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

329 points by accountinhn 6y ago

bko 6y ago
This is really unfortunate second order effect of lockdowns. You see the SAT scores go down as well and some groups don't want to admit the negative effects of in a shift to in home learning, especially among the most vulnerable groups. And we're not even honest about it and just retreat to the idea of getting rid of standardized tests altogether to mask over the achievement gap.
- tptacek 6y ago
  It's a second-order effect of not prioritizing school reopenings. Lockdowns aren't all-or-nothing.
  - crummy 6y ago
    Right. We should have closed restaurants, bars, whatever so we could keep schools open.
    - matz1 6y ago
      No, we shouldn't have lockdown in the first place, keep everything open. Adopt measure that doesn't involve lockdown.
      - jansan 6y ago
        This is debatable, but it is common sense that it shoud have been the target. And for somne reason it wasn't.
    - tptacek 6y ago
      We also should have prioritized epidemiology studies involving schools --- there seems to be a growing consensus that K-8 schools aren't significant spreaders. The HVAC concerns about schools are apparently easily addressed with basic, portable air filters and box fans. There's a lot we could have done differently here.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        > there seems to be a growing consensus that K-8 schools aren't significant spreaders There's almost no evidence for that. It boils down to the virus is absolutely out of control here, and kids are way more likely to be asymptomatic, meaning that it's way harder to nail down that a child to adult transmission occurred outside of the household.
        _Gyan_ 6y ago
        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 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-19 mortality, and absolute increases in risk were small." "Living with children aged 0-11 was associated with reduced risk of death from both covid-19 and non-covid-19 causes in both waves;"
        monocasa 6y ago
        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.
        _Gyan_ 6y ago
        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_pandemic_on_education_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemi...
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        Growing consensus? The only thing I've ever seen said about it -- which was said quite early on -- was "we have never seen an instance of children spreading the disease to adults".
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      Matt Yglesias wrote an interesting (non-paywalled) piece about this: https://www.slowboring.com/p/school-closure https://www.slowboring.com/p/school-closure > in the actual United States of America, it’s Congress that can write huge checks; it’s mostly states who write rules for restaurants; and schools are a local responsibility — often run by special purpose school boards that have no other governing powers. Given that Congress did not appropriate funds for a bar and restaurant bailout, I don’t think it’s crazy that governors mostly decided they had to reopen their restaurants. And given that this decision ensured continued community spread all through the summer and fall, I don’t think it’s crazy that teachers lobbied to keep schools closed. > D.C. eventually got a leg up thanks to our unusual governance. We are a “mayoral control” city (i.e., the schools are run by a political appointee rather than by a separately elected board), and our city government also performs the functions of a state government. So the mayor, in her capacity as essentially a governor, gave teachers vaccine priority, and then in her capacity as the head of the school system said they had to reopen. I think it’s clear that San Francisco mayor London Breed would do that if she could, but she doesn’t control California vaccination rules and she doesn’t control the San Francisco public schools, so she can’t.
      - lupire 6y ago
        Why can't CA bail out restaurants? Because they are afraid to raise taxes on tech billionaires who made a fortune during the pandemic?
        easton 6y ago
        Because any raise of taxes would accelerate the conversations happening at every tech company in CA as to whether or not they really need to be there now that they worked remote. Unless Tim Cook's taxes can personally pay for it (since Apple's staying because of their big new building), this isn't a good time to be raising taxes.
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Why can't CA bail out restaurants? Because the US system has evolved to one which structurally depends on federal government deficit spending to rapidly meet economic emergencies since the feds have structural advantages in borrowing independent of self-imposed limits (borrowing in a currency you control is a massive advantage) and states tend to have (self-imposed, but inflexible in the short term, since they are usually matters of state constitution) budget rules which require balanced operating budgets and, where they allow debt-financed deficit spending, have slow processes (often something like a legislative vote followed by a public election) to approve it. (Why it's counterproductive to raise taxes, instead of deficit spending, in the middle of a literally once-in-a-century economic downturn to pay for bailouts should be obvious.)
    - ohgodplsno 6y ago
      So, for context, France tried that. Badly, like the rest of our handling of Covid, but we did close restaurants, bars, and everything else, keeping schools open. Not really for the well being of the children, but rather that their parents could not work if they had to handle children. Depressions are still through the roof, grades are low.
      - croes 6y ago
        Because you get depressed if you are isolated and you get depressed if you have to fear to get infected. There is no undepressing way to handle the pandemic, only ways with less infections and deaths.
        anoncake 6y ago
        Our species has evolved to deal with deaths. Social isolation goes against human nature, it's a lot more harmful than any pandemic.
        croes 6y ago
        Single deaths not mass deaths. And it's social distancing not isolation. The whole lockdown nobody I know was isolated even if in quarantine.
        croes 6y ago
        BTW it's not social but physical distancing. You can be as social as you want, just not so much physical contacts.
        anoncake 6y ago
        Don't expect me to use your euphemisms. Even if you, personally, don't need real human contact. Mass deaths aren't particularly more traumatizing than individual ones. You don't know these people anyway.
        Robotbeat 6y ago
        The way to solve it was to accelerate vaccines even more than we did. A couple trillion dollars to accelerate vaccine production and rollout (and approval) to cut 6 months off the pandemic. Avoided the big wave in December. We already did better than some feared with vaccine roll out, but we could have done even more. Also, a harder (but shorter) shut down and a firmer masking requirement and really good test and trace and quarantine protocol were additional ways, but apparently not feasible due to having to heard so many cats. Vaccines were more under federal control and could have been accelerated.
    - EVdotIO 6y ago
      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 control, but the lockdowns, at best, were to slow the spread and a stop gap to larger secondary effects.
      - danhak 6y ago
        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"
        halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
        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.
clcaev 6y ago
There is an interesting article about how race affects the decision to go back to school. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/why-black-parents-arent-joining-the-push-to-reopen-schools/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/why-black-paren...
- rayiner 6y ago
  It's interesting how Mother Jones spins a fairly minor polling difference into a whole narrative about "Black Parents [Not] Joining the Push to Reopen Schools." First, they clearly are. According to the CDC study cited by the article, 46% of Black parents agreed that schools should reopen in the fall: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6949a2.htm?s_cid=mm6949a2_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6949a2.htm?s_cid=mm.... The article spins out a Black-white difference on this measure because 62% of white parents think schools should reopen in the fall. That modest difference can almost certainly be explained by differences in where people live: Black people are more likely to live in urban areas, where density can feed concerns about easier spread of the disease. They are also more likely to live in Democratic jurisdictions, especially cities, where government officials have been more cautious and have urged more caution about reopening. As a Marylander, I'm not surprised that people in a neighborhood within Baltimore City limits is skeptical about school reopening. The white people up there are also skeptical about reopening! Meanwhile here in exurban Anne Arundel county, people are much more eager about school reopening. We had protests this past summer in front of the county health office (which is by my house) urging the county to reopen high school sports. Black parents were at least as well represented at these protests as they are in the county as a whole (about 15-20%).
