> Our kids came back with a cold every 2 weeks, for approximately 2.5 months. That was not fun.
Noting also that frequent colds can lead to lifelong asthma conditions
Noting further that we really don't know the long-term effects of Covid on young people (both in the more frequent case of a speedy recovery and in the less frequent "long Covid").
Masks in school, and basic good hygiene (washing hands, having the school disinfect contact surfaces such as doorknobs multiple times per day, ...) go a long way to keeping everyone safe and healthy.
Even if they did work, there is a cost / benefit that needed to be calculated that never was. All these “experts” myopically focused on one exact thing to the literal exclusion of everything else. And if you did raise objections or concerns you were (and still are) subject to a bunch of horrible retaliation.
One of the things that doctors did was compare asthma rates between people who were already working from home to asthma rates of people who suddenly got thrown home due to Covid.
Asmtha went down more than expected in the people who suddenly got thrown home than in the folks who were already working from home. Since both groups faced roughly the same kind of environmental conditions (ie. pollution going down due to less driving), the excess decrease is posited to be purely due to pathogens.
Apparently, a not insignifcant chunk of asthma attacks are due to basically swimming around in continuous, low levels of pathogenic exposure.
But covid measures became irrational.
Then when those field hospitals closed virtually unused, instead of lifting restrictions and celebrating Covid wasn’t as bad as predicted, society decided to double down on the mitigations and continue them for two years.
Lockdowns continued over a year after the vaccine was available
"Two weeks to slow the spread [while we build hospital capacity]" is what we were sold on, then it just sort of kept going and people forgot what lockdowns were meant for.