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.
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.
One can discuss (dis)advantages of certain approaches without entirely discounting them.
Depressing.
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]