  - kortilla 6y ago
    It’s Mother Jones, not exactly a bastion of rationalism. If there is a way to use any slight statistical difference to support the current du jour narrative (“white people are the problem” is a big one), you can count on them to do it.
- testesttest 6y ago
  Not accurate in my community and no data. It is an opinion piece extrapolating from a few examples.
09y234aka 6y ago
the youngest have never mattered, the old steal from them all the same.
- sillyconesally 6y ago
  As linked elsewhere in the thread, the US Govt. spends 3 times more money (about $615B USD) on those aged 65+ compared to about $175B on children. https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/23xx/doc2300/fsec.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/23x... It is reassuring that we have Bill Gates' leadership in the vaccine debate. He correctly points out that expensive medical costs associated with the elderly could be cut so that we can keep teachers employed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03MZG9vK0W8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03MZG9vK0W8 This is the right attitude, as unfortunately these elderly are mostly white, racist and a net negative to society.
perardi 6y ago
The sun is shining, the vaccines are flowing, I can eat inside now, I am feeling optimistic today. But on my grey days: I wonder how long the mental health trauma of all this will last. Besides school-age depression, there was a noticeable uptick in drug overdoses. (https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/16/as-pandemic-ushered-in-isolation-financial-hardship-overdose-deaths-reached-new-heights/ https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/16/as-pandemic-ushered-in-i...) And, anecdotally, I have several friends and acquaintances who developed severe drug issues during the various stages of lockdown. I fear there’s going to be a lot of dark matter out there, and we won’t detect it until we see the knock-on effects for years down the road. This is not an anti-lockdown screed, I feel like I must say. My dad went into the ICU for something non-COVID in December, and the hospitals then were at the breaking point. (At least where I was.) We needed to control this virus somehow. But we will be feeling this for a long time to come.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  When times become hard, people turn to drugs, depression and religion. The wave will die down with the virus.
  - alibarber 6y ago
    Surely this is a bit of a tautology - like, 'when viruses are endemic, people will suffer from breathing dificulties, pneumonia, low oxygen count and in some cases death'. The idea is, like with COVID, we do something about it. Also no one turns to depression or drug abuse any more than they turn to being admitted to an ICU.
    - dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
      I definitely developed a drug issue during COVID. I wouldn't say I had no choice in it like the people admitted to the ICU. Boredom can predispose you to things, but the choice does lie with the person. Making it seem like the choice is not in your sphere of power makes it only harder to quit. What I said does not apply to depression.
  - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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anewaccount2021 6y ago
I predict California will also be full remote for the coming school year as well.
cassalian 6y ago
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?
- ls612 6y ago
  It’s almost like people don’t actually care for the children, they just know of the social consequences of crossing those who claim they do.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Or, it’s like education is a state and local issue and there is a US military sized budget line item called state and local education spending that’s not included in OP’s calculation of federal spending.
- germinalphrase 6y ago
  The US federal gov’t spends about 3x as much on those over the age of 65 than it does those under the age of 18 (including transfer payments to parents of those children)[0]. Personally, I think that should be flipped, but kid’s don’t vote. [0]https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/23xx/doc2300/fsec.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/23x...
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    Why so?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - germinalphrase 6y ago
      The young have little/no independent earning capacity. The investment we put in the young has a much longer time to accrue positive personal, social and economic benefits. Positive interventions in youth poverty and social stability reduce lifelong skill and mental health deficits that promote adult health, wellness and independence.
inglor_cz 6y ago
I am neither in the U.S. nor a student, not even an extrovert - and I still feel the effects of our local lockdown on my mental stability. So does my wife, who is usually more resilient than I am. This will have a lot of subtle consequences down the line.
- croes 6y ago
  Are you sure it's the lockdown and not only that the lockdown makes you more aware of the danger of the virus?
  - pragmatic8 6y ago
    Well, if the person is healthy and young, I can’t imagine why it’d be the latter.
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      I had a fairly mild case of Covid, with some consequences (heart extrasystoles, muscle twitching) that are almost resolved by now. What messes with me is the missing human contact in person. Skype/Zoom just isn't enough.
    - croes 6y ago
      Because young and healthy only lowers the probability of dying and not the probability of long term effects. "COVID-19 patients also suffer kidney and lung damage at above-average rates, with kidney failure occurring in more than a third of those who become severely ill. In a few cases, the virus has even been found in spinal fluid. This can trigger an immediate infection in the brain known in medical terms as meningoencephalitis. This can also have long-term consequences, such as permanent cognitive problems and memory impairments."
      - anoncake 6y ago
        Your quote doesn't say anything about probabilities, so it does not support your argument.
mrfusion 6y ago
That’s just the tip of the iceberg too. A quick summary of the lockdown harms: missed hospital visits for heart attacks and cancer screening, cancelled childhood vaccinations, school closures, child and spousal abuse, kids growing up without seeing facial expressions on others, pain from postponed elective (including dental) procedures, food shortages in the third world (and even in developed countries), the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in the US, massive economic damage, closed gyms and sports, suicide & mental illness
- mynameishere 6y ago
  To put this into concrete terms, imagine the number of breast cancer screenings that were delayed by two or three months--or more, as some people were so terrified by the pandemic that they pushed back appointments beyond that required. How many? Five hundred thousand? A million? Now how many of those might have caught cancer early? All of those are much more dangerous or even deadly than they might have been. That's one type of preventative treatment. Now picture all the prostate exams, blood work, colonoscopies, skin cancer screenings, etc, etc, etc. Multiply it out and you have a massive scourge caused by the media's promotion of a flu-like disease. But multiplication is hard.
- 1experience 6y ago
  And you aren't even considering the effects on developing countries 150 Million pushed into Extreme Poverty by 2021 https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/covid-19-to-add-as-many-as-150-million-extreme-poor-by-2021 https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/c... 168k child hunger deaths predicted in Africa https://apnews.com/article/africa-hunger-study-coronavirus-children-0e2a17d63163d8558d203b2824a844fe https://apnews.com/article/africa-hunger-study-coronavirus-c...
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    The effects on developing countries are not just on poverty levels but the natural environment as well. Wildlife conservation effects in East Africa and Madagascar are funded predominantly by tourists being able to come in and look at the animals; state support is meagre. A year of no travel has meant no income and some park staff being laid off, which means opening the door to more poaching and illegal land use.
DC1350 6y ago
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.
- ilikedthatone 6y ago
  I find this strange as you probably sitting at computer watching some twitch thing for 10 hours ? young people are spending their time with computerized things for many years already ...
  - DC1350 6y ago
    On a 'regular' day I would be spending 8 hours on campus or at an office for an internship. Probably 90% of the people I interacted with on a typical day would share my goals and understand my life. Now it's all online. So the problem is there's no social pressure to do anything related to my long term goals. The time spent on a computer is not really that important
