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Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

economist.com

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Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#31

Post by astalwick »

jfengel wrote: post #8
tboyd47 wrote: post #2

> But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. I'm not entirely comfortable with the narrative that the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully. It wasn't that the pros and cons weren't weighed. Every human decision involves the weighing of pros and cons. For every decision that harms someone, a person decided that the harms were justified because of some other goal they deemed necessary. The sol…

It's not clear to me that this was a poor decision. You can't send children to school if there are no teachers. And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Teachers are well aware that whatever is going around among the students will get to them. They get every cold and ever flu. If school boards said, "We're staying open for the sake of the children", teachers would have said, "Fin…

It was possible in other countries.

My children (Quebec) were in class all of last year, except for a 10 day period in January - the tail end of a local lockdown at the height of the third wave.

Infection rates were certainly higher due to schools opening, but other decisions - and a population that was mostly tolerant of restrictions - mitigated that. We wore masks, we limited contact and we stayed home to the extent possible. As a result, schools were able to stay open.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#32

Post by beaner »

seasoup wrote: post #30

This article doesn't take into account that maybe the kids didn't all get sick because closing the schools helped stop the spread of COVID in kids. It's like saying I exercised and lost weight so clearly that exercise was a waste of time, I would have lost weight anyway.

Isn't the Covid rate in kids exceptionally low? Closing offices only barely slowed the rate of progress in adults but closing schools helped children, who are less at risk, a lot?

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#33

Post by matthewdgreen »

gotoeleven wrote: post #14
tboyd47 wrote: post #2

> But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. I'm not entirely comfortable with the narrative that the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully. It wasn't that the pros and cons weren't weighed. Every human decision involves the weighing of pros and cons. For every decision that harms someone, a person decided that the harms were justified because of some other goal they deemed necessary. The sol…

A loud minority of twitter mob participants shouted "You want to kill grandma!" every time anyone tried to discuss the full costs of the lockdowns. People don't want to risk their careers saying things that are unpopular with twitter mobs (especially in academia). So now we're effectively governed by emotional neurotics and government can no longer make reasonable decisions based on a dispassionate cost-benefit analy…

Figuratively speaking, we did kill grandma. We've lost 603,000 human lives during this epidemic, and 90% happened within the first year.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#34

Post by GVIrish »

jfengel wrote: post #8
tboyd47 wrote: post #2

> But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. I'm not entirely comfortable with the narrative that the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully. It wasn't that the pros and cons weren't weighed. Every human decision involves the weighing of pros and cons. For every decision that harms someone, a person decided that the harms were justified because of some other goal they deemed necessary. The sol…

It's not clear to me that this was a poor decision. You can't send children to school if there are no teachers. And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Teachers are well aware that whatever is going around among the students will get to them. They get every cold and ever flu. If school boards said, "We're staying open for the sake of the children", teachers would have said, "Fin…

I would go one step further. We wouldn't have had to close schools for so long or at all if we had responded aggressively to Covid before the outbreak got large. South Korea largely controlled their outbreak without lockdowns because they aggressively tested, contact traced, and quarantined in the early days of the pandemic. Today, South Korea has something like 1/300th as many deaths even though it has about 1/5th the population of the United States.

The US had its first confirmed case on the same day as South Korea but was much slower to respond. Had we had a more robust response, we might not have had to make these tough choices about closing schools.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#35

Post by bellyfullofbac »

astalwick wrote: post #31
jfengel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me that this was a poor decision. You can't send children to school if there are no teachers. And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Teachers are well aware that whatever is going around among the students will get to them. They get every cold and ever flu. If school boards said, "We're staying open for the sake of the children", teachers would have said, "Fin…

It was possible in other countries. My children (Quebec) were in class all of last year, except for a 10 day period in January - the tail end of a local lockdown at the height of the third wave. Infection rates were certainly higher due to schools opening, but other decisions - and a population that was mostly tolerant of restrictions - mitigated that. We wore masks, we limited contact and we stayed home to the exten…

But staying home surely wouldn't help if the virus came home with Little Billy? And I'm guessing nobody wore masks and limited contact with their own children in their own homes...

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#36

Post by JoeCianflone »

Oy. This article is silly. In March of 2020 when schools started to close we did not know the full impact of COVID. decisions were made with the best knowledge AT THE TIME. Also we still don’t know the full impact of COVID. This article has a sample size of 1 year. As a parent of 3 with a child who started Kindergarten in September and did the entire year virtually—I’d rather deal with the fallout of having to “catch her up” than the fallout of her being asymptomatic and potentially killing me, my wife, one of her brothers or her teacher. I feel like that would be greater harm. We made/make decisions in real time with limited information—I regret none of my decisions with my kids schooling.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#37

Post by Robotbeat »

CarelessExpert wrote: post #29
commandlinefan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully It's just getting harder and harder, as more and more is revealed, to believe that the costs and risks weren't weighed based on what harm or benefit would come to specific individuals instead of how specific policies would help or hurt specific politicians and political interests. Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk, but nursing homes were fo…

> Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk Schools aren't closed to (primarily) protect the kids. Where did you get that idea? Schools are closed to protect the teachers, the families, and anyone those people contact that would be infected by those kids spreading infection at schools and then bringing the infection into households.

If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.”

Children, who have the least agency and the least blame for the situation they find themselves in, were being asked to take a pretty big hit for the benefit of many of those who actually did have more agency and blame.

We closed the schools just fine but still had a real hard time getting universal mask wearing (for instance) to happen. Yet again, children suffer to pay for the selfish decisions of the adults.

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#38

Post by _y5hn »

whoomp12342 wrote: post #22
guidoism wrote: post #4

This is crazy. No. Lack of school doesn’t create harm. Attempting to shoehorn traditional schooling into an online form certainly can.

all we are is just another brick in the wall

I wonder if there could be positives in the experience, some maturing, and gratefulness when returning to school. On what data is this based on?

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#39

Post by mulvya »

seasoup wrote: post #30

This article doesn't take into account that maybe the kids didn't all get sick because closing the schools helped stop the spread of COVID in kids. It's like saying I exercised and lost weight so clearly that exercise was a waste of time, I would have lost weight anyway.

41% of school-aged US kids are estimated to have gotten COVID. Not such a great success.

See Table 2 of https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Re: Closing the world's schools caused children great harm

#40

Post by tmn »

Jill_the_Pill wrote: post #24
AndrewBissell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Many of them were at greater risk of death from driving to school than they were from Covid.

This argues we must drastically improve traffic safety, not just accept driving and covid risks.

Not necessarily. There is an opposing argument that we need to accept the risk of death as a part of life. When does a population decide the risk has been reduced enough? I could argue we are well past that point.

As a culture we have completely lost touch with the natural cycles of life. The boomers in positions of power have clearly prioritized their own safety at the expense of the upcoming generations.

That's probably inflammatory. But it's a popular opinion where I'm from that isn't vocalized in the media.

Without trying to say one take is right or wrong, this can in a lot ways be reduced to the security vs freedom tradeoff.

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