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Comment by luxurytent | Hacker News Reader

Cities are amazingly resilient and it feels like every generation has a moment in which the city largest and most local to them is having a revival. Seems most large metros are going through some post-COVID pains: Increase in crime, extreme high cost of living, etc.

New York will, like always, come back.

But! The benefit to our mid size cities is great. We need these mid size cities to grow, and from my understanding, they have! Larger mid size cities mean a better national network for travel, more opportunities for jobs, growth, and movement of people/families. I'm here for all that.

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The "resilience" argument was misused and misapplied during the pandemic. You also saw it used for school closures -- "kids are resilient". It seems to justify inflicting known harms by having faith in "resilience".

covid spread through kids like wildfire, often via asymptomatic infections which then spread to, and killed, elderly who just wanted to see their grandkids.

The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives and prevent disability through long covid absolutely staggers the mind and erodes my faith in humanity.

> erodes my faith in humanity

Opposite for me. Maybe people still care about freedom and agency after all.

Or maybe our inability to collectively act and sacrifice to save over a million people is damning. It absolutely gutted my faith that we'll successfully tackle climate change.

A large percentage of the population relies on school for childcare. No childcare = no work = no money. A large percentage of those families didn’t have elderly in the home or visiting. For them, in-person school was critical.

...and hence why we helped those people who were unemployed and had children.

"Helped" as in the $600 stimulus checks people got that was supposed to cover groceries for 6 months while they couldn't pay rent?

more the unemployment benefits and the massive child care tax credits, yes.

> massive child care tax credits

massive? lol. It was like an additional $300 a month.

There was a rent moratorium in most places. People were not paying rent.

We? Who is we here?

US taxpayers I guess.

We did?

No, we didn't. Source: had young children during the pandemic and just finished paying back debt I accrued from having to quit my job.

There was this "Child Tax Credit" during the pandemic:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/child-tax-credit/

It sounds like you might have missed out on it due to not knowing about it, which would be unfortunate.

Tax credits aren't very helpful when, as the parent post noted, they had to quit their job to stay home.

You're right. I didn't make the connection. My bad.

I have no problem with sacrificing the elderly for the benefit of the kids. A few months of shutdown was reasonable, but shutting schools down for a couple years is too big of a price to pay.

Also, my kids were in daycare the whole time outside of Mar to May 2020, and they were spreading all sorts of viruses just like they were before COVID. How the government chose to allow the most prolific spreaders to congregate day after day, but prevent less prolific spreaders is very inconsistent logic.

> I have no problem with sacrificing the elderly for the benefit of the kids.

Read what you just wrote and ponder on it for a bit.

I have pondered about it for over a decade. Our societies drastically prioritize the elderly over the young. They are the ones with political power, after all.

Here’s an easy example: why does the US pay doctors more via Medicare (for people over 65) than via Medicaid (for poorer people, including kids).

We need to pick which out-group to sacrifice vs. take care of everyone is the kind of thinking that creates most of America’s problems.

That's not a great example. One is a single payer system funded by workers and the other is government welfare. Plus, the elderly can be on both programs simultaneously. If anything, this is an example of money influencing politics since the people who have been paying those taxes for Medicare are more likely to donate to politicians than people who require Medicaid.

> If anything, this is an example of money influencing politics since the people who have been paying those taxes for Medicare are more likely to donate to politicians than people who require Medicaid.

That is what I wrote, the elderly have more political power.

The same legislature that allocates society’s resources towards healthcare for people age 65+ also chooses to allocate less resources to people who happen to be poor (or have poor parents).

The Additional Medicare Tax is another lovely reminder of how society’s resources, because funnily enough, even though it has been widely known Medicaid does not even pay enough to keep the lights on, there is no Additional Medicaid Tax.

"That is what I wrote"

Could you point that out? I saw that the elderly had power - not the wealthy. Many elderly are also poor. Much of the political influence on Medicare comes from those who are working as they near retirement. For example, talks about raising the required age do not affect those already receiving it, but future recipients. Those are the people involved. The people receiving it could care less since the already have their's.

The reason the poor recieve less is because it's not single payer and is funded by other taxes. The general population (voters) feels that the vare minimum is all they deserve (for better or worse, that's how it is).

Again, there is a Medicare tax because it is a non-means-tested single payer system. There is no Medicaid specific tax because it is intended for a small minority of indignant individuals. As with other welfare programs, it paid for out of the general taxes and nothing specific.

It's a money and voter base issue. Yeah, that can be correlated with being old, but there's more to it.

> I saw that the elderly had power - not the wealthy.