  - klyrs 6y ago
    You might like cake. Given the choice, you might like to eat cake every day. Maybe it would even take place of breakfast. But what happens if you're only allowed to eat cake?
- throwaway53453 6y ago
  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.
adamnemecek 6y ago
For my me personally, school was a cause of mental anguish.
- carapace 6y ago
  Me too. It was a huge PITA, a sick joke. I doubt it's the lockdown per se that's causing problems rather than making kids sit inside and play what amounts to really crappy video games all day. I mean, that's what this quote says to me: > “Every morning I woke up crying because it was another day of online school.” Can you imagine the torment? It's like something out of Kafka, or "Brazil" (the movie.) Seymour Papert must be whirling in his grave.
renewiltord 6y ago
Teachers' unions saw an opening and they took it. The fact that private schools in SF have been open for so long safely with no public schools open should tell you all you need to know. I, for one, love it. When you're on this side of the wealth spectrum, an expanding gap lifts your ship and sinks the other guy. And I'm all for the pursuit of sheer greed. If other people want to hamstring themselves for whatever reason, I'm not going to stop them. Party on, dudes. Live your worst life.
- zamzoid 6y ago
  Wow. Maybe you didn’t intend this (or maybe you’re just trolling??) but this comment comes across as one of the most callous and tone-deaf things I have ever read. Like, Ebenezer Scrooge level. Families who can’t afford to send their children to private schools are clearly negatively affected by this through basically no fault of their own, and I cannot understand why you choose applaud that. Maybe consider deleting this.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Okay, I can see how it comes across. Personally, I want America to succeed and I think closing schools is bad for that because we're damaging people who are far more precious than us (the next generation). But people get what people vote for. They could smash the teaching unions if they want to. But they could choose not to. So if you choose a path I warned you about and it hurts you, I'm happy to find some positivity in that by insulating myself from you and prospering by not walking off a bridge like you.
    - superflit 6y ago
      You are right and you are being down voted for speaking the truth.
      - 3131s 6y ago
        You both are pathetic. Go pay off your debt, dumbass, because it sounds like you're one step away from being one of the people that this complete idiot renewiltord is referring to.
Tossito190 6y ago
I work in education, I'm also in school and was in school. My educator cohort has uniformly spoken about the retention issues their students have had, it seems shutdowns seriously retarded the academic growth of their students. I can corroborate that, myself: I was forced to leave my studies, and elected to take the fall off, hoping for a return to normalcy in the Spring of '21 - this was done both to ensure that work and school wouldn't conflict, and that I could observe the normal curriculum instead of a haphazard entree of online learning and recorded lectures and sans the labs that I'm paying extra money to participate in. Having returned, things aren't back to "normal", one of my professors elected to use recorded lectures which don't have the same quality as in-person lectures. Not to mention it tries my attention sitting at a computer. I had the same class previously, and returned good grades up to the lockdown, I'm now a C student in the class where I was before an A student. Mathematical concepts have almost entirely slipped. I seem to have forgotten all of my previous training, even simple processes like factoring were lost. I was an B student in the previous class, and had a reasonably solid grasp on the concepts, which we reviewed this year, and I found myself almost entirely lacking. I'm now a struggling C student and whats worse is the constant battery of assessment is actually doing more harm than good, requiring me to hamfistedly smash through chapters without ever studying the subject to develop understanding.
skybrian 6y ago
Strong support for rapid testing could have gotten schools open much sooner and probably prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths. But unfortunately this was largely overlooked by the general public, and the cheapest tests that could do the most good are still not approved by the FDA. https://www.rapidtests.org/ https://www.rapidtests.org/
superflit 6y ago
That was the reason I decided to go in debt to pay for private schools. Not only my kid was able to go to real live class but was more social and not isolated. Is it worth it? Well I have 40K in Debt. My values are that it is worth. Now working 2-3 jobs to pay it all.
- axiolite 6y ago
  Have to wonder if your kid would be happier to spend more time with you, instead of you being away all the time, working extra hours to pay for the private school. Perhaps you could have organized free/cheap social events, instead of paying for them in the form of a private school.
  - superflit 6y ago
    It is not like I sent him to live inside the school. School is from 8:00 to 15:00 with breaks. I deliver and pick up him everyday. We don't have the luxury of not "doing" nothing or having "free/cheap" social events. We just moved and have no social/familiar network. The other option is to be isolated in a apartment watching tv. Both parents need to work. I DO understand parents that were afraid and did not send their kids to the school. But in my case the isolation would be worse. Kids are *very* social they *need* it. There is no "perfect" solution only what is best at moment.
roadbeats 6y ago
On the other side, 10 million kids may never go back to school in the developing countries after pandemic. Probably good for the underground textile shops dressing up the ones who can work from home. https://www.savethechildren.net/news/almost-10-million-children-may-never-return-school-following-covid-19-lockdown https://www.savethechildren.net/news/almost-10-million-child...
croes 6y ago
What would it have been like if the schools had not been closed? If millions had been infected in a short time and the hospitals had been overloaded so that in addition to the deaths from Corona, the deaths from lack of capacity would have been added? How traumatic would that be for the children? Are there any studies on this from New York or Italy? Can the consequences of the lockdown be so cleanly separated from the consequences of the pandemic? Couldn't it also be that the lockdown simply makes people more aware of the threat of the pandemic because it has a tangible impact on their personal lives? It's nice that schools that follow the hygiene rules have fewer COVID cases, but what percentage of schools have the space for it and actually implement it? Why else have studies shown that school closures are one of the top 3 measures against the spread of infection, after closing down restaurants and limiting contacts to 5 people?
- christkv 6y ago
  Lots of European countries kept schools open during most of the pandemic so the answer is quit simple not much. I don’t know what studies you are referencing but they don’t seem to be backed by the experience in European countries.
  - zabzonk 6y ago
    > Lots of European countries kept schools open during most of the pandemic More like "SOME European countries kept schools open during SOME of the pandemic". And look at the state of Covid in the EU now, with infection rates climbing yet again.
    - christkv 6y ago
      Sure but locking down again is not going to change that significantly and even the WHO who I don’t trust at all has consistently been saying that lockdowns should be avoided at all costs.
      - onethought 6y ago
        Australia’s lockdown policies seem to have worked a treat
boomboomsubban 6y ago
So if I'm reading this right, Reuters sent survey's to an unknown number of school districts. Of those sent, 74 replied, and of those 55 answered "yes, we saw an increase in this metric" to at least two questions on the survey. How many would answer yes to at least two in most years? How many schools saw a decrease in metrics? And how many surveys weren't completed, as a district having issues seems more likely to respond? I don't doubt there have been issues, but without the full survey details I don't trust any of this article's conclusions.
- redisman 6y ago
  Also how much of this metric is from the school closure vs the rest of society dealing with covid?
- stareatgoats 6y ago
  >I don't doubt there have been issues Nor do I, and especially the youngest students might be suffering, but at the same time there seems to be an concerted effort from the established "brick-and-mortar" education establishment to discourage from further experiments in the remote learning field, something which seriously threatens the way education has been executed hitherto, being potentially both much cheaper and more individually targeted. That's at least the conclusion that I draw from the fact that there are multiple reports of this supposed mental health hazard that comes with remote learning, but the evidence is notoriously anecdotal. The only reliable real statistic I have seen (from Sweden) is that the quality of learning and grades on average have gone up, if anything.
