Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 553 posts

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

#411

Post by logicchains »

fukmbas wrote: post #215

It is what it is. We all made sacrifices during the pandemic. This had to happen in order to save lives. The only thing that matters is what we do going forward.

>It is what it is. We all made sacrifices during the pandemic. This had to happen in order to save lives.

Saving lives isn't the be-all and end-all of public policy. Normally public policy would look at the net effect in terms of quality-of-life-adjusted-life-years, and by that metric the lockdowns have had an overwhelmingly negative effect, since the lives they saved were mostly people already on death's door, while the lives they destroyed were young and middle-aged people.

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

#412

Post by isabelc »

koolba wrote: post #163
lupire wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All but three districts were open in September and those were open for children for in person learning a month later: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/os-prem-ne-op...

The largest county in Florida, Miami-Dade, has had my child do school at home since March 2020.

I've been trying since September to get him back in person but they don't allow it, so it's misleading to say they're open for in person. Only a tiny percentage of students are allowed in person.

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

#413

Post by throwaway53453 »

DC1350 wrote: post #33

I'm not a child (uni student) but I've spent the last year sitting at a computer in my childhood bedroom for 14 hours a day and I'm fucking miserable. My life feels fake since nothing I'm working towards exists in the offline world.

This is exactly where I am. I'm a uni student who also works at a software company (apprenticeship) and my personal learning has cratered during lockdown. I went from being the happiest I ever had (finally, I was setting out to achieve my life goals) to the complete and utter inverse.

Not only did I move back into my parents house due to loneliness, I was previous stuck for six months in a city with very few friends (as the lockdown started right as I was building up a network of people to hang out with).

I might not be suicidal, but I was teetering on the edge for a while. Spent more than half of this last year with a constant anxiety about dying. But it was not a fear of Covid, it was a fear of these lockdowns taking away time from my life that I will never get back, and how they might go on for years more, when it has hurt barely 0.01% of my age demographic. I'm at the point where I would accept even 10x the risk to get back to normal.

If I died tomorrow, I would've wasted the last year of my life. The only good thing I've gotten out of this is a bit of perspective that I won't be forgetting.

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

#414

Post by bsder »

fullshark wrote: post #377

The fallout of all of this will take years to unravel, and it all likely points to overkill. Was it justified given uncertainty (i.e. prepare for the p90 or p95 outcome)? Possibly. But what I saw from the leadership class the last year was a complete disregard for the concerns of the little people and their livelihoods. Once things got politicized re: Trump, the most polarizing american political figure of my lifetim…

> The fallout of all of this will take years to unravel, and it all likely points to overkill.

No, the biggest problem was the vast underkill at the start. After that, everybody was screwed.

For starters, a whole bunch of things needed funding. Mask manufacturers should have been given contracts so they would switch to 24/7 production--didn't happen. Unemployment needed to be funded so people could stay home when states burned through their funds--didn't happen. Schools needed money for A/V equipment, training, and internet connections for students--didn't happen.

Things needed to shut down fast at the beginning. Mardi Gras happened because the feds buried information. SXSW went down to the wire before being cancelled. International flights took forever before even they were finally cancelled.

I can go on and on and on ... this ain't what "overkill" looks like. This is what "malicious incompetence" looks like, and I won't let you rewrite that history.

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

#415

Post by dougmwne »

danaliv wrote: post #389
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…

> the total erosion of my belief that most people were basically good, and decent, and cared about the welfare of others Oh my god, this. When the pandemic is over, I’ll be left with the knowledge that a significant fraction of the people around me at any given moment wouldn’t lift a finger for someone else if it meant even the slightest inconvenience or discomfort for them. I don’t know how to recover from that.

But a significant fraction would lock themselves in their homes for a year to save people they've never met. It goes both ways.

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

#416

Post by practicalpants »

fullshark wrote: post #377

The fallout of all of this will take years to unravel, and it all likely points to overkill. Was it justified given uncertainty (i.e. prepare for the p90 or p95 outcome)? Possibly. But what I saw from the leadership class the last year was a complete disregard for the concerns of the little people and their livelihoods. Once things got politicized re: Trump, the most polarizing american political figure of my lifetim…

By "leadership class" you mean the professional front group that serves the ruling class.