Multiple groups can have varying amounts of power. In this case, I am using the fact that one group is getting a better benefit than another group as proof that the group getting the better benefit has power. Why else would they have it, and why else would those that do not have go without?

> The reason the poor recieve less is because it's not single payer and is funded by other taxes. The general population (voters) feels that the vare minimum is all they deserve (for better or worse, that's how it is).

This is my point. Voters skew older, and providing healthcare to the poor at least equivalent to Medicare is not a priority.

> Again, there is a Medicare tax because it is a non-means-tested single payer system.

This is incorrect. Medicare premiums get more and more means tested every year.

https://www.ncpssm.org/documents/medicare-policy-papers/medi...

Even Social Security is means tested, look up bend points in the benefit formula.

And at the end of the day, all taxes are fungible. Government received money and pays money for benefits. Who gets how much is a political exercise.

"Why else would they have it, and why else would those that do not have go without?"

I already told you - the people working to get it later are included in the group. It's not just old people.

"Voters skew older, and providing healthcare to the poor at least equivalent to Medicare is not a priority."

It's not a priority because the poor are a small voting segment. The voting segment concerned with Medicare include the elderly and those who are working and thinking about their future retirement, which is a huge segment.

"Medicare premiums get more and more means tested every year."

That's not exactly means-tested. You get Medicare if your old enough, then yes you have premiums and deductibles since this is insurance after all. You even have contribution requirements for things like part A. The permium cost can vary based on income, but that doesn't affect the actual coverage or eligibility.

Yeah, money is fungible. The laws are pretty clear on the funding sources and amounts for the entitlement programs, unlike with welfare programs that are more open-ended and less predictable.

Bend points are not means testing. You get your benefits regardless of your situation. The insurance just pays out based on a formula to adjust to cover the more basic expenses. You can see this intent in the way the formula for payouts is designed as a replacing percent of income as well as in the tax cap.

Stuff like Medicare and Social Security are not welfare programs that are means tested. The costs and benefits can vary based on contributions and income but you are entitled to the benefit. These programs are not powerful just because of the old people. The workers expecting these benefits in the future are a huge source of the political power. It's the money and the fact that people have been paying in with an expecting of benefits that's the difference.

> The permium cost can vary based on income, but that doesn't affect the actual coverage or eligibility.

> The insurance just pays out based on a formula to adjust to cover the more basic expenses.

Both of these are means testing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_test

> A means test is a determination of whether an individual or family is eligible for government assistance or welfare, based upon whether the individual or family possesses the means to do without that help.

> The workers expecting these benefits in the future are a huge source of the political power. It's the money and the fact that people have been paying in with an expecting of benefits that's the difference.

I see what you are saying, but I don’t think many people buy it anymore. The demographics alone make it quite obvious that workers today should not be expecting those benefits, not to mention the continuous devaluation of them already for many years.

The old/young divisions are thoroughly established. Technically, I guess the division is old and young expecting inheritances versus young not expecting inheritances. There are just so many examples. California’s prop 13, defunding state colleges in favor of indebting students, tiered taxpayer funded DB pensions and retiree healthcare that are only available to older employees.

NJ just cut taxes big time for people 65+:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/nyregion/property-tax-cut...

If you're at increased risk of contracting a deadly disease, you should take steps not to contract said disease, up to and including isolation, quarantine, testing, etc. What you shouldn't do is use political pressure to permanently stunt the education and growth of an entire generation of kids by insisting that elementary school children can just go to class on Zoom. 40% of 8th graders are deficient in math[0]. That didn't happen in a vacuum, it happened because schools were shut down. It happened because we expected 7 year olds to sit at a desk and watch a computer screen all day instead of allowing them to go to school.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/test-scores-show-how-...

Couldn't elderly think about themselves? If they have poor health - stay at home, make a zoom call instead of in person visit.

Rising a child is incredible difficult nowadays, and government shouldn't close schools and daycare.

Are you proposing that organ transplants be prioritized to the 80 year old chain smoker over the healthy 12 year old?

Are you proposing that old people should be the first off a sinking ship?

Old people have lived life. They should have stayed home and isolated. Kids had practically zero risk. The difference in risk between a healthy 12 year old and the average 80 year old was orders of magnitude different.

All parents understand. I would end my life in an instant for my kids.

Would you end the life of others for your kids?

Of course.

What state had schools closed for years? I see this claim a lot, but even in California hybrid was available ~1 year after shutdown, and full return to school was available for the fall after that (so about 1.3 years)

Washington was pretty egregious. There were random closures and testing requirements that made planning impossible, all the way until April or May 2022, I think. And it is cover-your-ass related stuff, because no one below the state level wanted to be on the hook if the state was still going on and on with nebulous reactions.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/seattle-...