genericacct 6y ago
I suspect a non student control group would show similar cratering.
decafninja 6y ago
Disclaimer: I am not a parent. Recalling back to my student days, I and my friends would be ecstatic about not going to school for whatever reason. Granted, the most extended no-school period would be the 3 months of summer break. I don't recall any kid ever actually wanting to go to school. Maybe I'm thinking of this all wrong, but I feel it kind of hard to believe kids aren't liking not having to go to school. Did school suddenly turn into a utopia of fun and excitement since the decade+ I was last in a classroom? What I can believe though, is that some kids might be having a hard time not meeting and playing with their friends. But only a small handful of parents seem to be forbidding their kids from doing so anyways, so this still doesn't compute for me.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  A day off and a year off aren't really comparable, though. They're also still largely in school, just remotely. My middle school aged children have Zoom calls, remote band/orchestra lessons, classwork, etc. on their remote days - it's not the same as a snowday.
- MarkLowenstein 6y ago
  I've got two kids in middle/high school, in a 100%-closed-from-beginning school district (still closed). The worst part of the experience has been the monotony of sitting at their desks all day experiencing communication solely via Teams/Zoom meetings. Combined with the monotony of most extra-curricular activities shut down, and a lot of friends lost to sheltering parents, it's increased the number of spontaneous breakdowns in our house...they're doing okay; they're mostly just disappointed. A big chunk of their childhood has been taken away from them, unnecessarily in some of our opinions. What will suffer hugely into the future, though, is participation in sports, music, and other common activities. With a lot of them, like playing an instrument, once you break the chain, people usually don't go back. If we had maybe 40% of kids that age before that had no hobbies or interests to fill their time with before, we're going to have more like 70% now. What will they fill their time with?
- smoldesu 6y ago
  I finished my senior year of high school right when Coronavirus was starting to spread (and graduated in a mask), and I've got mixed thoughts about how this has gone down. On the one hand, I love online school. Zoom calls give me a lot of flexibility to create a better learning environment (listening to music, burning candles, being isolated), but it also takes the urgency out of it all. Last semester I failed 2 classes because the teachers didn't distribute a clear timeline of our work, which made it really difficult to figure out what was due, and when. Ultimately, (surprise surprise) I think it comes down to an issue with our education system as a whole. Teachers are trained to get their students to "jump through the hoop", and when they fail they blame either the system or the student. The United States has an incredible opportunity to reassess what matters to students, and what the modern workforce is looking for. Our rhetoric around education is stuck in the last century, and we're in the middle of the largest paradigm shift the working world has ever seen. Another tangential (but important) thing I've noticed is the disparity between our social messaging and teaching methods. Having spent the last 12 years of my life in a 21st century classroom, the emphasis is still on busywork (with an increasing amount of it automated or digitized. I empathize with the teachers who want to keep their workload to a minimum, but it's entirely at-odds with our social goals to make the next generation of students creative and leaders. In my Junior year, I took an AP Language+Composition class that handed out a grading rubric on the first day of class. Overall, the homework load was weighted as 15% of the total grade, so I simply didn't do it for the first trimester. When my teacher found out, he called me in for a discussion about "home life" and other vaguely patronizing things, but he seemed shocked when I told him that I saw his busywork as an opportunity cost. I felt pretty guilty for the next two trimesters, because at some point he just stopped handing me homework assignments with a defeated look. We shouldn't victimize students for thinking critically, and ideally we shouldn't even put them in positions where they have to choose between extracurriculars and practicing their times-tables. That's just my two cents though.
ern 6y ago
How much of this is caused by remote learning? Kids tend to spend long periods out of school with no ill effects during holidays. They even do a lot of homework without a severe mental health crisis (we presume). The difference could be that they have control over their time. The remote learning experience seems to be needlessly regimented. My own children have repurposed tools for remote learning to keep in touch with their friends: they probably socialize more now than they did pre-pandemic. He would scream and cry multiple times per hour on Zoom,” she said. “It was all really scary and not in keeping with his personality. The fact that children are being tethered to Zoom for hours in regimented routines is really disturbing. Adults can push back, kids don’t have the authority to do so. Our boss tried a group “good morning” routine as a sly way to do a roll-call when we went remote-first, but a limited number of people took the bait, and she quickly learned to trust us.
runjake 6y ago
Not only mental health, but things like basic nutrition, hygiene, and medical care, as well. Many school districts recognized this and offered free meals, healthcare and other services throughout the pandemic. But this still requires parents motivated enough to take their kids by a meal pick-up site. Working with some of these parents throughout the pandemic, some of them (mostly dads) did not know the correct spelling of their child's first name and/or did not know their child's birthday. This wasn't one or two people, this was many. Except for those who put in the work, such handing out meals or providing medical care for essentially free, "Think of the children" is largely a lie in America.
GiorgioG 6y ago
Sample size of 2 children (my 9 year old and 14 year old): neither want to go back to in-person school. In-person school can create its own set of mental health issues. My 14 year old socializes on her phone. The 9 year old is a type 1 diabetic and out of an abundance of caution we pulled him out a month before the school system decided to go remote learning last year. He loathes going back. Neither of my kids are antisocial, but they prefer not dealing with social drama that pervades school. I don't think my kids have had their growth stunted because of our isolation. Quite the contrary, the 14 year old has had time to mature away from school without the influences of less-than-ideal schoolmates. On the other hand, they've had to learn to learn by themselves sometimes when they're stuck and can't get help (and can't wait for us to finish working.) Learning to help oneself is more valuable than anything I ever learned at school. Our 9 year old will probably be homeschooled through June '22 because his age bracket won't be able to get a Covid-19 vaccine until early 2022. He's already asking if we can homeschool him beyond that. It's not all black and white and there is no one-size fits all.
II2II 6y ago
I live in a part of North America that kept its schools open during most of the pandemic. Children are learning and playing together. The games they play are pretty much the games they would have played a bit over a year ago. The adults in their lives don't transfer the stress that they are feeling to children whenever two kids get the urge to hug each other. It is almost as though the pandemic does not exist. For the most part, it does not exist in our small corner of the continent because adults behaved responsibly. This means that most of the measures we take happen behind the scenes: the children have a few more rules to comply with, adults calmly correct them when those rules are broken, and (most important) the focus is on teaching them good habits and sheltering them from the burden of the emotional stresses of this exceptional time. If we have another outbreak, I am all for shutting down the schools as a part of a swift and hopefully short response. Just as keeping children home for months on end is not good for their mental health, exposing them to a twisted version of the classroom environment for an extended period of time is not good for their mental health.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  > as a part of a swift and hopefully short response. Unfortunately that doesn’t work because once you decide to close them, you also need to decide to bite the bullet and open them again. And if it turns out it doesn’t work (or ‘doesn’t work enough’) and cases remain high, that’s a tough decision.
  - II2II 6y ago
