Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64
actuarial.news
actuarial.news
We’ve tortured and hindered the youth of this country to protect folks age 60+.
Children are struggling academically due to a lost 1+ year of proper education. The reading gap in 1st-3rd grade is real and documented. And the lingering mental damage … well, we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s not looking good.
*to be fair, they were increasing at a worrying rate year over year pre-pandemic
Interesting thought.
For what do we optimize actually? For the working class? For human lives?
You know what would have not been an issue if we would talk to each other and would find a global compromise independent of capitalism?
A pandemic.
We would just take our knowledge and resources we have and transform it temporarily in a setup in were its not an issue to work from home, work less for a year or two, have family and friend clusters were subgroups can visit each other without spreading virusus, high vaccine rate, masks everywere.
I don't mind discussing IF our society should throw older people under the bus, but only if we accept that we did a lot of stuff shitty before and we could do it much better.
But also lets not forget one thing: This is a pandemic. Our first pandemic in a modern time, unique to our society.
We have handled it much better than 100 years ago.
Is that so? The pandemic seems far from over. I think it is a little early to draw any conclusions.
[1] https://www.dn.se/varlden/danmark-omikron-kan-fa-slut-pa-pan...
Best case: Omicron gives everyone a baseline resistance, so that future mutations are more like the flu. We'll get new mutations a couple times a year. Some will contact them, some won't. It will be fatal to those with comorbidities (just like the flu)
I don't think covid is ever actually going away, though. It is just too contagious.
We have 'only' 5 Million covid death while the estimate for spanish flu is at 50 Million.
1920 we had way less people, way less/none cheap air travel, fast transport.
We have never created a vaccine that fast and responded on such a global level together.
Have we?
Especially given that it's much much less lethal than the one 100 years ago.
I'm not 100% sure of the answer to this, and I don't think anyone is, but as a resident of Melbourne, AU (world's most locked down city!), I can categorically state that destroying the quality of life for an entire society just so that a small percentage of vulnerable people can prolong their life for a few years is absolutely not the answer.
It's not even a young vs. old thing at this stage. People aged 60+ (who were already lonely before) have suffered just the same as we have and I'm sure would have a very similar opinion to the rest of society.
What do you even mean? The population-weighted infection fatality rate is somewhere around 0.8% (for vanilla SARS-CoV-2), can you even imagine what that would mean in terms of deaths alone? We are not even talking about hospitalisations or severe cases or chronic disease, or the collapse of critical infrastructure and the economy.
I don't get this "Covid is just a problem for the old and weak" rhetoric, is that the society you want to live in?
Call it cold, but I'd rather live in a society where we throw the old and weak under the bus rather than make life unbearable for all.
Hell, I suspect even if I were old and weak I would have rather died surrounded by my family and friends in 2020 instead of gone through two years of isolation only to die alone in 2022.
It seems that there's been little effort or focus on how to cater for increased hospitalisations, or problem solving on how to ensure there are enough people trained to handle covid patients.
The only tools available are vaccines and lockdowns...
The rules are ridiculous - for example you have to wear a mask stepping inside a bar but as soon as you are seated you don't need one. You have to wear a mask to check in at the gym but as soon as you are in the gym you don't need one.
Everyone needs to check in with a QR code... for what reason I really don't know (assuming it's "just incase" a new variant emerges, but half suspect it's just a psychological trick to remind is of covid 24/7)...
I get that a small percentage of people get very sick and may die (and we should protect those people) but the way things are is just ridiculous and is a bunch of red tape that at this stage I don't think is really helping to do anything except keep people obedient and in constant fear.
Just imagine it would be okay to stay at home as a restaurant worker, not fearing to lose your job and knowing that nothing changes in a bad way when the pandemic is over.
We can easily afford this as a society. We just don't.
While we're all painfully aware of the shortcomings in various responses, it's disingenuous to say that the pandemic would "not have been an issue if we would talk to each other". Similarly, "just" taking our cumulative knowledge and resources and having WFH, vaccination, and all the other adjustments work instantly and without issue is a high bar; I've personally worked on projects over the past two years trying to help smooth the transition on a small subset or those adjustments, and it's not an easy undertaking.
To have a reasonable discussion of the tradeoffs of various measures, it requires acknowledgement of the challenges and drawbacks of the alternatives. I agree we've got far better capabilities than 100 years ago and we should have these discussions, but thought it might help to shift your framing a bit.