My child's school was online-only instruction from March to June, and reopened in September 2020 for in-person instruction. They did not miss one day of instruction. No idea what you're talking about.

A lot of schools remained remote in fall 2020 - depended on the school, and it's not exactly easy to switch between districts. Also, the quality of instruction in spring 2020 was absolutely affected as teachers adapted to remote and everyone dealt with the general chaos. Again could vary by school, but I think saying no instruction was missed is naive. "Days in class" is a horrible metric for learning, and there absolutely were classrooms where quality of learning degraded.

It was a shitty situation all around, and I'm definitely not arguing that schools should have remained open that spring. But it's silly to pretend that education was not affected across the country by the switch to remote.

OP said "shutting schools down for a couple years". That did not happen in the US.

> The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives and prevent disability through long covid absolutely staggers the mind and erodes my faith in humanity.

Or you could reasonably conclude that the policies enacted during COVID are yet another example of how we prioritize the elderly over children in the United States, arguably because children don't vote and the elderly do.

We sacrificed the educational, emotional, and psychological development of children during the pandemic to help 90 year olds live to 91. Was this the right thing to do? I don't believe there's a clear answer to that - it's a tradeoff and one that many people felt was not worth it. That doesn't make them bad or selfish, they're just on the opposite side of very difficult question with no clear answer.

The 140k children who lost a parent or caregiver to COVID [1] would probably disagree with your statement. Losing your parents is also not great for emotional wellbeing or development.

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/more-140000-us...

>Overall, the study shows that approximately 1 out of 500 children in the United States has experienced COVID-19-associated orphanhood or death of a grandparent caregiver.

What about the other 499 children who missed 2+ years of in-person classes?

they'll make it up. nothing is going to magically bring a dead parent back.

>they'll make it up

That remains to be seen. The 2022 PISA tests suggests that in developed countries, children have missed on the equivalent of 0.5-0.75 of a year's worth of learning.

[1] https://www.economist.com/international/2023/12/05/the-pande...

> nothing is going to magically bring a dead parent back.

nothing is going to magically bring back those years either, for all 500 students.

This happened everywhere, including in the places that only shut down in-person schooling for March 2020-May 2020, and opened up again in August 2020.

Maybe the effect of going through a pandemic was a stressful event harmful to school performance, independent of whether your schooling was in-person or remote?

From the article linked above:

>Education ministries the world over will envy the handful of rich places that have a cheery story to tell amid the gloom. In Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, test scores not only held steady over the pandemic period, they actually ticked up in at least one of the three subjects in which pupils sat exams. Israel and Switzerland are among other countries that appear, at least as judged from these data, to have done reasonably well.

>Some of these outliers protected learning by keeping school closures short. Across the OECD’s dataset there is a modest association between the length of time schools stayed closed and children’s subsequent performance in tests. Teachers in Switzerland ran fully remote or hybrid timetables for only six weeks (the average among countries in Europe was around 29). Closures in Japan were also comparatively zippy: in 2020 schools in that country shortened their summer breaks in order to claw back some of the class hours that children had lost up to then. Singapore, likewise, decided to alter school holidays to maximise learning time.

They didn't loose those years. How do you even know it wasn't better for some at home than it was in school? Aren't you learning your whole life? Do you use everything you learned in school?

>They didn't loose those years. How do you even know it wasn't better for some at home than it was in school?

But did lose those years of in-class instruction, as the PISA tests have shown, post pandemic scores were down from historical trends. The article says that there was a correlation between lockdown intensity and/or catch-up school days and test performance, so I think it's fairly reasonable to conclude that lockdowns did cause a loss of learning.

>Aren't you learning your whole life?

You can also make money your whole life, but that doesn't mean it's totally fine to steal a year's worth of salary from you.

>Do you use everything you learned in school?

And did the pandemic related lockdowns conveniently only caused students to miss the knowledge that they didn't need?

Nobody stole anything from them, they were still learning. They maybe even learned something they otherwise wouldn't in school. Maybe some kids got a break from their bullies. Some spent more time with other grown ups or some spent it more outside. PISA tests are really not a measure of any kind of success in life.

I asked my two kids and they would rather have their parents.

Ah yes, kids who famously care about their educational attainment and are experts on education related policies and outcomes.

Why would that even be a problem?

It wasn't just the elderly. Pretty much anyone over 50 was at higher risk.