    I am not going to claim that it will always work, but it did work the one time our schools were shut down. That being said, we have kept numbers very low. This means the response can be targeted since tracing the source of an infection is more realistic. When it looked like schools would be affected, they were temporarily shut down. Since it came during the Christmas break, only seven days were lost for students and two for staff. The most recent increase did not affect schools, so the response was directed towards the most common causes of spread. Now that new cases are due to travel and direct contact with someone who has travelled, those targeted restrictions are being lifted. Is this approach going to be effective in the long run? Probably not. Remaining on guard for an extended duration is stressful and the virus will eventually catch us off guard. On the other hand, our children are still enjoying their childhood and the burden is not so heavy on adults.
fukmbas 6y ago
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.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  I suggest we start by not trivializing ‘depression, eating disorders, neglect and emotional, physical or sexual abuse’ as simply ‘a sacrifice that had to happen in order to save lives’.
- logicchains 6y ago
  >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.
valuearb 6y ago
My kids were never happier when being schooled remotely. Me on the other hand...
permo-w 6y ago
This is what happens when you institutionalise children
dnndev 6y ago
This sucks. Parents are setup for failure with demanding jobs and low wages. They need more time with children. Public school used to be small classes... now they are basically useless and do more harm than good for the majority. Things are going to get worse unless there is a huge reversal with education, nutrition and the idea of success in life.
Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
Lockdowns after the first month fail any and all cost-benefit analyses. I'm not making political claims or favouring any political causes or parties - but the tremendous costs simply cannot be justified any longer now that they are clearer, and the "at risk" populations are much clearer. Side note: even if you take public choice theory seriously and bake in the assumption that lockdowns will continue to happen despite being devastatingly costly, then the onus becomes vaccination - there is no reason not to approve AstraZeneca's vaccine this instant and roll it out into every arm you can find ASAP, starting with the elderly and the obese. Even if the blood clot thing was real (which is appears not to be), you lose more people to covid than the supposed blood clots. Roll them out, yesterday. PPS: Every major Western country is doing wacky things on this topic, so don't take my comment as commentary on any given country (except re: approval of the AZ vaccine, which is a commentary directly on the FDA of the US).
catholicparent 6y ago
My eldest started kindergarten this year at our local parochial school. We’re so happy they did “in-person”. It was a great success Effect on my kid: 1. My kid was getting really weird by the end o August, after not seeing other peers since March. Her mental well being changed completely. 2. English is not her native tongue, and KG have her a great opportunity to catch up before starting 1st. grade The role of the school: 1. The school has had three cases of COVID all year (k-Gr8. Maybe about 320 kids?). There was no spread of COVID to others. 2. The school implemented a strict regiment to ensure safety. They had strict rules, and trusted the parents to respect them. 3. Only once were we asked to go “online” for two weeks because one of the three cases was a faculty member that worked in our class. That person had gottenCOVID elsewhere and was quickly identified due to periodic testing. 4. Parents were (are) offered virtual learning. No one I know took it except a women who gave birth in January; she pulled her kid once the baby was born. Overall the gratitude my family has of our parochial school is immense. Tuition is very cheap (much cheaper than day care), and it’d be free if we couldn’t afford it.
fullshark 6y ago
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 lifetime, it became even worse in multiple directions. Very few people come out looking good in this, except the scientists and regulators who pushed the vaccine forward.
- ghaff 6y ago
  And, yet, were there significant differences in behavior in Europe overall?
- silvi9 6y ago
  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 forever known as The Lonely Generation if something won't be done to help. Recently, RTE News in Ireland did a segment covering short films that young people made about their experiences in lockdown (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jZWm6tzpQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jZWm6tzpQ), and it was truly harrowing to hear what they had to say and the short films that resulted.
  - ip26 6y ago
    I'm mainly thinking about whether we can get the pendulum to swing the other way now, after ~50 years of increasing isolation.
  - staplers 6y ago
    Terrifyingly, this isolation makes it easier to manipulate and polarize the population. Paired with capitalistic engagement-hungry algorithms, I see a dark future.
sabujp 6y ago
parents also
lazyasciiart 6y ago
This article doesn't even attempt to show differences between mental health effects in school districts with in-person school vs those that stayed in person. It might as well be an opinion piece.
deleted 6y ago
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lazyasciiart 6y ago
An interesting development - students in LA object to returning to school buildings for the sake of being physically present https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdNO2pWrKD7IY9zPi2HI66lmK1ycTXujHL-FnT3t1PfQIVYYw/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdNO2pWrKD7IY9zPi2H...
bumbada 6y ago
It is really nothing particular about schools. In Spain the first day schools were closed children started playing on the streets, or playing basketball and soccer(you can play soccer anywhere). They were quite happy doing that. Then the authorities said: No, no no! Kids must stay in house all day, closed all public spaces, something contranature for kids. It was the get "in house", secluded, don't do anything socially. Too many don'ts with no does. I can stay indoors playing guitar or piano. Reading books,or HN, or cooking. Even then I need to get out from time to time. It is not realistic to expect children doing the same. Most of those activities were not really dangerous with some restrictions. You can go in a bus or car with mask if people don't talk and introduce air from the outside. You can play different basketball or football games with little risk. You can jump rope. But bureaucrats decided they were little monks. They are not. School is not the necessary thing here. It is playing socially and exercising what children need like water and air.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Sure, but the entire point of closing the schools is to force the kids to stay home (or at least stay isolated from others) so just accept the terms mean basically the same thing.
  - Peckingjay 6y ago
    Having 30-ish (or more) children crammed inside a classroom is not the same as having smaller groups of children play together outside in terms of potential transmission.
- gizmo 6y ago
  > You can go in a bus or car with mask if people don't talk and introduce air from the outside. Don't talk don't breathe wear two masks don't leave the house we're all gonna die. In reality kids are not an at-risk group and there used to be a healthcare maxim "first, do no harm". When did it become OK to hurt one group (young healthy people) in exchange for hypothetical benefits to another group?
  - 6y ago
freddealmeida 6y ago
I'm rather against the lockdowns, shutting of schools and businesses or gathering. As adults we should be able to judge correctly based on real data. I think people just lost touch with what makes them human. They should never have agreed to any of this for the mild security they gained. I can go into detail why but it won't convince anyone. You have to look yourself.
- lambdaba 6y ago
  I agree, we only went this way because the discussion about the downsides never had a chance, but I was easy to speculate about the potential upsides (this is also why I believe a large part of the public is clinging on to the narrative that they did, because we can't / won't conceive of them being ineffectual or even detrimental, it wouldn't be "fair").
  - frockington1 6y ago
    Not just never stood a chance, socially outlawed. Last year you were bigoted, racist, un-eductated etc.. if you dared to think differently than the state Science of the time.
helen___keller 6y ago
Neither a parent nor an epidemiologist, so I'm going to stay out of the discussion of whether or not various lockdowns were worth it, but > Of the 74 districts that responded, 74% reported multiple indicators of increased mental health stresses among students. More than half reported rises in mental health referrals and counseling. Hasn't this been a trend for years pre-covid anyways? It will probably take many years to get reliable conclusions on how 2020-2021 actually affected the trajectory of young people, and I'm not convinced either way as of yet.

