, N95 masks, ventilation) to prevent them from catching it at all. I get that this may not be realistic for kids, but the alternative imo is that we're going to injure the next generation. Maybe we're just doomed.

Nonetheless, at times when COVID is peaking in transmission, I think schools should be shut down to protect kids and the adults they come into contact with. In a month or two, transmission should decline. Opening schools will increase transmission again, but America seems to have no capacity to really tackle this.

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