I'll point out again, covid killed over 1 million people in the US alone. That doesn't even account for the ~ 10% of infected who got stuck with the lingering effects of long covid.

Yeah, we asked kids to attend school remotely from home. Some didn't have parents that kept them on task, and suffered. The pandemic was hard on everyone, but even in places that didn't lock down, loved ones getting sick and dying takes a toil. I felt like I was rolling the dice every time I visited my grandmother.

My child's classmate has a mother who has only one lung, and that one lung is barely functional. If she catches COVID, she will certainly be in the ICU. As a class, we all worried about her mother during the entire pandemic.

So maybe students in that situation can do remote education and then everyone else does normal, more effective, in-person education?

So we should paralyze a generation? You work to keep the mother safe. You don't sacrifice the well-being of children and whoever else at the altar of her well-being.

The same goes for the elderly. You don't lock down the world to keep them safe (which in NY was a disaster under Cuomo anyway). You take measures to secure their well-being without paralyzing everyone else. And FWIW, there are plenty in that age group who would rather risk COVID to see their grandchildren than live out their remaining years in isolation.

If anything is irrational, it's the ridiculous priorities that were imposed by the lockdown.

>>So we should paralyze a generation?

A generation was paralyzed because it had 1 year remote school instead of in person? Kids are just fine. I think they rather got a much more valuable lesson on how to act in a crisis.

I don't believe that COVID "paralyzed" a generation. The acute non-vaccine phase in the US was what - 18 months tops? Hyperbole does not help.

People still got paid. Business got done. My kid learned. People got married. People got divorced. Children were born, people died. No evidence of a "paralyzed generation".

My youngest kid has incredibly strong math and verbal skills compared to my older kid, and I suspect that's because the youngest sat and listened to the online instruction along with his sibling.

Absolving all culpability and foisting it on "the government" or "shutdowns" is just as weak as using hyperbole to make misleading claims about how a generation was "paralyzed". Difficult to get shit done? Sure. Not paralyzed.

I think you're letting a bit of emotion get in the way of logic, take a step back and just breath for a second.

Given the information we had at the time, and how violent the virus was ripping through communities it was the best, worst choice we had at the time. Sure it meant you didn't get to go to your social functions or parties you craved, but we kept the curve down and allowed medical facilities and practitioners brace for the infection wave.

It wasn't irrational at all, and if you found wearing a mask a "ridiculous priority" you were part of the problem. Sometimes someone higher up than you needs to impose a restriction or law to protect others.

> Sure it meant you didn't get to go to your social functions or parties you craved

I have to say this is ridiculously callous. My grandmother cried every day until she passed. I would like to see an investigation into pandemic preparedness. I don’t think we have been getting our money’s worth.

I don't generally agree with parent's needless reduction to 'protect 90 years old to get to 91', but can't we agree that whole schooling from home was pretty badly mishandled literally everywhere?

Not sure how we can isolate and measure just school-from-home effect on kids across age groups, various places etc. but I strongly believe there was some harm and it was not tiny. How much, and if not temporary again I can't say (but maybe some huge long term stats on things like grades, counseling frequency, suicides, BMI etc. can, but who knows if they won't show just 2nd order effect of parents suffering too).

> Was this the right thing to do? I don't believe there's a clear answer to that

I'm not sure how you reconcile your claim that you don't believe there's a clear answer to whether it was wright with the emotion-laden and leading statement you made just before.

Everyone suffered during the pandemic. There was no way to spare anyone, it was a traumatic experience for everyone. Having a dead grandmother and grandfather would be much more impactful on their life than the school they missed.

> Having a dead grandmother and grandfather would be much more impactful on their life than the school they missed.

I'm not really too sure about that.

> I'm not sure how you reconcile your claim that you don't believe there's a clear answer to whether it was wright with the emotion-laden and leading statement you made just before.

The parent commenter stated that the way we handled COVID made them lose their faith in humanity. I was pointing out that there were a series of choices to make, none of them good, but just because someone wanted to make a different tradeoff does not ipso facto make them a bad or uncaring person.

Was I snarkier than I should have been, sure. That was immature of me.

I'd add that there were a variety of different approaches in different countries and regions and, unless I've missed something, there's no smoking gun that "WOW This approach vastly slashed deaths vs. that approach." You can make arguments that this similar country did a bit better than that similar country but did anyone (with reliable data) really come out as having clearly found the magic formula?

I feel like anyone who feels the way the above poster does hasn't experienced having a kid in school and the way infections spread through those populations. Especially with young kids who still do things like thumb sucking. My child has been home sick from school four separate times since September, the amount of colds children get from being exposed to each other's germs is absolutely staggering.

