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

reuters.com

211–220 of 553 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kids would be pretty depressed being surrounded by a 8 digit body count in the US too. Kudos for expressing an unpopular opinion. I'll express another one: I think the whole thing about "ZOMG! Suicide rates through the roof!!!elevelty!1!" is blown out of proportion, largely thanks to pseudo-news web sites trying to grab clicks on the internet. The school district where I live put out a press release lamenting an 18%…

> I'll express another one: I think the whole thing about "ZOMG! Suicide rates through the roof!!!elevelty!1!" is blown out of proportion, largely thanks to pseudo-news web sites trying to grab clicks on the internet.

Certain news sites in my state spent 2020 lamenting about how the lockdown is causing overdose deaths to skyrocket. Well, 2021 rolls around and the 2020 overdose death statistics were calculated, and there were about a dozen more overdose deaths in 2020 than in 2019, a change that is statistically insignificant when comparing it to the tens of thousands of overdoses that occurred in the state each year in 2019 and 2020, or to the tens of thousands of people who died from COVID there in 2020.

For whatever reason, the types of people who shared such news in 2020 were not the kind of people who gave two shits about addiction and its effects on others before the pandemic. I say this as a person who has struggled with addiction in the past and has lost numerous people I care about to it. It seems to me that the overdose stats were merely a tool to be used to complain about policy that they disliked.

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand - are you implying that the act of deciding to have a long lockdown necessitates that the decision makers do not care about children, or are there specifics you are leaving unsaid?

> are you implying that the act of deciding to have a long lockdown necessitates that the decision makers do not care about children I do get this impression from watching interviews with some of the public-health experts advising governments. As an academic, I can recognize my fellow academics who are obsessively focused on their own field and passionate about it, but they might not realize that people outside the f…

I don't think we've done a poll asking that question. At any rate this is a representative democracy so we expect our leaders to trust the experts.

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

#213
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Florida is perfectly ok. Obviously this "8 digit body count" concept is a load of that which makes the grass grow green.

it's okay because only one in one thousand people have died

While on average, every year roughly 1 in 85 people dies.

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

#214

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.

The death rate from Covid is not double digits in Italy or any other country. Where are your numbers coming from?

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

#216
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can still bring it home to parents, grandparents, and the general community. It’s silly to dismiss the indirect effects as if they don’t exist.

There is little or no evidence that children frequently transmit the virus to adults. And even if there was, it wouldn't be ethical to collectively punish all children just to marginally reduce the risk to a minority of vulnerable people.

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-07-...

> Researchers in South Korea have found that children between the ages of 10 and 19 can transmit Covid-19 within a household just as much as adults, according to new research published in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention journal Emerging Infectious Diseases

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point we have enough data. The CDC gives an approximate IFR of 0.7% in the US. That would translate to low 7 digits. Also, it's very heavily weighted to the 70+ population. Strictly speaking from a kid's perspective, it would mostly be the experience of losing a grandparent early. It would be sad (as death almost always is) but probably not life-changing.

> At this point we have enough data. The CDC gives an approximate IFR of 0.7% in the US. That would translate to low 7 digits. Also, it's very heavily weighted to the 70+ population. ..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity. > Strictly speaking from a kid's perspective, it would mostly be the experience of losing a grandparent early. It would be sad (as death almost always is) bu…

> ..with lockdowns in effect enough to keep hospitalization rates below capacity.

“Want to buy this vampire repelling rock?”

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

#218
post #21

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?

“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.

Rich kids have access to private schools, which aren't subject to teacher's unions and political battles like the confusing one you had in New York between the Governor and the Mayor of NYC. They were contradicting each other on policy predictions and did a big disservice.

In California, apparently teacher's unions have been blocking school opening plans. That's what I read and it could just be false or misleading news.

Again, rich people afford private schools, tutors, etc.

In contrast, in France they just went under lockdown in the north this weekend, yet for many months now they had schools open. In the US we're opening up but schools stay closed in many places. Who's being scientific and who's being political?

Nothing makes much sense! We must question authority and special interest groups, constantly. Take nothing for granted, even if a politician claims to be on the side of science.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim that a lack of lockdown means the healthcare system being overloaded with COVID victims, leading to no capacity for sufferers of other illnesses, depends on a major assumption: that hospitals would have to treat patients coming in with COVID symptoms. Another approach could be to triage COVID patients away from intensive care, providing them only with palliative, end-of-life care, and letting those beds rem…

I suggest you might be seeing things too linearly. Consider all the evolved variants. By letting it run wild you would a) just accelerate viral evolution and b) eventually and unpredictably find yourself in a situation where the mortality rate might spiral out of control across all kinds of demographics. You would then do the same thing as now: lockdown measures to curb mortality. I guess the question of lockdown is…

All viruses either die out or become endemic. They mutate continuously while reproducing in your body because copies are not perfect. Most mutations do nothing. Sars2 is already well adapted to humans and none of the new mutations have significantly changed anything about the virus no matter what the media says so it looks like vaccines will end the pandemic soon.

I think Sweden got accused of letting infected seniors just die. I remember it being a scandal last year.

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

#220
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That doesn't affect my point. They're a case study not in the sense of "look how easy it is for hospitals to be overrun", but instead "look what an absolute tragedy it is when hospital are overrun". Of course the country predisposed to hospital overruns hit that issue first.
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