329 points by accountinhn 6y ago

bko 6y ago

This is really unfortunate second order effect of lockdowns. You see the SAT scores go down as well and some groups don't want to admit the negative effects of in a shift to in home learning, especially among the most vulnerable groups. And we're not even honest about it and just retreat to the idea of getting rid of standardized tests altogether to mask over the achievement gap.

tptacek 6y ago
It's a second-order effect of not prioritizing school reopenings. Lockdowns aren't all-or-nothing.
- crummy 6y ago
  Right. We should have closed restaurants, bars, whatever so we could keep schools open.
  - matz1 6y ago
    No, we shouldn't have lockdown in the first place, keep everything open. Adopt measure that doesn't involve lockdown.
    - jansan 6y ago
      This is debatable, but it is common sense that it shoud have been the target. And for somne reason it wasn't.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    We also should have prioritized epidemiology studies involving schools --- there seems to be a growing consensus that K-8 schools aren't significant spreaders. The HVAC concerns about schools are apparently easily addressed with basic, portable air filters and box fans. There's a lot we could have done differently here.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      > there seems to be a growing consensus that K-8 schools aren't significant spreaders There's almost no evidence for that. It boils down to the virus is absolutely out of control here, and kids are way more likely to be asymptomatic, meaning that it's way harder to nail down that a child to adult transmission occurred outside of the household.
      - _Gyan_ 6y ago
        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 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-19 mortality, and absolute increases in risk were small." "Living with children aged 0-11 was associated with reduced risk of death from both covid-19 and non-covid-19 causes in both waves;"
        monocasa 6y ago
        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.
        _Gyan_ 6y ago
        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_pandemic_on_education_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemi...
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      Growing consensus? The only thing I've ever seen said about it -- which was said quite early on -- was "we have never seen an instance of children spreading the disease to adults".
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    Matt Yglesias wrote an interesting (non-paywalled) piece about this: https://www.slowboring.com/p/school-closure https://www.slowboring.com/p/school-closure > in the actual United States of America, it’s Congress that can write huge checks; it’s mostly states who write rules for restaurants; and schools are a local responsibility — often run by special purpose school boards that have no other governing powers. Given that Congress did not appropriate funds for a bar and restaurant bailout, I don’t think it’s crazy that governors mostly decided they had to reopen their restaurants. And given that this decision ensured continued community spread all through the summer and fall, I don’t think it’s crazy that teachers lobbied to keep schools closed. > D.C. eventually got a leg up thanks to our unusual governance. We are a “mayoral control” city (i.e., the schools are run by a political appointee rather than by a separately elected board), and our city government also performs the functions of a state government. So the mayor, in her capacity as essentially a governor, gave teachers vaccine priority, and then in her capacity as the head of the school system said they had to reopen. I think it’s clear that San Francisco mayor London Breed would do that if she could, but she doesn’t control California vaccination rules and she doesn’t control the San Francisco public schools, so she can’t.
    - lupire 6y ago
      Why can't CA bail out restaurants? Because they are afraid to raise taxes on tech billionaires who made a fortune during the pandemic?
      - easton 6y ago
        Because any raise of taxes would accelerate the conversations happening at every tech company in CA as to whether or not they really need to be there now that they worked remote. Unless Tim Cook's taxes can personally pay for it (since Apple's staying because of their big new building), this isn't a good time to be raising taxes.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Why can't CA bail out restaurants? Because the US system has evolved to one which structurally depends on federal government deficit spending to rapidly meet economic emergencies since the feds have structural advantages in borrowing independent of self-imposed limits (borrowing in a currency you control is a massive advantage) and states tend to have (self-imposed, but inflexible in the short term, since they are usually matters of state constitution) budget rules which require balanced operating budgets and, where they allow debt-financed deficit spending, have slow processes (often something like a legislative vote followed by a public election) to approve it. (Why it's counterproductive to raise taxes, instead of deficit spending, in the middle of a literally once-in-a-century economic downturn to pay for bailouts should be obvious.)
  - ohgodplsno 6y ago
    So, for context, France tried that. Badly, like the rest of our handling of Covid, but we did close restaurants, bars, and everything else, keeping schools open. Not really for the well being of the children, but rather that their parents could not work if they had to handle children. Depressions are still through the roof, grades are low.
    - croes 6y ago
      Because you get depressed if you are isolated and you get depressed if you have to fear to get infected. There is no undepressing way to handle the pandemic, only ways with less infections and deaths.
      - anoncake 6y ago
        Our species has evolved to deal with deaths. Social isolation goes against human nature, it's a lot more harmful than any pandemic.
        croes 6y ago
        Single deaths not mass deaths. And it's social distancing not isolation. The whole lockdown nobody I know was isolated even if in quarantine.
        croes 6y ago
        BTW it's not social but physical distancing. You can be as social as you want, just not so much physical contacts.
        anoncake 6y ago
        Don't expect me to use your euphemisms. Even if you, personally, don't need real human contact. Mass deaths aren't particularly more traumatizing than individual ones. You don't know these people anyway.
      - Robotbeat 6y ago
        The way to solve it was to accelerate vaccines even more than we did. A couple trillion dollars to accelerate vaccine production and rollout (and approval) to cut 6 months off the pandemic. Avoided the big wave in December. We already did better than some feared with vaccine roll out, but we could have done even more. Also, a harder (but shorter) shut down and a firmer masking requirement and really good test and trace and quarantine protocol were additional ways, but apparently not feasible due to having to heard so many cats. Vaccines were more under federal control and could have been accelerated.
  - EVdotIO 6y ago
    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 control, but the lockdowns, at best, were to slow the spread and a stop gap to larger secondary effects.
    - danhak 6y ago
      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"
      - halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
        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.

clcaev 6y ago

There is an interesting article about how race affects the decision to go back to school. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/why-black-parents-arent-joining-the-push-to-reopen-schools/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/why-black-paren...

rayiner 6y ago
It's interesting how Mother Jones spins a fairly minor polling difference into a whole narrative about "Black Parents [Not] Joining the Push to Reopen Schools." First, they clearly are. According to the CDC study cited by the article, 46% of Black parents agreed that schools should reopen in the fall: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6949a2.htm?s_cid=mm6949a2_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6949a2.htm?s_cid=mm.... The article spins out a Black-white difference on this measure because 62% of white parents think schools should reopen in the fall. That modest difference can almost certainly be explained by differences in where people live: Black people are more likely to live in urban areas, where density can feed concerns about easier spread of the disease. They are also more likely to live in Democratic jurisdictions, especially cities, where government officials have been more cautious and have urged more caution about reopening. As a Marylander, I'm not surprised that people in a neighborhood within Baltimore City limits is skeptical about school reopening. The white people up there are also skeptical about reopening! Meanwhile here in exurban Anne Arundel county, people are much more eager about school reopening. We had protests this past summer in front of the county health office (which is by my house) urging the county to reopen high school sports. Black parents were at least as well represented at these protests as they are in the county as a whole (about 15-20%).
- kortilla 6y ago
  It’s Mother Jones, not exactly a bastion of rationalism. If there is a way to use any slight statistical difference to support the current du jour narrative (“white people are the problem” is a big one), you can count on them to do it.
testesttest 6y ago
Not accurate in my community and no data. It is an opinion piece extrapolating from a few examples.

09y234aka 6y ago

the youngest have never mattered, the old steal from them all the same.

sillyconesally 6y ago
As linked elsewhere in the thread, the US Govt. spends 3 times more money (about $615B USD) on those aged 65+ compared to about $175B on children. https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/23xx/doc2300/fsec.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/23x... It is reassuring that we have Bill Gates' leadership in the vaccine debate. He correctly points out that expensive medical costs associated with the elderly could be cut so that we can keep teachers employed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03MZG9vK0W8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03MZG9vK0W8 This is the right attitude, as unfortunately these elderly are mostly white, racist and a net negative to society.

perardi 6y ago

The sun is shining, the vaccines are flowing, I can eat inside now, I am feeling optimistic today. But on my grey days: I wonder how long the mental health trauma of all this will last. Besides school-age depression, there was a noticeable uptick in drug overdoses. (https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/16/as-pandemic-ushered-in-isolation-financial-hardship-overdose-deaths-reached-new-heights/ https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/16/as-pandemic-ushered-in-i...) And, anecdotally, I have several friends and acquaintances who developed severe drug issues during the various stages of lockdown. I fear there’s going to be a lot of dark matter out there, and we won’t detect it until we see the knock-on effects for years down the road. This is not an anti-lockdown screed, I feel like I must say. My dad went into the ICU for something non-COVID in December, and the hospitals then were at the breaking point. (At least where I was.) We needed to control this virus somehow. But we will be feeling this for a long time to come.