For all the problems of kids staying home, I'd much rather stay home from school and learn online by being healthy than get COVID and stay home from school without learning anything at all. Especially when you consider the 10% of cases that have long term consequences. We saw a few examples of university age athletes giving up their athletic careers because of potentially permanently reduced lung capacity caused by long COVID so it's not just the older generation that has consequences.

I don't feel it's a fair characterization of these methods to say that the main benefit was getting 90 year olds to live to 91. I think the main benefit was slowing down the spread enough that hospitals weren't badly over capacity so that people who needed emergency care mostly could get it. Letting COVID spread like wildfire through the population would result in more people needing emergency care than we had resources for.

> For all the problems of kids staying home, I'd much rather stay home from school and learn online

Supervised by who, though?

Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you about the risks. But those of us that were working remotely from our office jobs while our kids stayed at home had enormous privilege over the people who still had to go to their jobs in person. Like all the cheering we did for first responders: first responder parents? Oh, well they’re screwed.

IMO we should have prioritized (in the areas where it’s climate appropriate) outdoor schooling. I’m sure there would have been a steep learning curve but it would have been possible, a lot of schools have plenty of outdoor space available.

>My child has been home sick from school four separate times since September, the amount of colds children get from being exposed to each other's germs is absolutely staggering.

That's just a normal part of being a child in in-person school, temporarily made somewhat worse by lack of in-person schooling for 1, sometimes 2 years.

>I'd much rather stay home from school and learn online by being healthy than get COVID and stay home from school without learning anything at all.

All dependent on timescales. I'd rather my child get COVID or any other respiratory virus and stay home from school without learning anything at all for a week max, than keep them home from school for months on end. Even though it wasn't too bad for me as a parent to have my kid home, I'm also part of the laptop class.

>We saw a few examples of university age athletes giving up their athletic careers because of potentially permanently reduced lung capacity caused by long COVID so it's not just the older generation that has consequences.

Yes, we saw a few examples. We didn't see those few examples pre-COVID when it came to bad flu complications because it wasn't click-worthy so no one bothered to write the article. This isn't to say long COVID or COVID complications in under-50s isn't a problem, just trying to put context into the equation.

>I don't feel it's a fair characterization of these methods to say that the main benefit was getting 90 year olds to live to 91.

It's about as simplistic and dismissive as "pfft kids will be fine without in-person school, they're so resilient". Which I've heard far too many times.

>another example of how we prioritize the elderly over children in the United States, arguably because children don't vote and the elderly do.

Or arguably because death is final, death came for the elderly more than the children with this disease, and we were trying to save lives.

We can debate the philosophy of saving people near end of life vs. allowing children to continue with close-contact education. But it's revolting that the first place your mind went was "save the vote".

Hell, old people who vote lean Republican, so if you're going to play a shrewd voting population game with a pandemic, wouldn't it have been in the interests of the "pro-isolation" coalition to let it run amok?

---

One final note, moving away from your premise: The reason we needed to lock down besides saving lives from COVID directly was that our hospitals and funeral homes couldn't handle the burden. You can't treat people with heart attacks and broken bones if the ICU is filled with people dying of influenza-class viruses.

Maybe if our healthcare system can keep up with a disease's infection rate, we let society chug on - as we have each year when preventable, transmissible diseases kill tens of thousands of people per year.

> Or arguably because death is final, death came for the elderly more than the children with this disease

Death always comes for the elderly though. The metric of "years of high quality life saved" is important to apply here.

I was all for the shutdowns starting in March 2020, and was arguing in favor of it, but it then went on for way too long. NYC schools remained closed until fall 2021, and even then they kept shutting down individually for awhile afterwards as part of the COVID protocol. In hindsight it went on for way too long.

> covid spread through kids like wildfire, often via asymptomatic infections which then spread to, and killed, elderly who just wanted to see their grandkids.

If only there was a way we could stop the elderly from contracting covid from their grandkids that didn't involve isolating children from social interaction and learning at the most crucial periods of their development.

I have an idea, maybe the people most at risk of dying can isolate themselves so everyone else doesn't have to.

Well, it would be great if that worked but in general people with this oppinion seemed to be fine to sacrifice (as in let die) anyone with a higher risk rather than contribute with money to allow this isolation.

Your comment is a blatant strawman.

I had a much longer comment written but I really don't want to relitigate covid for the umpteenth time.

There are at least hundreds of thousands of teachers in high-risk age groups. I can't imagine any solutions to this logistical problem that wouldn't also significantly affect learning outcomes.