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

#417

Post by ip26 »

silvi9 wrote: post #391
fullshark wrote: post #377

The fallout of all of this will take years to unravel, and it all likely points to overkill. Was it justified given uncertainty (i.e. prepare for the p90 or p95 outcome)? Possibly. But what I saw from the leadership class the last year was a complete disregard for the concerns of the little people and their livelihoods. Once things got politicized re: Trump, the most polarizing american political figure of my lifetim…

Gen Z today are becoming increasingly more isolated; the long-term effects of this are yet to be known and could be serious. But it angers me that this is often an issue that's overlooked, especially when it's such a prevalent one. It's truly disturbing to think of the little regard there is for the mental health of young people, especially in an age fraught with enough social isolation as it is. Gen Z will be foreve…

I'm mainly thinking about whether we can get the pendulum to swing the other way now, after ~50 years of increasing isolation.

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

#418

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

danhak wrote: post #354
EVdotIO wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand these half assed measures. The original goal was to shut everything down to explicitly flatten the curve and not swamp hospitals. That was the fear, the exponential curve of millions on millions dead in a few weeks time if this wasn't contained, but as we have seen, this is simply not happening. Yes, this virus is bad, it is highly contagious, it kills people and deserves a serious response to cont…

This is the third rail of Covid discussions. But you are correct. The area under the curve was exactly the same in all the "flatten the curve" vs zero mitigation models. The rationale behind flattening the curve was never to decrease the absolute number of infections. But somewhere along the way, the goalposts were implicitly switched from "flatten the curve" to "wait for the vaccine"

Because everyone realized that compliance beyond lockdowns is piss poor. Mask wearing is political and people can't preform simple hygiene to avoid spreading. Once the curve was flattened it was abundantly clear that any reopening was going to follow with an explosion of cases, which it did.

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

#419

Post by stephen_g »

fullshark wrote: post #377

The fallout of all of this will take years to unravel, and it all likely points to overkill. Was it justified given uncertainty (i.e. prepare for the p90 or p95 outcome)? Possibly. But what I saw from the leadership class the last year was a complete disregard for the concerns of the little people and their livelihoods. Once things got politicized re: Trump, the most polarizing american political figure of my lifetim…

How about here in Australia? I think our outcomes look pretty good. We went hard and early, locked down, and now we basically have no restrictions internally (apart from not being able to travel internationally except to New Zealand (travel bubble should be starting in two or three weeks), and having to quarantine on entry coming from anywhere but NZ for two weeks and with two negative tests on I think the 10th and 13th days).

We have cinemas, sporting events, music concerts, etc. all open, you don't have to wear masks, you don't have to sit with empty seats between you and others. Schools have been mostly normal this year (save for a 3 day lockdown in QLD and a one week lockdown in Victoria and Western Australia). Lots of people are still choosing to work from home but offices are back to normal, domestic travel has been back on all this year an a decent part of last year... All with basically zero community transmission.

All this with about an eight week lockdown where I live (unfortunately Victoria had another outbreak so had to have another three months later on but got that back down to zero community transmission). So the lesson should be that it actually was perfectly possible to eliminate the virus locally and open up again fairly quickly. We could have done it even quicker if our incompetent Federal Government had acted more quickly, but luckily for us the State Governments all did mostly all the right things apart from a few issues (letting in a cruise ship with dozens of infected people with no quarantine or testing early on in New South Wales being a big one, and some issues with hotel quarantine later on).

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

#420

Post by _Gyan_ »

monocasa wrote: post #111
_Gyan_ wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Association between living with children and outcomes from covid-19: OpenSAFELY cohort study of 12 million adults in England https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n628 " Conclusions In contrast to wave 1, evidence existed of increased risk of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection and covid-19 outcomes among adults living with children during wave 2. However, this did not translate into a materially increased risk of covid…

From the UK, where they've closed schools pretty much universally across the country. Yes, the slight immunobump from being exposed to pretty much every year's influenza outweighs being next to one of the most socially isolated groups. That doesn't mean that if they repoened you wouldn't see the opposite.

UK schools were open most of the autumn/fall term. They have been closed since mid-December and reopened earlier this month.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemi...

Post reply on HN