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
When times become hard, people turn to drugs, depression and religion. The wave will die down with the virus.
- alibarber 6y ago
  Surely this is a bit of a tautology - like, 'when viruses are endemic, people will suffer from breathing dificulties, pneumonia, low oxygen count and in some cases death'. The idea is, like with COVID, we do something about it. Also no one turns to depression or drug abuse any more than they turn to being admitted to an ICU.
  - dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
    I definitely developed a drug issue during COVID. I wouldn't say I had no choice in it like the people admitted to the ICU. Boredom can predispose you to things, but the choice does lie with the person. Making it seem like the choice is not in your sphere of power makes it only harder to quit. What I said does not apply to depression.
- 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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anewaccount2021 6y ago

I predict California will also be full remote for the coming school year as well.

cassalian 6y ago

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?

ls612 6y ago
It’s almost like people don’t actually care for the children, they just know of the social consequences of crossing those who claim they do.
- rayiner 6y ago
  Or, it’s like education is a state and local issue and there is a US military sized budget line item called state and local education spending that’s not included in OP’s calculation of federal spending.
germinalphrase 6y ago
The US federal gov’t spends about 3x as much on those over the age of 65 than it does those under the age of 18 (including transfer payments to parents of those children)[0]. Personally, I think that should be flipped, but kid’s don’t vote. [0]https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/23xx/doc2300/fsec.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/23x...
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Why so?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - germinalphrase 6y ago
    The young have little/no independent earning capacity. The investment we put in the young has a much longer time to accrue positive personal, social and economic benefits. Positive interventions in youth poverty and social stability reduce lifelong skill and mental health deficits that promote adult health, wellness and independence.

inglor_cz 6y ago

I am neither in the U.S. nor a student, not even an extrovert - and I still feel the effects of our local lockdown on my mental stability. So does my wife, who is usually more resilient than I am. This will have a lot of subtle consequences down the line.

croes 6y ago
Are you sure it's the lockdown and not only that the lockdown makes you more aware of the danger of the virus?
- pragmatic8 6y ago
  Well, if the person is healthy and young, I can’t imagine why it’d be the latter.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    I had a fairly mild case of Covid, with some consequences (heart extrasystoles, muscle twitching) that are almost resolved by now. What messes with me is the missing human contact in person. Skype/Zoom just isn't enough.
  - croes 6y ago
    Because young and healthy only lowers the probability of dying and not the probability of long term effects. "COVID-19 patients also suffer kidney and lung damage at above-average rates, with kidney failure occurring in more than a third of those who become severely ill. In a few cases, the virus has even been found in spinal fluid. This can trigger an immediate infection in the brain known in medical terms as meningoencephalitis. This can also have long-term consequences, such as permanent cognitive problems and memory impairments."
    - anoncake 6y ago
      Your quote doesn't say anything about probabilities, so it does not support your argument.

mrfusion 6y ago

That’s just the tip of the iceberg too. A quick summary of the lockdown harms: missed hospital visits for heart attacks and cancer screening, cancelled childhood vaccinations, school closures, child and spousal abuse, kids growing up without seeing facial expressions on others, pain from postponed elective (including dental) procedures, food shortages in the third world (and even in developed countries), the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in the US, massive economic damage, closed gyms and sports, suicide & mental illness

mynameishere 6y ago
To put this into concrete terms, imagine the number of breast cancer screenings that were delayed by two or three months--or more, as some people were so terrified by the pandemic that they pushed back appointments beyond that required. How many? Five hundred thousand? A million? Now how many of those might have caught cancer early? All of those are much more dangerous or even deadly than they might have been. That's one type of preventative treatment. Now picture all the prostate exams, blood work, colonoscopies, skin cancer screenings, etc, etc, etc. Multiply it out and you have a massive scourge caused by the media's promotion of a flu-like disease. But multiplication is hard.
1experience 6y ago
And you aren't even considering the effects on developing countries 150 Million pushed into Extreme Poverty by 2021 https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/covid-19-to-add-as-many-as-150-million-extreme-poor-by-2021 https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/c... 168k child hunger deaths predicted in Africa https://apnews.com/article/africa-hunger-study-coronavirus-children-0e2a17d63163d8558d203b2824a844fe https://apnews.com/article/africa-hunger-study-coronavirus-c...
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  The effects on developing countries are not just on poverty levels but the natural environment as well. Wildlife conservation effects in East Africa and Madagascar are funded predominantly by tourists being able to come in and look at the animals; state support is meagre. A year of no travel has meant no income and some park staff being laid off, which means opening the door to more poaching and illegal land use.

DC1350 6y ago

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.

ilikedthatone 6y ago
I find this strange as you probably sitting at computer watching some twitch thing for 10 hours ? young people are spending their time with computerized things for many years already ...
- DC1350 6y ago
  On a 'regular' day I would be spending 8 hours on campus or at an office for an internship. Probably 90% of the people I interacted with on a typical day would share my goals and understand my life. Now it's all online. So the problem is there's no social pressure to do anything related to my long term goals. The time spent on a computer is not really that important
- klyrs 6y ago
  You might like cake. Given the choice, you might like to eat cake every day. Maybe it would even take place of breakfast. But what happens if you're only allowed to eat cake?
throwaway53453 6y ago
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.

adamnemecek 6y ago

For my me personally, school was a cause of mental anguish.

carapace 6y ago
Me too. It was a huge PITA, a sick joke. I doubt it's the lockdown per se that's causing problems rather than making kids sit inside and play what amounts to really crappy video games all day. I mean, that's what this quote says to me: > “Every morning I woke up crying because it was another day of online school.” Can you imagine the torment? It's like something out of Kafka, or "Brazil" (the movie.) Seymour Papert must be whirling in his grave.

renewiltord 6y ago

Teachers' unions saw an opening and they took it. The fact that private schools in SF have been open for so long safely with no public schools open should tell you all you need to know. I, for one, love it. When you're on this side of the wealth spectrum, an expanding gap lifts your ship and sinks the other guy. And I'm all for the pursuit of sheer greed. If other people want to hamstring themselves for whatever reason, I'm not going to stop them. Party on, dudes. Live your worst life.

zamzoid 6y ago
Wow. Maybe you didn’t intend this (or maybe you’re just trolling??) but this comment comes across as one of the most callous and tone-deaf things I have ever read. Like, Ebenezer Scrooge level. Families who can’t afford to send their children to private schools are clearly negatively affected by this through basically no fault of their own, and I cannot understand why you choose applaud that. Maybe consider deleting this.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Okay, I can see how it comes across. Personally, I want America to succeed and I think closing schools is bad for that because we're damaging people who are far more precious than us (the next generation). But people get what people vote for. They could smash the teaching unions if they want to. But they could choose not to. So if you choose a path I warned you about and it hurts you, I'm happy to find some positivity in that by insulating myself from you and prospering by not walking off a bridge like you.
  - superflit 6y ago
    You are right and you are being down voted for speaking the truth.
    - 3131s 6y ago
      You both are pathetic. Go pay off your debt, dumbass, because it sounds like you're one step away from being one of the people that this complete idiot renewiltord is referring to.

Tossito190 6y ago

I work in education, I'm also in school and was in school. My educator cohort has uniformly spoken about the retention issues their students have had, it seems shutdowns seriously retarded the academic growth of their students. I can corroborate that, myself: I was forced to leave my studies, and elected to take the fall off, hoping for a return to normalcy in the Spring of '21 - this was done both to ensure that work and school wouldn't conflict, and that I could observe the normal curriculum instead of a haphazard entree of online learning and recorded lectures and sans the labs that I'm paying extra money to participate in. Having returned, things aren't back to "normal", one of my professors elected to use recorded lectures which don't have the same quality as in-person lectures. Not to mention it tries my attention sitting at a computer. I had the same class previously, and returned good grades up to the lockdown, I'm now a C student in the class where I was before an A student. Mathematical concepts have almost entirely slipped. I seem to have forgotten all of my previous training, even simple processes like factoring were lost. I was an B student in the previous class, and had a reasonably solid grasp on the concepts, which we reviewed this year, and I found myself almost entirely lacking. I'm now a struggling C student and whats worse is the constant battery of assessment is actually doing more harm than good, requiring me to hamfistedly smash through chapters without ever studying the subject to develop understanding.

