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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

It is basically just Covid, you can see the graph in this article:

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/11/act-test-scores-lowest-2023

Before Covid it was normal noise, it goes a bit up and down, it started to go outside the normal range when Covid started 2020.

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If there was some other major thing that came online in 2018, I think it would be easy to rationalize this chart as confirmatory evidence of that too, though I mostly agree.

TikTok?

maybe electronic classrooms --I don't think today's kids get many actual textbooks to consult and read. It's either MSFT or GOOG classroom content delivery solutions. It can't be helping.

Every school should have a library for the interested students! Otherwise I bristle a bit at being anti-computers in public school, especially in the coming age where LLMs can be doing a lot of the more rote 1:1 work of teaching.

This is coming from someone whose "Google classroom content" was chromebooks connected to our teacher's Drive; if there's some cursed Google Blackboard-competitor then maybe a return to physical books could be justified!

And it wasn't covid, it was our response to it.

Well, my uncle had a heart attack during the covid pandemic but couldn't get a bed in the ICU as it was full of covid patients. Was he a covid death? I'd say yes (he lived in an region of low vaccination).

Hospital saturation is lightly correlated with vaccination rates. In fact, it’s probably reverse correlated. Rural areas which have a high degree of social isolation due to low population density didn’t run out if capacity to the same extent hospitals in large urban areas did. I’m very, very sorry for your loss, but maybe you are holding on to anger that is misplaced. Population density (lack of social isolation) was what drive hospital saturation. I was in a very low vaccination rate area, and we never get to even quarter capacity in the local hospitals.

This was in phoenix arizona. No anger on my part, just a dispassionate description.

People made fun of how Sweden addressed it --known vulnerable populations and the rest were deprioritized for isolation/lockdowns and vaccines.

The jury is still out if their response was better, worse, or just different.

They had lower excess deaths from 2020-2022, which is good. But they also had significantly higher COVID deaths in vulnerable populations in 2020, mostly the elderly, which could have lead to the lower excess deaths in 2021-2022, because those elderly people were expected to die in those years anyway, leaving headroom for other excess deaths that wouldn't show up.

Economically and educationally they seemed to fare about the same as their neighboring nordic countries with stricter policies.

So right now it looks like they had about the same results as their neigbors, but sacrificed some of their elderly a few years earlier than they would have died anyway.

This is kind of like saying the bullet didn't kill you, the loss of blood did. It's a distinction without a difference.

It’s more like if a bullet goes past you, and you calmly decide the best approach is to run full speed off the nearest cliff.

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