> I can't imagine any solutions to this logistical problem that wouldn't also significantly affect learning outcomes.

Okay, what's the least harmful? It seems obvious to me the easiest solution (blanket ban of in person schooling) was chosen rather than trying to minimize harm.

Just off the cuff, regarding high risk teachers, why not have _them_ work remote with an in class, lower risk, TA to handle the physical interaction required?

I can't say I have all of the solutions or even a good suggestion but I can say that, after the initial closing of schools when there was very little information, once the risk factors became much more apparent, there was a minimal amount of rethinking of policy because everyone had already taken ideological stances when there was only ideology to make decisions with. That extends well beyonds schools as well but schools and retirement homes are essentially the opposite ends of the spectrum of risk and seemed to, at best, have the same solutions applied to them.

On the other hand, there's a deep learning deficit that that generation will never recover from. That has costs too, and people trapped in a bad economic situation because of shitty schooling have reduced lifespans as well.

I agree that longterm closure of schools was a bad move and created many problems. However, I do think to be fair we need to look at some of the other issues at play regarding education. The system was barely working to begin with. It seems that countries with better school systems (or educational cultures), or just individual schools/districts here faired much better. The broken system can't play catchup if it was struggling to meet the basic education to begin with.

There's always a strong tension between the two points:

1) School closures were good, kids weren't harmed at all and it saved lives!

2) Schools provide the basis for future success and are critical to our social and economic well-being!

My stance is that, as mediocre as many public schools are, they provide a better environment for learning than home life for the majority of children. We should be moving toward making public schools great. (I'd be the first to agree that a broken system makes that a very difficult task.)

There's really no evidence public schools are a better learning environment than homeschooling, in fact there's evidence to the contrary.

Even when you include the extreme fringes of homeschooled children such as religious fundamentalists and unschooling, homeschooled students perform better on average.

This is probably because many-to-one learning is MUCH less effective than one-to-one learning, even with a massive difference in skill. Individualized learning is far better. Schools are the opposite of individualized.

The kids who have the lowest chances of success in school are those without a supportive home life.

In other words, forcing kids to school at home was the most in-equitable policy in our generation, if not many.

Even things like "has a stable Internet connection" is not a given.

I agree. And many of the well off families switched their kids to private schools that were in-person or hired tutors.

> covid spread through kids like wildfire, often via asymptomatic infections which then spread to, and killed, elderly who just wanted to see their grandkids.

Was someone forcing the grandparents to visit their infected grandchildren? In my own case, I didn't see my own grandmother for two years during COVID other than via Zoom/FaceTime. She has a history of bad lung infections, so none of us wanted to get her sick. This was despite her having four great-grandchildren and being a widow. When she finally got COVID this year for the first time, she developed some blood clots, but was able to pull through and now is back to great health.

I think the damage to children who were isolated from one another was much worse, and unlike the elderly, they couldn't really understand why we lived so unnaturally. If elderly people wanted to "just see their grandkids," they knew the risks and made a choice. Every death is sad, but I have a hard time thinking we should adopt harsh and even draconian measures just to protect those who ought to know better.

> In my own case, I didn't see my own grandmother for two years during COVID other than via Zoom/FaceTime. She has a history of bad lung infections, so none of us wanted to get her sick.

Absolutely! I was already under personal quarantine of sorts before the pandemic even started, because I had immune compromised people under my care. I would bever expect society to turn itself upside down to accommodate my particular situation.

What is the point of society if not to protect its weakest?

It's funny to see these bickerings still happening.

It was a no-win situation. Trying to save lives inflicted measurable harm. Doing nothing would also inflict measurable harm. Either side presenting their position as the "correct" position is just biased.

I would also assert that tying your faith in humanity to an unwinnable situation is probably not the correct move, but YMMV.

Perhaps the problem they have is that one was not allowed to choose which measurable harm was acceptable to themselves in the no-win situation.

That doesn't work in a lot of cases though. It's the RTO/WFH struggle. If teachers decide they don't want to be in a classroom, sending your kid in isn't very practical. Or is it only parents who get a choice?

Ideally you would reshuffle - people who lost jobs in some areas and were qualified to be teachers could teach in person; teachers could take remote teaching jobs for the kids that wanted/needed a cyber school. Nothing is perfect, but some choice is better than none.

At least RTO and WFH companies can co-exist though, and there are hybrid models as well. With school parents are stuck with what their specific district wants to do, and the number of hours and days spent in school is extremely rigid. For the academic year that started in fall 2020, it's not inherently impractical that the two options could have co-existed for both teachers and parents. But obviously it was unrealistic given the state of the school system already pre-COVID.

