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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

#81

Post by void_mint »

AndrewBissell wrote: post #63
void_mint wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When everyone runs the risk of dying in traffic accidents in quick succession, every individual traffic accident becomes more problematic

"Keeping schools closed was necessary to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed" is a different argument from "teachers don't want to face the mortal peril of in-person instruction," and not the one that was made in favor of keeping schools closed.

Kids infect eachother -> Kids infect teachers and their parents -> Hospitals overwhelmed

When hospitals are overcrowded any injury has a higher mortality rate. Teachers not wanting to die is a totally fine reason to close schools, too.

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

#83

Post by wsatb »

GVIrish wrote: post #34
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…

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 t…

This, and not just the US, the West in general. Everyone concerned about the long term consequences of these closures needs to look no further than our leadership mostly ignoring it and thinking we were somehow immune. Heck, even after taking some measures, many parts of the nation/world then reopened too early only to see multiple surges.

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

#84

Post by AndrewBissell »

jfengel wrote: post #62
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.

No, they weren't. There are half a million COVID deaths last year. There are around 30,000 deaths a year from automobile accidents. COVID is more deadly than automobile accidents, by an order of magnitude.

Unlike automobile accidents, risk of death from Covid varies substantially according to age and whether one has any comorbidities.

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

#85

Post by HonestOp001 »

GVIrish wrote: post #34
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…

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 t…

There were intimations at closing down the border from President Trump, howls of racism were made. Nancy Pelosi went down to Chinatown and asked what was the president afraid of.

The president tried to take action, but politics was and is involved. We have a report from last week saying that scientists were afraid to speak up because of fear for saying orange man bad was correct.

If you believe these super simple arguments of hard lock downs would have worked, then look at how the guy at imperial college who screwed us all over with his horrible forecasts. He said “lockdown to save is all.” Then proceeds to visit his mistress, one of the two had coronavirus! How do you think we could legitimately implement a lockdown when the people who scream lockdown do not implement it themselves (athletes sneaking ladies, Newsome, Whitmer, etc.).

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

#86

Post by AndrewBissell »

intrepidhero wrote: post #70
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.

My research says this claim is false. The mortality rate for COVID-19 for all age groups is much higher that mortality rates for drivers. How I compared the risks: In New York the mortality rate for COVID-19 for all age groups over 18 was found to be at least 0.2%[1]. The CDC[2] reports 18-29 years at 0.5%, 30-39 at 1.4%, 40-49 at 3.5%, 50-64 at 16.4%. There were 36,560[3] motor vehicle related deaths in 2018 in the…

Several problems with this analysis:

- Using confirmed cases as the denominator significantly overstates the fatality rate, because a large share of the total infections is never confirmed

- "All age groups over 18" elides huge disparities between the younger and older age groups. It also obscures large differences in risk between those with comorbidities vs those without. The CDC does not make this easy to parse out, but in Canada after their first wave, "100% of the COVID-involved deaths under the age of 45 as of July 31 had at least one other disease or condition certified on the medical certificate of death." https://web.archive.org/web/20210219195135if_/https://www150...

- New York as a region had one of the highest fatality rates of the entire pandemic

- Covid is a "one-and-done" risk as far as we know, while the risk of a car accident is repeated year after year for as long as one drives on the roads. Even in the absence of vaccines, the risk of death from Covid is unlikely to remain as high in 2024 as it was in 2020.

The most sound way to run this sort of comparison is something like "how many in risk group X (say, people aged 30-39 with no comorbidities) died in 2020 from Covid vs how many in that group die in a typical year from auto accidents?"

If you want to say that overweight 60 year old teachers with diabetes should not have been forced back to in-person instruction you'll get no argument from me.

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

#87

Post by AndrewBissell »

GVIrish wrote: post #34
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…

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 t…

It is certainly not true that South Korea's measures have succeeded in eliminating community spread, which has been significant (if not at the same level as the U.S.) since the start of winter. East Asians seem to be more resistant to SARS-CoV-2: their new case rate of about 1/20th the U.S. (1/4 on a per-capita basis) is translating into a death rate around 1/300th of ours.

Lockdowns have been largely orthogonal to school closures -- much of Europe kept its schools open while pursuing even more draconian lockdown measures than blue states in the U.S. "Just lockdown, test, and trace harder" is not the lesson from South Korea.

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

#88

Post by AndrewBissell »

kurthr wrote: post #66
AndrewBissell wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This paper which was published in May 2020 established that the IFR of Covid was in the 0.05% range for people under 70, lower for those without comorbidities. It was peer reviewed and published by the WHO in October 2020. There is no excuse for how long it has taken people to come to a more accurate assessment of the risks of Covid -- and public opinion polling shows the public is still grossly overestimating that r…

This would be accurate, if only those school age children didn't have older teachers or parents. Although children are rarely (though in some cases fatal) symptomatic there is evidence that they spread COVID, just as they spread many other colds and flus every school year. This is not a virus that should make us question the germ theory of disease. I understand the want for children's education and emotional well bei…

> This would be accurate, if only those school age children didn't have older teachers or parents.

Then this should have been handled on a case-by-case basis. What share of families actually have an elderly or otherwise at-risk relative living at home with them? What share of teachers were actually in a high risk category? These questions were easily answerable by the middle of 2020 but all such nuance was thrown out in favor of "COVID is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS to EVERYONE and we have to shut EVERYTHING (except Wal-Mart, naturally) down to stop it!"

> This is not a virus that should make us question the germ theory of disease. I understand the want for children's education and emotional well being, but that shouldn't require other adults to be hospitalized or die.

How is this not an argument that one could make in favor of closing schools and shutting down society to prevent the spread of influenza? The difference is just one of degree, not kind.

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

#89

Post by moistly »

robomartin wrote: post #25

This whole narrative is insane. I can't help but think there's an underlying objective to drive for additional funding to fix a problem that does not exist. Kids did not go from learning 100% to 0%. Let's make an argument that, perhaps (and I don't believe this either) they learned 50% of what they would have learned in person. Half. OK. How much harm does that cause? For reference, I have two kids who went remote th…

> We live in a reasonably decent school district…

…proceeds to describe an unreasonably substandard school district. If your district really is decent, there is no good future. Without a well-educated population, the nation will fail.

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

#90

Post by tolbish »

adamnemecek wrote: post #20
BitwiseFool wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much of school is socialization with other human beings. Beyond academics, children need to experience being in a group and learning about how people are supposed to interact with each other. And most of this is not explicitly taught, but acquired through trial and error and simple monkey-see, monkey-do. You can't get that level of interaction and fidelity online.

Sure. But then you end up with adults who are incapable of socialization outside of school. Maybe having children develop making friends outside of school is a good idea.

It's striking how often you see adults who don't have friends they see regularly or even speak to their neighbors.
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