No Way to Grow Up

I agree that adults have failed kids during the pandemic, but the agenda that this article is pushing is deeply, deeply flawed. The consequences the pandemic is having on kids is not due to schools being closed, it's due to kids growing up in the middle of a society collapsing under the weight of a pandemic.

To argue that we shouldn't have closed schools, or should have made things more normal for the kids is to say that our half-assed mealy-mouthed nothing of a response to the pandemic didn't work, so we should have done even less, tried to spread the virus even harder, and that would have made things better. No. What would have made things better is a real, collective, and effective response to the pandemic. Modeling a real, pro-social, collaborative, and reasonable response to the pandemic.

Of course it's not _fair_ that kids are being kept away from school while hoards of adults are too obsessed with proving they have freedom to consider how to use their freedom to act appropriately. It's not fair that they can't get an education, but hoards of the unmasked, unvaxxed, and unconcerned can huff and puff their way through bars, restaurants, gyms, clubs, and every other super spreader event they care to name without a concern for the costs of their actions to them or anyone else.

Fair would have been for everyone to do their part, to exercise a modicum of self control, and work together to actually contain things, keep them to a reasonable level, and then let things get back to normal in the ways we can, and have a clear plan for how to monitor and react to changes in the future. Fair would be everyone working together to make this thing actually be over, at least for some periods of time, rather than making the reasonable people pay the entire burden for the whims of the hoards of pro-plague cultists.

I think the article does a good job at looking at this as a trade-off. No where in the article do they state outright that there is no change to transmission. The main point is to ask the question "Is avoiding the damage to those that are older worth the damage to those that are younger?"

The main problem I see is that kids are not (yet) organized.

There is a pandemic going on. Kids can "vote" with their behavior.

Hm, I found David Leonhardt's summary of that article to be fairly sound – it even opens with "School closures have been implemented internationally with insufficient evidence for their role in minimising covid-19 transmission."

"[A]ccumulating evidence shows that teachers and school staff are not at higher risk of hospital admission or death from covid-19 compared with other workers" quote seems most pertinent. Other quotes that certainly back the paraphrase include "teacher absence decreased in tier 3 regions during the November lockdown despite schools remaining open" and "Teacher absence because of confirmed covid-19 in England was similar in primary and secondary schools in the autumn term."

Finally, the "Transmission" section explicitly casts doubt on studies that did show a reduction in transmission. Overall, "skeptical," as the linked NYT article states, seems dead on.

Were there other sources from the article that you took issue with?

Too little, too late NY Times. I won't forgive you.