I think the broader issue with this sort of choice in a pandemic is it does have downstream effects. People going to school everyday could cause an uptick in community cases that then makes necessary trips like the grocery store more dangerous for those who do want to isolate as much as possible. Especially relevant in a city where many people are living together in apartment complexes.

So I agree there's no clear answer here, and I think pre-vaccine I would've kept my kids home regardless. But more generally I am very dissatisfied with how homogeneous and inflexible the school system is, and that is something we should push for change in. Funnily enough, my district has done a full 180 since COVID and this past year stopped accepting doctor's notes to excuse absences! They are quite literally encouraging people to send their kids in even while sick. A friend's son has mono right now and the HS is threatening to hold him back over absences (grades are fine still because ofc that matters less than attendance record.

"They are quite literally encouraging people to send their kids in even while sick. A friend's son has mono right now and the HS is threatening to hold him back over absences"

Maybe complain to the state departments of education and health. Many states have laws on what constitutes an excused absence and procedures around communicable diseases. Many times the local people in power don't know or would rather do whatever they think is best until the state steps in.

Unfortunately telling hundreds of millions of people to figure it out for themselves is basically the same as doing nothing.

I don't know. It seems the media coverage (sometimes bordering on fear mongering) had most people wearing masks, using hand sanitizer, etc. Enforcement of policies like masking were not widespread in most places, yet most people obeyed because of what they saw on the news. This is the method the government relies on for all forms of emergency preparedness - they present documents/resources for people to use, then in times of emergency the media diseminates them to the public. This generally works fine for stuff like storms, escaped convicts, etc.

"The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives"

Did it actually significsntly save lives or prevent long covid? I'm wondering if any countries didn't shut schools that we could compare to?

I would guess maybe in the initial wave by not overwhelming hospitals it would save a few lives. But when the policies were continually extended thier return on investment dropped as the harms they inflicted increased and the value they provided decreased. Perhaps a better approach would have been to tell the at-risk populations about the risks and mitigations to let them decide what level of protection they wanted for themselves (not talking about others since the whole masking thing turned out to be effectively useless without at least N95s).

My main point is that I know we could save tons of lives by banning cars (not just traffic fatalies but forcing people to walk could prevent many chronic issues), but that doesn't mean the cost/benefit is justified by ignoring the downsides, forcing large opposing population segments into it, and merely stating it was to save lives.

It's worth bearing in mind that the people making these policy decisions in 2020 were doing so without any objective knowledge of how the pandemic would actually end up playing out.

Car safety is somewhat different. While the harms of a car-dependent society are subjectively hard to come to terms with, especially for those who have grown accustom to it, it's a lot easier to objectively measure and predict.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Even in 2020, they knew that the fatality rate was very low for most of the population and was only an issue for the elderly and those with specific comorbidities. Many of the secondary and n-ary effects of either the pandemic or eliminating cars are unknown until they actually play out. There may be some projections, but those projections tend to change. For example, maybe electric scooter become a huge problem because people refuse to walk after cars are banned (negating the potential exercise related benefits).

My observation/experience was that we had lots of younger people in lockdown in (expensive) cramped studio apartments in big cities for two years while their boomer parents living in the suburbs more or less went about life as normal all while watching the value of their homes and investments skyrocket as trillions of dollars of additional wealth was transfer to them. At least in my circle of friends this was near universally the case.

Overall the entire situation was completely ridiculous on many levels, but it was the pro-lockdown forever crowd that made me lose my faith in humanity.

How many kids not learning to read is an elderly life worth? Kids not eating? Child abuse going unreported and unchecked?

How many years of learning loss is “just wanting to see grandkids” worth?

And when did the benefits of closing school stop being worthwhile-how many years after the vaccine was widely available? Because the ongoing disruptions to education were measured in years- all while grandma and grandpa were living it up at bars and restaurants.

Are you factoring in the many other ways that children and families could be kept safe (masking, air filtration, UV sanitizing, outdoor classrooms+heaters, etc)?

The pushback on school closures isn’t because people hate grandma, it’s because some people are capable of a cost-benefit analysis and looking at second order effects when we do so. “Hurt millions of kids to spare thousands of grandmas” folks made me lose my faith in humanity.

>>How many kids not learning to read is an elderly life worth? Kids not eating? Child abuse going unreported and unchecked?

>>How many years of learning loss is “just wanting to see grandkids” worth?

Luckily this wasn't the problem, because kids were still learning, maybe at little slower pace, but on the other hand got to learn a lot of things they otherwise wouldn't get to learn in school. Do you use all the knowledge you learned in school? Have you not learned anything new since then?

