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As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

reuters.com

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Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#131

Post by croes »

anoncake wrote: post #117
croes wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you get depressed if you are isolated and you get depressed if you have to fear to get infected. There is no undepressing way to handle the pandemic, only ways with less infections and deaths.

Our species has evolved to deal with deaths. Social isolation goes against human nature, it's a lot more harmful than any pandemic.

Single deaths not mass deaths. And it's social distancing not isolation. The whole lockdown nobody I know was isolated even if in quarantine.

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#132

Post by thaumaturgy »

inglor_cz wrote: post #12

I am neither in the U.S. nor a student, not even an extrovert - and I still feel the effects of our local lockdown on my mental stability. So does my wife, who is usually more resilient than I am. This will have a lot of subtle consequences down the line.

Speaking for myself: the biggest consequence for me, in terms of mental health, has been the total erosion of my belief that most people were basically good, and decent, and cared about the welfare of others. It was a choice I made years ago; I wanted to be the sort of person that believed those things, even when there was occasional evidence to the contrary.

But 2020 brought a trifecta of social stress that laid bare some festering social diseases. Both national and global politics, the response to Black Lives Matter, and the pandemic, all in the same year.

I don't know quite how to describe it. It's the loss of an ideal? I don't know. But, I feel it, viscerally. Whereas depression is more of an internally-focused feeling, this is externally-focused.

In the before times, I loved road trips, especially through smaller towns. It was a part of my identity. I've traveled through most of what's west of the Mississippi. I always knew that I had political differences with many of the people in the places I visited, but it rarely mattered. It wouldn't come up in casual conversation. Everyone was friendly. I won't ever be able to see people in those places the same way again.

I happily spent money in small towns as I went. Gas, food, lodging, services, the occasional trinket. I can't do that anymore, either.

I've been fortunate throughout the last 12 months in a lot of ways, and it's still left a big long-term impact on me.

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#133

Post by Robotbeat »

croes wrote: post #88
ohgodplsno wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, for context, France tried that. Badly, like the rest of our handling of Covid, but we did close restaurants, bars, and everything else, keeping schools open. Not really for the well being of the children, but rather that their parents could not work if they had to handle children. Depressions are still through the roof, grades are low.

Because you get depressed if you are isolated and you get depressed if you have to fear to get infected. There is no undepressing way to handle the pandemic, only ways with less infections and deaths.

The way to solve it was to accelerate vaccines even more than we did. A couple trillion dollars to accelerate vaccine production and rollout (and approval) to cut 6 months off the pandemic. Avoided the big wave in December. We already did better than some feared with vaccine roll out, but we could have done even more.

Also, a harder (but shorter) shut down and a firmer masking requirement and really good test and trace and quarantine protocol were additional ways, but apparently not feasible due to having to heard so many cats. Vaccines were more under federal control and could have been accelerated.

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#134

Post by croes »

anoncake wrote: post #117
croes wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you get depressed if you are isolated and you get depressed if you have to fear to get infected. There is no undepressing way to handle the pandemic, only ways with less infections and deaths.

Our species has evolved to deal with deaths. Social isolation goes against human nature, it's a lot more harmful than any pandemic.

BTW it's not social but physical distancing. You can be as social as you want, just not so much physical contacts.

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#135

Post by _Microft »

adolph wrote: post #81
_Microft wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The length of lockdowns is the problem, here in Germany at least. An even harder lockdown limited in length would have most likely achieved better control of the pandemic than the on-going half-measures and we would have been out of it earlier as well.

The interdependence of humans means that no lockdown could be hard or long enough and the independence of humans means that nobody would actually live under such a hypothetical regime anyway (starting at the top especially). As it stands the worst of both worlds was erected, a lockdown too soft to effectively “eradicate” the virus and too hard to prevent the economic and psychological ills that have predictably prese…

We do not talk eradication here.

It already worked fine during the first lockdown last year. At the end we were down to numbers at which tracing contacts and quarantining them worked quite fine for a while. This would have been an acceptable level where people would have been able to do quite a lot of things but not everything. A lot of people overdid it though. Parties, weddings, ... if nothing had ever happened. Unfortunately the response was slow and weak. Now we still deal with the consequences.

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#136

Post by 13415 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #123
Griffinsauce wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"think of the children" is only about keeping them free from sin, not actually educating them because well educated children are likely to become atheist adults. Getting money out of politics and the church out of education are the two most effective things we can do to advance our civilization.

How is any of that relevant to a pandemic and isolation?

The way I understand it, GP's thesis was that "think of the children" has always been mostly just a slogan for Christian moralists to prevent "sin" and hasn't involved really thinking about what's best for the children, so there is no contradiction now with this slogan and not caring about the children much during the pandemic, as the OP suggested.

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#137

Post by monocasa »

nradov wrote: post #129
monocasa wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would use many phrases to describe Florida's covid response, but "perfectly ok" would not be one of them.

A better description of Florida would be "perfectly average". In deaths per capita they are right in the middle of US states. Obviously Florida could have done better, but many other states have done far worse. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

The ones above Florida are either the dense area of the NY extended metro that got hit early and had trouble getting it back under control, or states ideologically aligned with Florida.

Just because they're in the middle doesn't make it a good response.

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#138

Post by lupire »

koolba wrote: post #109
croes wrote: post #77

What would it have been like if the schools had not been closed? If millions had been infected in a short time and the hospitals had been overloaded so that in addition to the deaths from Corona, the deaths from lack of capacity would have been added? How traumatic would that be for the children? Are there any studies on this from New York or Italy? Can the consequences of the lockdown be so cleanly separated from th…

Likely nothing. Look at Florida for a decent example of what’d happen at scale if we left schools open. It’s been fully open, 5 days a week in person, since the start of the most recent school year last September. The state as a whole has done better at dealing with the virus than other similar sized large states. It also has a wide range from dense urban to light rural populations. It’s not that you don’t have any m…

Why are you making absurd claims like " fully open, 5 days a week in person, since the start of the most recent school year last September", that trivial to refute with a simple web search?

https://www.browardschools.com/backtoschool

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#139

Post by sokoloff »

monocasa wrote: post #30
cassalian wrote: post #9

Anyone else find it strange that a country that has often fallen in line with "think of the children" arguments for hypothetical dangers appears to be completely uncaring about very real dangers of social isolation that are impacting our youth?

They were balancing it against what they saw in Italy: allowing the virus to get out of hand and overwhelm the hospital system and your death rate from covid jumps into the double digits. Kids would be pretty depressed being surrounded by a 8 digit body count in the US too.

It’s not even clear that the hospitalization rate for COVID cases is over 10%, let alone the case-fatality-rate. In fact, it’s pretty clear that it’s not.

Re: As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds

#140

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

_Microft wrote: post #48
matz1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it obvious? The lockdown harm the children.

The length of lockdowns is the problem, here in Germany at least. An even harder lockdown limited in length would have most likely achieved better control of the pandemic than the on-going half-measures and we would have been out of it earlier as well.

The problem with a harder lockdown limited in length is that Germany is a member of Schengen, so even if Germany largely eradicated COVID within its borders, it could then be reimported from another EU country that hadn’t been as locked down.

You might advocate for Germany closing its borders earlier and for longer, and forcing police registration of fellow Europeans, but personally I think that is horrible. I see restrictions on free movement in Schengen and challenges to European integration as much more of a problem in the long term than COVID morbidity.

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