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Comment by edejong | Hacker News Reader

Although it is easy to attribute this to school closures, we should not dismiss the possibility of these results being caused by brain damage from (repeated) COVID infections [1, 2, 3].

[1] Douaud, G., Lee, S., Alfaro-Almagro, F. et al. SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK Biobank. Nature 604, 697–707 (2022). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5#citeas

[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.9921...

[3] https://neurosciencenews.com/covid-microglia-21676/

[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-022-11398-z

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How does that hypothesis square with this study:

No learning loss in Sweden during the pandemic: Evidence from primary school reading assessments

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088303552...

Interesting study. I read most of it and couldn't immediately find any big mistakes. Unfortunately, the study does not compare official government tests.

In addition, the study compares up to Q1 2021 (average would be feb 2021). By then it had 580k confirmed COVID cases on a population of 10 million (5%) and it was in the middle of the first large wave.

Personally, I think the study is not 100% convincing, but important to position within a larger frame of evidence.

Wait, I thought we closed schools so kids wouldn’t get COVID.

Unfortunately, it was terribly ineffective for that purpose. We closed them to reduce peak hospital admissions in the older population.

Also, we opened up the schools while COVID still was, and is, going on.

We can argue about the pros and cons of doing that, but pretending COVID is over is just sticking our heads in the sand.

We closed them because everybody else was closing them. Anything else is just post-hoc bullshit.

In case you didn't notice, COVID is still making the rounds but kids are at school. Kids were at school, at least in Canada and the US, during the massive surge at the beginning of 2022. There are more than 93M reported cases.

I'm amazed at the level of ignorance about a disease that has killed more than a million people in the US and Canada alone; thousands dead unnecessarily because this ignorance.

Two weeks to flatten the curve.

Kids are far from the only humans in a school building.

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