Kids mostly forgot and adapted back. It is adult, mostly men, who just cant get over fear of vaccines, injury of having to do something a little uncomfortable for someone else.
But I can tell you that our collective sense of (unusually strong) community has taken six years since the first lockdown (four and a half years since the end of mask restrictions) to truly return to what it was before.
So even in this quite cushioned place I think we didn't really return to a sense of proper ordinary community positivity for quite a long time (it helps that we had a pretty great summer). Last summer things still felt very disjointed.
Kids, young adults, I can assure you, resent what happened and how poorly we managed it.
In other towns where community was weak, a lot of damage has been done, and you can see that in how little collective spirit there is in dealing with new challenges. Even around where I live, things like reduced footfall and contribution shortages in community services have been used as a pretext to cut them entirely. We have done damage to young people by simply deleting community things we benefited from that they no longer will.
But the resentment isn’t towards the handling, it’s towards the reality. It sucks covid happened and it shouldn’t have. But there’s nothing that could have been done to save their youth; it was already ruined for those years.
I mean, if the lockdown didn’t happen and instead a few million more people died, would they have preferred that? I doubt it, especially considering such a situation would inevitably result in even stricter restrictions going forward. After all, lockdown was a reaction. If you make the thing it’s reacting to even bigger, even more of a problem, then… well… the reaction will be more extreme.
Oooooh yes it is. They are so mad at how badly we handled it. And they are right to be.
> I mean, if the lockdown didn’t happen
That isn't their complaint. Their complaint is not the first one (except that in our case in the UK it was idiotically weeks late and major sporting events happened; the older ones understand how stupid that was). It's the fact that we subsequently undermined it, and then did it again. And again. And again.
Kids are not angry that there was a lockdown; they understand the science of it (in many cases better than adults) because it was a pretty rich topic of conversation in their tedious remote lessons.
They are angry that we fucked up the first lockdown (rolling it out too late after demonstrably obviously bad decisions like letting major sporting events continue, followed by utterly stupid measures that undermined it after it was lifted). They understand there had to be another winter lockdown; they thought we undermined that by having stupid, arbitrary "zones" when another national lockdown would have been safer.
The older ones also IMO pretty correctly feel resentful being stuck individually in their expensive rooms at universities when they are not a high risk population and could at least have been quarantined collectively or just provided distance learning without wasting massive amounts of money on accommodation.
Believe me when I say, young people have absolutely got the receipts. They know what happened, why it happened, and who fucked up.
That’s basically all the elderly or an entire cohort, I’m really struggling to believe that.
The point is: if the lockdown didn’t happen, would the outcome be better? Remember, it’s not like Covid would go away. It’s not like we get teleported to an alternate dimension in which everything is okay.
Lockdown was a reaction.
I think people would like for Covid to have never happened, and they think that if lockdown didn’t happen then it would be just like before Covid. No, it wouldn’t be, it would still be a new world. That much was inevitable.
I'm not in a position of power to make the calls as if something like this was to happen again, I'd only caution we look the prior experience to be a guide for what comes instead of pretending outbreaks haven't happened before.
If you look at the "deaths by covid" graphs for 2020 and 2021, Australia barely rates a blip. Meanwhile, the US has 850 000 deaths in those first two years.
For years now, kids go to school as before, they go to do sports as before and those whose parents dont allow unlimited gaming meet each other in person.
> In other towns where community was weak, [...] things like reduced footfall and contribution shortages in community services have been used as a pretext to cut them entirely
That has nothing to do with covid or covid handling. This is about your community not wanting to pay community services regardless of covid.
Isn’t that exactly what I said? I mean, who else would it be on?
> That has nothing to do with covid or covid handling. This is about your community not wanting to pay community services regardless of covid.
No, it’s the result of cynical regional government exploiting how long communities took to bounce back from a series of mismanaged lockdowns to claw back some money. But that is not the point. The point is it is another reason young people resent how adults handled COVID and direct consequences. These systems needed time to recover footfall. Instead adults fucked it up gor kids.
My child had two intelligent and supportive parents, including a stay-at-home mother, and it was still rough. Many of her classmates just flat-out lost a year of education. There's still obvious effects on her cohort years later.
The communities that did exist were always running on fumes, basically only existing due to inertia. When the inertia was cut, even if only for a couple weeks in some places, they were done. That’s it.
The social damage has been here, and we’ve been zombie-ing our way through it. Covid just let the undead stay dead, and turns out we can’t revive it.
We had concerted anti-vaccine campaign. Literally trying to make you feel afraid of vaccines or feel sorry for kids that might get them. And yes, it was fear spread by men who fancy themselves manly men.
> The lack of human communication being the new normal, cut friendships and shattered communities are the real killer here.
I am particularly salty about this one. Because the exact same ideological and political groups who are throwing complete temper tamptrum over lockdown are the ones who want women to be stay at home moms. I did not, lockdowns were easier, you had a lot more communication and everybody was in the same position so you could realate.
Lockdowns were an easy mode compare to the thing they want force women into.