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Comment by pauldenton | Hacker News Reader

I want to see young people take countries to court for their Covid response. The mass quarantine of healthy people is unprecedented. We've quarantined the sick for hundreds if not thousands of years like Typhoid Mary. Quarantining healthy young people who are not at risk in response to a pandemic has never been done before.

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Um, mass quarantines of healthy people is not unprecedented. It was, in fact quite common through history when outbreaks seemed to be getting out of control. First they'd quarantine families. Then neighborhoods. Then entire cities. In fact, during the pre-industrial times, entire cities would be quarantined and sometimes, if anyone tried to escape, they would be executed. While a reasonable arguments can be made about whether the various flavors of Covid quarantines were necessary or effective, to say they are unprecedented is simply wrong.

Quarantine means 40 days. We had kids out of classrooms for 2+ years.

In Spain we were forced to stay at home and the order was later ruled unconstitutional and absolutely nothing happened.

Young people are two years behind because schools were unnecessarily closed. That should be a lawsuit right there.

This does not square with my experience. I have school-age children (currently 5th and 7th grade) and they are not behind. The year everyone came back to on-premise school was rough, certainly, but most normal kids seem to have bounced back just fine. There's a huge amount of repetition in primary and secondary school curriculum anyway.

>but most normal kids seem to have bounced back just fine

There are millions of non-normal kids.

They would lose because the response was appropriate with the given information at the time. (and the lower risk we enjoy today is thanks to vaccination and natutal immunity of the survivors).

It totally wasn't, and countries that had less heavy-handed responses such as Japan and most African countries didn't have a significantly worse outcome than the one that took dictatorship-like measures.

On the other hand the negative effects of those policies are very strong, and for some ery visible. For instance France's debt skyrocketed from 100% to about 120% of GDP in a single year. Then there is impact on mental health, education, lowered public trust in the institutions etc. It's an absolute disaster with nothing to show for it.

From my understanding, Japan didn’t have as big of a response because it’s already normal in their culture to wear a mask when sick.

And African countries may have a younger less overweight population along with a climate that requires less gathering inside.

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