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

421–430 of 553 posts

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

#421

Post by mrslave »

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%…

Darrell Huff - How To Lie With Statistics[0]. And the first chapter or two of David Spiegelhalter - The Art of Statistics[1] has a good example of absolute vs relative rates/probabilities with respect to medicine. Pretty basic an important issue to understand.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51291.How_to_Lie_with_St... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43722897-the-art-of-stat...

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

#422

Post by staplers »

stephen_g wrote: post #419
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 1…

To be fair, it's a lot easier to isolate an island than multiple international hubs for many different types of people (LA, SF, NYC).

Also having leadership which denies anything is bad until a major sports league (NBA) takes action doesn't help.

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

#423

Post by notsureaboutpg »

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?

Actually, I think it makes exact sense since "think of the children" is now such a ridiculed phrase in mainstream media and thought.

We actually should, often, think about the children, but people did not like this excuse when it was used to argue against the vulgarity of music, television, movies, video games, etc. and now when it actually mattered we didn't care.

Like the boy who cried wolf.

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

#424

Post by staplers »

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…

Terrifyingly, this isolation makes it easier to manipulate and polarize the population. Paired with capitalistic engagement-hungry algorithms, I see a dark future.

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

#425

Post by wernercd »

heavyset_go wrote: post #319
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.

There's about a 3% death rate[1] when hospitals aren't flooded with sick people, and the death rate hits double digits when the healthcare system is DDOS'd by sick patients, as we've seen in Italy. The hospitalization rate is about 10%. If everyone in the US got COVID, and 1% of them died, that would be 3.3 million people dead and over 30 million hospitalized. If the death rate is 3%, 9.85 million would die. I don't…

CFR vs IFR

https://www.methodsman.com/blog/case-fatality-rate-vs-infect...

What I can tell you is that the CDC now provides an “infection fatality rate” parameter in it’s planning scenarios. They range the IFR from 0.5% in their best-case scenario to 0.8% in the worst-case scenario.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201030/covid-19-infection-...

A new study conducted by researchers at Imperial College London found the COVID-19 infection fatality ratio is about 1.15% of infected people in high-income nations and 0.23% in low-income nations.

The new study confirms that the coronavirus is deadlier for older people, with the risk of death doubling for every eight years of aging and ranging from 0.1% for people under 40 and 5% among people over 80 years old. The disparity between high and low-income nations is due largely to facts that high-income nations tend to have larger number of elderly in their populations whereas low-income nations’ population tend to skew youngers.

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

#426

Post by peytn »

bsder wrote: post #414
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 st…

Before delving into accusations of maliciousness, might I suggest you first review the annual budgets of the relevant public health agencies? At least a hundred billion dollars have been spent by my government during my lifetime on public health. Some of this spending was overseen by the very same officials you see on TV condemning others for their poor performance. The budgets they were given feel to me like more than enough money to be prepared for a foreseeable respiratory pandemic.

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

#427

Post by olliej »

usaar333 wrote: post #386
heavyset_go wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's about a 3% death rate[1] when hospitals aren't flooded with sick people, and the death rate hits double digits when the healthcare system is DDOS'd by sick patients, as we've seen in Italy. The hospitalization rate is about 10%. If everyone in the US got COVID, and 1% of them died, that would be 3.3 million people dead and over 30 million hospitalized. If the death rate is 3%, 9.85 million would die. I don't…

3% CFR, not IFR. Even Spain hit only a 1.2% IFR early in the pandemic ( https://covid19-projections.com/about/#assumptions ) The worst-case realistic number of deaths for the US is around 1.2 million. With hospital collapses, maybe double that. 10 million is not possible.

I'm fairly certain that the "only" 6 digit death rate we've currently had has had a negative impact on the families and friends of the affected.

If you have been left untouched by it, then good for you, but you shouldn't be assuming that that applies to everyone.

The mortality rate in the US is 1.8%. That is 542k dead out of 29.8 million cases.

That's nearly 30 million cases with all the lockdowns, mask rules, etc.

Even with that minor amount of 9% infected, LA hospitals ran out of capacity, morgues overflowed, etc. Try to imagine if we didn't try to limit the spread - by among other things closing schools.

NZs recent outbreak started from a couple of kids in a school of only 13-1500 students, and with lockdowns that dwarf anything the US did they only just managed to control it, getting to something like 100 positive cases because they didn't want to lock down completely.

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

#428

Post by tehjoker »

stickfigure wrote: post #167
monocasa wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

It's pretty incredible how easily hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, each of which is a full human life, becomes a statistic to some people let alone the millions. Don't we teach students in history classes about how easily people allow themselves to justify mass death when it is convenient?

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

#429

Post by olliej »

JoshuaDavid wrote: post #399
monocasa wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be mistaken then. Government interventions like lockdowns and school closings were a very good response. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338

So do you think Florida is lying and underestimating the number of COVID deaths to greater extent than California is, or the California is exaggerating the number of COVID deaths, or maybe that there's a difference in behavior between Floridians and Californians (maybe California had stricter laws but Floridians act more responsibly in terms of disease prevention). If you don't have such an explanation, and Californi…

Because lockdowns only work if you actually lockdown.

That and yes, FL clearly lied and has fired people for indicating correct numbers. This is not helped by many US states that try to record CV19 deaths as being due to "underlying conditions" instead of covid.

If you go to hospital due to covid, and then die, whatever other conditions you have aren't relevant, covid is what killed you.

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

#430

Post by polishdude20 »

chii wrote: post #374
ipaddr wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lockdowns have made a big difference. Places like New Zealand have 0 cases. The half lockdowns have lower but mixed results. An 80 year old has a lot of life in them. Some may have a year or two but others will have 20 or 30 years left.

even if the 80 yr old has 20 yrs of life left, it still means that a 16 yr old is worth at least 3 80 yr olds. and the 80 yr olds do not contribute to the economy or work, and is indeed a "burden" (sad to say, but they can't really sustain themselves without external resources, as their economic value output is zero). The 16 yr old will likely contribute to society for 40 years at least. i'm not saying the lockdowns…

I think the return you get from saving the elderly is the example that is shown to the young. The example shows the young that life when you're elderly isn't miserable and people WILL care for you. Society doesn't take care of the elderly solely for the elderly's sake. The bigger benefit is the example it makes to the younger generations who will be elderly themselves in due time. I can imagine in a society where I see the elderly treated badly, I probably won't have much hope for when id get to that state.

It's like saying "when you're older, we will treat you like shit" and people going back to society and saying "if you're gonna treat me like shit, I'm not going to be a productive member of society like you want me to"

Post reply on HN