We really have dropped the ball and turned valid concerns by parents into a political finger pointing shit storm.
Who's "we?" Politicians?
Thing is I realized recently that as a kid with a bpd mother one reason I grew up as a shy nerdy shut in was because any time I did anything it would cause a giant fight with my mom so I just gave up and stopped trying. Now I realize it fucked me up in multiple ways being like that. I imagine it's much the same with a lot of these kids. They have zero agency to go against it.
Regardless of how you or I feel about the usefulness of masks this is a side benefit to many parents and schools. Schools want kids that just bend over and take whatever flavor of capricious BS they're producing on a given week. Few parents want kids with agency and critical thinking skills because you can't just lie to them to get them to do what you want. Everyone says they want critical thinking but look at their actions.
And everyone acts so insanely self righteous and judgy about it.
I take you don't have children? I have, and they do regularly socialize, and none of the families I've ever talked with, mentioned any form of damage due to this.
Social isolation during the first wave - that was a real problem; there was concrete suffering.
I actually have an alternative take on this: if society is not able to do something as simple as consistently use a mask, there's no hope to do something that requires concrete sacrifice as mitigating global warming.
Who cares about society? Focus on your kid.
Let me frame this positively: Covid as a whole did increase the chances that humanity will actually do something as against global warming, and actually survive the next 200 years or so.
I really am baffled that people don't see things with more positivity.
Take the US as an example: Would you have guessed that the 'most pandemically prepared country' would lead Western democratic nations in terms of death count? How ready do you view US society to combat future threats like climate change, an even deadlier pandemic, or non-democratic state actors? What does that mean for the Western model of democracy?
2 out of 3 of what you brought up has nothing to do with covid.
History doesn't stop just cause there's a pandemic.
Working from home the most I had to wear the mask is flying somewhere and I fucking haaaate it. And I say this as a trans person that enjoyed for once not being misgendered in public. The truth is me and my very liberal girlfriend are fucking over it and we don't care anymore. We're triple vaxed and fuck it. We've been going clubbing at maskless down town LA parties for months now and haven't caught it yet.
The fact that kids have to do more than I do as an adult is baffling to me. I legitimately feel bad for them.
My wife is a teacher, and we know a bunch of other teachers, and I'd like to say please do not give up on this kid — they're more resilient than adults often think, and family support is really important, even if it might not seem like it's doing anything now. The problems you described sound like they're more due to other pandemic-related disruption rather than wearing a mask and whatever you can do to be there for him is going to make a difference.
> The fact that kids have to do more than I do as an adult is baffling to me. I legitimately feel bad for them.
I completely agree. Our national policy has basically been to write off children to keep high-risk businesses open for adults and I would in a heartbeat take a blanket vaccination mandate and other risk mitigation measures for high-risk businesses explicitly based on the goal of keeping normal schooling open (e.g. link high-risk activities like indoor dining or drinking being open to community spread rates).
Maybe if we raise a generation that doesn't rely on facial cues to recognize emotions as much we'll end up with a society that's more open and understanding to people who struggle with interpreting facial and other non-verbal cues for other reasons, such as autism?
Covid-19 causes brain damage in children: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...
Even non-hospitalized covid-19 cases cause measurable cognitive impairment: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
Mental damage vs brain damage, take your pick. Personally I pick the one that doesn't kill their grandparents, seeing as childhood trauma also causes cognitive impairment.
One can discuss (dis)advantages of certain approaches without entirely discounting them.
Depressing.
I think this is overly simplistic, and doesn't consider the relative rates of both.
Besides - The goal of managing Covid shouldn't be to reduce total cognitive impairment, it should be to maximise the total quality of life for everyone. For me, forcing kids to wear a mask throughout school is a significant quality of life reduction, as well as loss of high-quality education which will no doubt continue to drive inequality in the years ahead.
There is no 'right' and 'wrong' approach here.
Boy is this editorialized, did you even read your own study?
> Conclusions and Relevance In this study, many children and adolescents hospitalized for COVID-19 or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children had neurologic involvement, mostly transient symptoms. A range of life-threatening and fatal neurologic conditions associated with COVID-19 infrequently occurred. Effects on long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes are unknown.
1. this is among survivors of severe covid. The cohort of under 21's that get severe covid in the first place is extremely low.
