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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

#201

Post by jacob2484 »

redisman wrote: post #177
offby37years wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California COVID death rate: 0.146% Florida COVID death rate: 0.155% These numbers are statistically tied. Yet, FL's economy is open, kids are in school, Disney World entertaining tourists. CA's business are closed & kids are depressed and falling behind. (Bad) leadership matters.

Interesting claims. How do you know FL economy and kids depression is doing so much better than CA?

Unemployment rates for one. But now, numbers are skewed because we printed billions of dollars to bail out California.

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

#202

Post by jansan »

matz1 wrote: post #39
crummy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. We should have closed restaurants, bars, whatever so we could keep schools open.

No, we shouldn't have lockdown in the first place, keep everything open. Adopt measure that doesn't involve lockdown.

This is debatable, but it is common sense that it shoud have been the target. And for somne reason it wasn't.

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

#203

Post by Spooky23 »

monocasa wrote: post #83
nradov wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any proof that that would have increased depression rates in children relative to what we see today? And an 8 digit body count would be impossible in the US for a disease with a >99% survival rate. So quit the hyperbole.

What proof would you believe without empirically letting the death rate get into the double digits to begin with?

It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback when we’ve had a year of figuring out how to treat the disease and reduction in use of ventilators, which was killing people.

Last June, my aunt in nyc was stacking bodies like cordwood in the back of trailers. They weren’t all 90 year old diabetics with copd.

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

#204

Post by II2II »

I live in a part of North America that kept its schools open during most of the pandemic. Children are learning and playing together. The games they play are pretty much the games they would have played a bit over a year ago. The adults in their lives don't transfer the stress that they are feeling to children whenever two kids get the urge to hug each other. It is almost as though the pandemic does not exist.

For the most part, it does not exist in our small corner of the continent because adults behaved responsibly. This means that most of the measures we take happen behind the scenes: the children have a few more rules to comply with, adults calmly correct them when those rules are broken, and (most important) the focus is on teaching them good habits and sheltering them from the burden of the emotional stresses of this exceptional time.

If we have another outbreak, I am all for shutting down the schools as a part of a swift and hopefully short response. Just as keeping children home for months on end is not good for their mental health, exposing them to a twisted version of the classroom environment for an extended period of time is not good for their mental health.

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

#205

Post by sjg007 »

watwut wrote: post #180
afavour wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“think of the children” has always been a lie, though. Or at best a surface level truth. When the rubber hits the road (i.e. when it comes to spending money) the US as a country doesn’t care about things like early childhood education all that much. In many ways the pandemic response was in line with the norm: rich kids do just fine, poorer kids are mostly ignored.

I dont know, US seems to me to ve obsessed with early childhood education. The expectations on when the kid should read and what not seem to be pushes to very low ages.

In the US early childhood education programs describe services from birth to kindergarten such as preschool, preK and screening services for autism, learning disabilities etc...

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

#206

Post by matthewdgreen »

offby37years wrote: post #165
optimiz3 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID does worse in warmer climates; it would be useful to see data adjusted for factors such as ventilation, climate, baseline prevalence, viral variants, etc. No one AFAIK has attempted to do any of this work. All I've seen are unsubstantiated claims for each side's agenda. We need to know what hard conditions guarantee an R0 small enough to prevent disease transmission in schools. There has been zero leadership he…

California COVID death rate: 0.146% Florida COVID death rate: 0.155% These numbers are statistically tied. Yet, FL's economy is open, kids are in school, Disney World entertaining tourists. CA's business are closed & kids are depressed and falling behind. (Bad) leadership matters.

Florida is currently facing a $2-$3 billion tax shortfall (numbers vary depending on the time of projection [0]) and California is facing a budget surplus [1]. There are details around this like one-off capital gains and tax rates and budget cuts, but the overall story is that FL had a slightly higher death rate than CA in exchange for an overall economy that isn't doing so well. Some of this is due to the fact that FL's economy is tourism-driven and my personal response to that is: as a tourist I was very tempted to (safely) visit FL this winter, but the whole "our state doesn't believe in basic COVID restrictions" thing made that much too scary.

[0] https://www.wftv.com/news/local/facing-3-billion-shortfall-l...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/gavin-newsom-california-coronavir...

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

#207

Post by onethought »

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?

No weirder than “prolife” folks often intersecting heavily with “pro war” and “anti lockdown” folks.

US lives in a weird bubble where they ignore the very successful policies around the world and create these weird internal narratives that they all follow relatively blindly

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

jjcon wrote: post #173
thaumaturgy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bar…

Are things really that different than they were before though? I still chat with my neighbors, doctors etc etc... everyone is just as friendly as before. I think it’s just our main connection to the outside world has been doomscrolling... I don’t think the people in this world are that different. They are good, caring, loving... despite what some would have us believe.

[deleted]

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

#209

Post by lisper »

vagrantJin wrote: post #193
lisper wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's still not the right way to look at it. Calling it "ignorance" is unnecessarily pejorative. It's a difference in quality metric. Some people attach a lot of value to avoiding (what they believe to be) moral transgressions because they believe it imperils their soul in the afterlife or something like that. You may vehemently disagree with this goal, but if you accept that as a goal then this narrowly foc…

> but if you accept that as a goal then this narrowly focused "think of the children" actually makes logical sense because the afterlife lasts a lot longer than this one does. The afterlife may last for a few minutes for all we know. While I do agree with you that not everything neccesarily needs to be looked at and judged quantitatively, the deep dive into esoteric ideas such as the afterlife is misplaced.

You have missed the point. This is not about whether or not there is an afterlife. This is about getting to the root of the disagreement, which is not the sincerity or disingenuousness of the slogan "think of the children". It's about the weight people place on avoiding certain kinds of moral transgressions, and the fact that whose who do believe in an afterlife almost universally believe it is eternal.

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

#210

Post by jansan »

monocasa wrote: post #159
sokoloff wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tell that to Italy. Their death rate was in the double digits when hospital capacity was overrun.

Their hospitals are overrun every second winter, dude. They had as much a medical system problem as they had a COVID-19 problem. Check this article from 2018.

https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

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