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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

#331

Post by sjg007 »

tinus_hn wrote: post #228
sjg007 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with covid is now the mutants. England did not lock down the schools this past winter and the B117 spread thru the schools into the wider population. Brazil and its variant seems to be even worse and they basically let the virus rip from day 1. These new variants are more lethal and more transmissible. So now we are really screwed unless the vaccine proves effective enough with masks to slow the spread. And…

Good luck paying for 5 years of lockdowns!

Let’s be realistic, they will be intermittent and regional.

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

#332

Post by aidenn0 »

vesinisa wrote: post #254
School-Cotton wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What countries fund education better per capita than the US? Can you give numbers? According to various sources, for example https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp , US per-student K-12 education funding is only behind four OECD countries: Switz…

To me, this fact makes it even more shocking how bad the US public education system is. How can it so effectively continue to fail to provide social mobility at scale? Where is all this money being spent? Not at least on teachers' salaries, I guess?

The US spends almost as much (per capita) on medicare and medicaid together as the French government spends on their healthcare system. The Education system seems par-for-the-course.

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

#333

Post by thaumaturgy »

orangecat wrote: post #322
thaumaturgy wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's different in the sense that there was a forced reckoning of idealism vs. ground truth. We learned a great deal more about our family, friends, and neighbors. Sure, they may still be as outwardly friendly as before, but many of them, far too many, aggressively support some really heinous things. I don't want to venture into off-topic political stuff here. And, let's just acknowledge that everything about the pand…

It wasn't a small, isolated thing, and I don't think people should be described as good, and caring, and loving, while they identify with and support so many terrible things. Both supporters and opponents of lockdowns could read this and agree 100%.

I don't know of anyone that was enthusiastic about lockdowns or wanted them to happen just because it would ruin somebody else's day.

At best they were a necessary evil to prevent an even more catastrophic loss of life. Nobody likes them and there's nothing wrong with being frustrated or upset by them, and as the article points out, they're going to have far-ranging repercussions for a long time.

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

#334

Post by Wolfenstein98k »

Lockdowns after the first month fail any and all cost-benefit analyses.

I'm not making political claims or favouring any political causes or parties - but the tremendous costs simply cannot be justified any longer now that they are clearer, and the "at risk" populations are much clearer.

Side note: even if you take public choice theory seriously and bake in the assumption that lockdowns will continue to happen despite being devastatingly costly, then the onus becomes vaccination - there is no reason not to approve AstraZeneca's vaccine this instant and roll it out into every arm you can find ASAP, starting with the elderly and the obese.

Even if the blood clot thing was real (which is appears not to be), you lose more people to covid than the supposed blood clots.

Roll them out, yesterday.

PPS: Every major Western country is doing wacky things on this topic, so don't take my comment as commentary on any given country (except re: approval of the AZ vaccine, which is a commentary directly on the FDA of the US).

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

#335

Post by Wolfenstein98k »

reaperducer wrote: post #79
monocasa wrote: post #30

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%…

The false assumption here is that making kids stay home for a year saves a single life from covid.

It doesn't - the kids have a better survival rate than they do from the flu, and the people who are at risk are overwhelmingly not getting it from kids.

Do a cost-benefit analysis. Keeping kids in detention fails it every time.

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

#336

Post by CryptoPunk »

nostrademons wrote: post #313
dehrmann wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big, open question is why Florida and California have seen such similar case rates despite radically different approaches.

There's less difference than their public policies might suggest. Reportedly lots of senior citizens in Florida voluntarily social-distanced themselves from everybody. The press reported on square dancing and packed beaches, but the anecdotes I heard were that vulnerable individuals were taking things very seriously (despite the lack of restrictions) and self-quarantining away from everyone else. Meanwhile, in SoCal,…

The vulnerable voluntarily self-isolating, while the less vulnerable live more normal lives, is a very desireable outcome, and much better than a blanket lockdown, which imposes restrictions on large subsections of the population which are not vulnerable.

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

#337

Post by DiggyJohnson »

reaperducer wrote: post #79
monocasa wrote: post #30

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 was briefly a pandemic student last fall, and am closely connected with a relatively large network of current students who I communicate with regularly (aka my friends).

This is incredibly frustrating to read. Among students, the relevance of this topic - mental health issues spiking do to online curriculum - is painfully obvious. And yes, we are balancing this against the realized danger/negative health consequences of the pandemic.

I understand that this is anecdotal, but it seems that large, robust data sets are not convincing for you.

From what perspective are you writing? Do you have children in school? Do you feel that rising suicidality correlates with a broader issue that suggests some amount of increased suffering in the larger population?

> compared to what children had to deal with during previous social upheavals

Are you saying that we can't aspire to manage crises better than some historical bar? Why does this comparison appear here?

I am genuinely curious, and I hope you understand that my questions are genuine. I just rarely come across a comment that so confidently disagrees with things that are extremely obvious to me. Cheers

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

#338

Post by p1necone »

heavyset_go wrote: post #211
reaperducer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Frothing covid deniers/lockdown protestors will cling on to anything that lets them win arguments with people on the internet. Assuming these people and the news outlets they frequent are communicating in good faith is a fools errand.

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

#339

Post by nostrademons »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #336
nostrademons wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's less difference than their public policies might suggest. Reportedly lots of senior citizens in Florida voluntarily social-distanced themselves from everybody. The press reported on square dancing and packed beaches, but the anecdotes I heard were that vulnerable individuals were taking things very seriously (despite the lack of restrictions) and self-quarantining away from everyone else. Meanwhile, in SoCal,…

The vulnerable voluntarily self-isolating, while the less vulnerable live more normal lives, is a very desireable outcome, and much better than a blanket lockdown, which imposes restrictions on large subsections of the population which are not vulnerable.

Depends on your threat model. If you're worried about old people dying from COVID directly, then yes, it makes sense. If you're worried about the hospitals being overwhelmed and then people dying from car crashes and heart attacks, then targeted self-isolation of vulnerable people isn't going to help as much.

As a healthy 30-something, my chance of dying from COVID is about 1:3000, about 300x better than an 80-year-old. However, my chance of being hospitalized from COVID is about 3%, which is only about 7x better than the 80-year-old. The hospitals were overwhelmed, here (Bay Area) and in many other cities. Even now (2 months after the Christmas/January surge) Santa Clara County still has 21% of its ICU beds taken up by COVID patients.

U.S. life expectancy dropped by a full year during COVID. We were concerned about the 0.1 year declines in 2016-2018 from the opioid epidemic (which did affect young people), and this was 10x that. It'll be interesting to see how all-cause mortality has varied among different states in 2020-2021.

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

#340

Post by the_only_law »

heavyset_go wrote: post #211
reaperducer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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.

You’ll find this is common with a lot of political subjects, I could name a few that come up HN seemingly weekly now. Pick up a cause when it's politically convenient, drop it afterwards. I don’t trust anyone or their intentions when it comes to these sort of things.

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