2. symptoms are described as "mostly transient".
i.e you're not getting brain damage from casual covid, which is 99.9% of cases.
Even your lancet study shows for non-hospitalization cases, the "cognitive decline" is under SD=0.1 which is arguably within margin of error.
Concerns about the efficacy of cognitive aptitude tests notwithstanding. [0]
[1] unfortunately because this means there is no disincentive against future regulatory misbehaviour
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/masks-in-schools-how-con...
"The Evidence Summary from the Department for Education (DfE) accepts the harm inflicted by face masks in class. It cites research showing that:
‘80 per cent of pupils reported that wearing a face covering made it difficult to communicate, and more than half (55 per cent) felt wearing one made learning more difficult’
‘Face coverings may have physical side effects and impair face identification, verbal and non-verbal communication between teacher and learner.’
‘Almost all secondary leaders and teachers (94 per cent) thought that wearing face coverings has made communication between teachers and students more difficult, with 59 per cent saying it has made it a lot more difficult.’"
And also in the article:
"The DfE study of 123 schools says that in schools with masks, Covid absences fell to 3 per cent, from 5.3 per cent — a 2.3 per cent drop. In schools that did not have masks — 1,192 of them — there was a 1.7 per cent drop: a small difference of 0.6 percentage points.
As the DfE accepts, the 123-school analysis is 'non-peer reviewed' and 'shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow-up period'. So the results are within the margin of error, in a study that has not been properly assessed in the standard academic way."
I don't understand how this extreme rhetoric will lead anywhere. It distracts from the actual discussion about how to distribute the burden of the pandemic, and is dishonest in two ways:
a) It makes a whole lot of difference whether you lose one year in education vs. actually dying,
b) It frames the pandemic as a problem of the folks 60+, when instead the collapse of health systems and economies harms all members of society.
It is certainly a possibility that as a society, we have under-estimated the burden on children, and time will tell. However, in every single jurisdiction I know schools were the last public system to be locked down, and the first to re-open.
b) This IS a problem of people 60+ and 50+. Collapse affects everyone, but the vast majority of deaths and hospitalizations are among individuals in this age cohort (~93%). If hospitals collapse it won't be because the kids went to school.
The goal of this rhetoric should be to guide everyone towards consensus so we can plan better for the next time around. If it sounds extreme, maybe that's because it should be treated with urgency.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
So what do you think about the ‘if you go to school you’re killing grandma’ rhetoric?
Have we become so mentally weak that the last 2 years have been considered "torture"?
> Children are struggling academically due to a lost 1+ year of proper education.
The worst kept secret is that schools in the US are little more than babysitting services.
> And the lingering mental damage … well, we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s not looking good.
My son is a type 1 diabetic and we pulled him out of school a month before schools went virtual and he hasn't been back. He hasn't played with his friends in 18 months. He's still a happy go lucky kid. Kids are adaptable. It's not all doom and gloom.
And it always amazes me that people are just now caring about kids education. Our school systems have been demonstrably backsliding for 20 years. The ranks of teachers are thinner than ever, and the pay/benefits are so low teachers aren’t going to risk their lives to go into the classroom — many were already working second jobs, which made it really easy to stop teaching.
You want to improve kids education? Invest in the school systems, because a big part of the reason the pandemic was so negative for kids’ learning is that we had starved our public school systems of resources for decades before anyone ever got sick.
One might infer that school itself drives suicide among children, or one might say only that correlation should not be confused with causation, and we don't know why the suicide rate fell during the pandemic.
What one should never do, of course, is to claim that suicides are up dramatically when they aren't.
Anecdotally, although my 11-year-old daughter has been back at school since September of last year, she loves wearing masks at school and in public generally. She plays volleyball while wearing a mask. Not all children are struggling or feel tortured or hindered.
There isn’t much detail on the cause of those increased deaths. Worth noting from both articles is that insurance companies don’t pay out for suicide deaths, and there is mention of hospitals filled with other ailments instead of just COVID. So what’s left is the assumption that people of working age are dying from other causes that increase insurance payouts for the working age bracket. Could be worse health, more sedentary lifestyle, increased rate of cancers, heart disease, trauma caused by activities done to reduce boredom, car accidents, alcohol and drug abuse etc. If you have data sources on recent % of causes of death, that may shed more light on the underlying problem than speculation.