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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/more-140000-us...
What about the other 499 children who missed 2+ years of in-person classes?
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.
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?
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'm not really too sure about that.
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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
massive? lol. It was like an additional $300 a month.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
Opposite for me. Maybe people still care about freedom and agency after all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/seattle-...
Read what you just wrote and ponder on it for a bit.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/test-scores-show-how-...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
Rising a child is incredible difficult nowadays, and government shouldn't close schools and daycare.
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.
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.
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.
I had a much longer comment written but I really don't want to relitigate covid for the umpteenth time.