That assumption obviously has an availability heuristic bias / selection criteria bias, like speeding down a road is safe because you haven’t died yet.

NYC no doubt has a lot of things going for it, I think being the financial center for the hegemony is the deciding factor. In my view survival of NYC probably has less to do with local crime than the outcome of future wars.

Detroit was the center of manufacturing for "the hegemony," which is currently in the process of losing its control of the financial markets, just like they did in manufacturing.

Unlike Detroit, NYC has a very diversified economy. In addition to being the primary finance capital it is a major international player in media, art, fashion, tech, and more. NYC is simply not utterly dependent on finance in the way Detroit was on manufacturing- or SF is on tech, for a modern example.

I think that’s what has made it, and the other global cities like it, so extremely resilient over a long period of time. That and financial services being, thus far, an evergreen industry.

Finance is pretty meta itself, which is probably a contributing factor to NYC having such a diversified economy. Like an automotive company might still want a business-focused office in NYC, but a non-automotive company doesn't have much reason to open an office in the auto manufacturing capital.

So was manufacturing. I will say that Detroit was probably over-indexed on auto workers more than other kinds of manufacturing.

Not sure "we" is, but I think the people who have had to uproot their entire lives because of poor leadership, would rather the poor leadership leave.

I agree that the midsized, and even small cities are important. I think there are some real problems associated with the centralization of populations in large cities. We have tons of dying cities in former manufacturing regions that could be utilized instead of having population/density fights in the more popular locations. The main problem is the vicious cycle that causes the loss of job and the loss of amenities, which decreases the attraction. Instead we get into an infinite desire/density loop because that's where the jobs are. Having more options for cities to move to would provide better population distribution and alleviate many density or flux related issues.

> Cities are amazingly resilient...

I concur. Some cities that have outlived their empires -- Rome, Istanbul (Constantinople), London, Baghdad, Alexandria, Cairo, Kabul, Mumbai.

Even NYC, Boston, Philly predate the US constitution.

> The benefit to our mid size cities is great

This is a great point! I like the fact that the US is more decentralized and isn't dominated by a single large city. Germany is similar in this regard. I understand the appeal of NYC, especially to the young, but if other cities reap the rewards of increased inward migration, then I think it's a positive thing for the country overall. People too might realize they can have a better quality of life without the insane competition for resources.

> Seems most large metros are going through some post-COVID pains

I don't know about the US, but here in Canada the 2016 census was already showing meaningful decline in communities with >100,000 people, with communities of 1,000-29,999 people picking up most of the slack. COVID may have accelerated things, but signs of a 'counterubranization' movement were already presenting itself long before we ever heard of COVID.

Also, that national network for travel needs to include a much higher percentage spent on intercity/regional rail than we currently do.

Detroit?

Another good example of resilience.

Bound to return to its peak population of 1.85 million any day now... Cities always come back, something, something.

Rome hasn’t been the seat of empire for over a thousand years but it’s a rather nice place to live in today.

Detroit won’t return to the way it used to be, but it will regain its footing in its own way over time.

Covid maybe in part but it’s mainly because of the demands that enforcing laws must stop by activists and certain political organizations. So crime is up and the city looks shabby and there’s drugged out zombies and homeless everywhere. So people leave.

It’s what happened in the 1960/70’s - lots of political changes made cities hospitable to crime and people left. As cities managed to become nice again, people moved back and tax revenues rose.

NYC needs another Bloomberg that’s willing to cleanup the streets and keep them nice and to stop pandering to the worst aspects of society. To put the fringe idea weirdos back on the fringe where they are better complaining about things than actually getting things done.

Which specific laws are not being enforced and which specific political organizations caused this?

Sure if you could clarify specifically what you mean.

I generally agree with this sentiment.

However, unlike the situation in the 1980's, there's no desire to address any of their problems because it undermines so many ideological premises the residents cling to. Coupled with the most morally narcissistic people on the face of the Earth, I don't see any turnaround.

The mechanisms necessary to avoid becoming Detroit are not there

I think most of the "post-COVID" pains are actually much worse because they come from culture and macro-economic consequences, aka "chickens come home to roost".

There seems to be general feeling that stealing stuff and robing people are only bad if you get caught and even when you get caught the are little to no consequences. Forgetting the politicization of this for a while, this type of stuff is one of the worse cancers for society, even if "nobody says nothing", they know and think and they will vote with their feet. Detroit type situations are not really that far for some cities. I don't think this applies to NYC but I wouldn't bet my life on it.

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