The Miscalculations of Covid School Closures | Hacker News Reader

The Miscalculations of Covid School Closures

newyorker.com

13 pointspseudolus19 comments

These discussions are important. It's okay for us, as a society, to make mistakes. Especially if the mistakes are made in an attempt to do "the right thing", whatever that is.

We can only make the decisions we make with the information we have available in the moment, but it is important, later, to be honest with ourselves about the outcomes of the decisions we made and try to learn from them to improve decision making next time.

We shouldn't need to be defensive about this or that, we should follow the data, wherever it leads.

If it turns out the risk from spreading COVID wasn't worth the social and economic damage of lockdowns, that's an important data point to consider when making these kinds of decisions again.

https://archive.ph/z0QR1

Speaking of retrospectives, it seems COVID-19 infection in kids increases their risk of kidney problems.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/research-links-covid-poo...

Not sure how this is relevant to an article about school closures, which were successful in preventing perhaps 0.00001% of children from eventually becoming infected with COVID.

Plus, repeat covid infections don't make things worse... right?

Oh, wait... repeat covid infections are much worse and even damage T cells similar to HIV.

Plus 1 in 5 covid infections result in long covid.

Your numbers and etiology are complete nonsense, and again I'm not sure how they're relevant to the question of school closures, unless you believe schools (and I would think, to be consistent, all of public life itself?) should be shut down indefinitely to prevent COVID infections?

> Your numbers and etiology are complete nonsense, and again I'm not sure how they're relevant to the question of school closures

Are you really this dense or do you just enjoy arguing about COVID? The school closures were in response to COVID, you suitcase.

Is it your belief that the school closures were successful in mitigating a significant portion of the (grossly exaggerated) harms being enumerated in this thread?

> something that is utterly absent from “An Abundance of Caution”—any palpable recognition of where all the caution was coming from.

This sums it up. No recognition of there being adults in schools, of there being adults in the homes these children come back to, of Sweden’s substantially higher excess deaths, or of the deaths happening at the same time as the school closures.

Sweden ranked second behind only Norway for lowest excess mortality among European Nations.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

Sweden's death are heavily front loaded though, 60% in the first year when Norway actually had negative excess deaths in that year.

So roughly 14,000 years of life saved in Norway, even if they ended up dying within 2 years anyway.

“Years of life saved” is the wrong metric - the one we need to optimize for is sum quality-of-life * years across the population.

We stole a few years of young people’s _highest_ quality of life, and in many cases saddled them with long term academic deficits, to save a few years of older people’s lowest quality of life. It’s a morally reprehensible decision when looked at from a high level.

My memories of school were of nothing special happening there. I wouldn't have missed anything if I'd needed to learn remotely. And that was an era before smartphones and social connection via multiplayer games and everyone (not just me) being terminally online.

As an adult, I even found my quality of life actually went up during the lockdowns.

We stole a few years

you from Australia? :) my kid’s school was closed for a quarter. and the rest of it is on parents, my kid actually progressed academically during covid and socialized with numerous other kids. was not ideal but also not some earth-shaddering thing if a kid had right parents

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