skybrian 6y ago

Strong support for rapid testing could have gotten schools open much sooner and probably prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths. But unfortunately this was largely overlooked by the general public, and the cheapest tests that could do the most good are still not approved by the FDA. https://www.rapidtests.org/ https://www.rapidtests.org/

superflit 6y ago

That was the reason I decided to go in debt to pay for private schools. Not only my kid was able to go to real live class but was more social and not isolated. Is it worth it? Well I have 40K in Debt. My values are that it is worth. Now working 2-3 jobs to pay it all.

axiolite 6y ago
Have to wonder if your kid would be happier to spend more time with you, instead of you being away all the time, working extra hours to pay for the private school. Perhaps you could have organized free/cheap social events, instead of paying for them in the form of a private school.
- superflit 6y ago
  It is not like I sent him to live inside the school. School is from 8:00 to 15:00 with breaks. I deliver and pick up him everyday. We don't have the luxury of not "doing" nothing or having "free/cheap" social events. We just moved and have no social/familiar network. The other option is to be isolated in a apartment watching tv. Both parents need to work. I DO understand parents that were afraid and did not send their kids to the school. But in my case the isolation would be worse. Kids are *very* social they *need* it. There is no "perfect" solution only what is best at moment.

roadbeats 6y ago

On the other side, 10 million kids may never go back to school in the developing countries after pandemic. Probably good for the underground textile shops dressing up the ones who can work from home. https://www.savethechildren.net/news/almost-10-million-children-may-never-return-school-following-covid-19-lockdown https://www.savethechildren.net/news/almost-10-million-child...

croes 6y ago

What would it have been like if the schools had not been closed? If millions had been infected in a short time and the hospitals had been overloaded so that in addition to the deaths from Corona, the deaths from lack of capacity would have been added? How traumatic would that be for the children? Are there any studies on this from New York or Italy? Can the consequences of the lockdown be so cleanly separated from the consequences of the pandemic? Couldn't it also be that the lockdown simply makes people more aware of the threat of the pandemic because it has a tangible impact on their personal lives? It's nice that schools that follow the hygiene rules have fewer COVID cases, but what percentage of schools have the space for it and actually implement it? Why else have studies shown that school closures are one of the top 3 measures against the spread of infection, after closing down restaurants and limiting contacts to 5 people?

christkv 6y ago
Lots of European countries kept schools open during most of the pandemic so the answer is quit simple not much. I don’t know what studies you are referencing but they don’t seem to be backed by the experience in European countries.
- zabzonk 6y ago
  > Lots of European countries kept schools open during most of the pandemic More like "SOME European countries kept schools open during SOME of the pandemic". And look at the state of Covid in the EU now, with infection rates climbing yet again.
  - christkv 6y ago
    Sure but locking down again is not going to change that significantly and even the WHO who I don’t trust at all has consistently been saying that lockdowns should be avoided at all costs.
    - onethought 6y ago
      Australia’s lockdown policies seem to have worked a treat

boomboomsubban 6y ago

So if I'm reading this right, Reuters sent survey's to an unknown number of school districts. Of those sent, 74 replied, and of those 55 answered "yes, we saw an increase in this metric" to at least two questions on the survey. How many would answer yes to at least two in most years? How many schools saw a decrease in metrics? And how many surveys weren't completed, as a district having issues seems more likely to respond? I don't doubt there have been issues, but without the full survey details I don't trust any of this article's conclusions.

redisman 6y ago
Also how much of this metric is from the school closure vs the rest of society dealing with covid?
stareatgoats 6y ago
>I don't doubt there have been issues Nor do I, and especially the youngest students might be suffering, but at the same time there seems to be an concerted effort from the established "brick-and-mortar" education establishment to discourage from further experiments in the remote learning field, something which seriously threatens the way education has been executed hitherto, being potentially both much cheaper and more individually targeted. That's at least the conclusion that I draw from the fact that there are multiple reports of this supposed mental health hazard that comes with remote learning, but the evidence is notoriously anecdotal. The only reliable real statistic I have seen (from Sweden) is that the quality of learning and grades on average have gone up, if anything.

genericacct 6y ago

I suspect a non student control group would show similar cratering.

decafninja 6y ago

Disclaimer: I am not a parent. Recalling back to my student days, I and my friends would be ecstatic about not going to school for whatever reason. Granted, the most extended no-school period would be the 3 months of summer break. I don't recall any kid ever actually wanting to go to school. Maybe I'm thinking of this all wrong, but I feel it kind of hard to believe kids aren't liking not having to go to school. Did school suddenly turn into a utopia of fun and excitement since the decade+ I was last in a classroom? What I can believe though, is that some kids might be having a hard time not meeting and playing with their friends. But only a small handful of parents seem to be forbidding their kids from doing so anyways, so this still doesn't compute for me.

ceejayoz 6y ago
A day off and a year off aren't really comparable, though. They're also still largely in school, just remotely. My middle school aged children have Zoom calls, remote band/orchestra lessons, classwork, etc. on their remote days - it's not the same as a snowday.
MarkLowenstein 6y ago
I've got two kids in middle/high school, in a 100%-closed-from-beginning school district (still closed). The worst part of the experience has been the monotony of sitting at their desks all day experiencing communication solely via Teams/Zoom meetings. Combined with the monotony of most extra-curricular activities shut down, and a lot of friends lost to sheltering parents, it's increased the number of spontaneous breakdowns in our house...they're doing okay; they're mostly just disappointed. A big chunk of their childhood has been taken away from them, unnecessarily in some of our opinions. What will suffer hugely into the future, though, is participation in sports, music, and other common activities. With a lot of them, like playing an instrument, once you break the chain, people usually don't go back. If we had maybe 40% of kids that age before that had no hobbies or interests to fill their time with before, we're going to have more like 70% now. What will they fill their time with?
smoldesu 6y ago
I finished my senior year of high school right when Coronavirus was starting to spread (and graduated in a mask), and I've got mixed thoughts about how this has gone down. On the one hand, I love online school. Zoom calls give me a lot of flexibility to create a better learning environment (listening to music, burning candles, being isolated), but it also takes the urgency out of it all. Last semester I failed 2 classes because the teachers didn't distribute a clear timeline of our work, which made it really difficult to figure out what was due, and when. Ultimately, (surprise surprise) I think it comes down to an issue with our education system as a whole. Teachers are trained to get their students to "jump through the hoop", and when they fail they blame either the system or the student. The United States has an incredible opportunity to reassess what matters to students, and what the modern workforce is looking for. Our rhetoric around education is stuck in the last century, and we're in the middle of the largest paradigm shift the working world has ever seen. Another tangential (but important) thing I've noticed is the disparity between our social messaging and teaching methods. Having spent the last 12 years of my life in a 21st century classroom, the emphasis is still on busywork (with an increasing amount of it automated or digitized. I empathize with the teachers who want to keep their workload to a minimum, but it's entirely at-odds with our social goals to make the next generation of students creative and leaders. In my Junior year, I took an AP Language+Composition class that handed out a grading rubric on the first day of class. Overall, the homework load was weighted as 15% of the total grade, so I simply didn't do it for the first trimester. When my teacher found out, he called me in for a discussion about "home life" and other vaguely patronizing things, but he seemed shocked when I told him that I saw his busywork as an opportunity cost. I felt pretty guilty for the next two trimesters, because at some point he just stopped handing me homework assignments with a defeated look. We shouldn't victimize students for thinking critically, and ideally we shouldn't even put them in positions where they have to choose between extracurriculars and practicing their times-tables. That's just my two cents though.

ern 6y ago

How much of this is caused by remote learning? Kids tend to spend long periods out of school with no ill effects during holidays. They even do a lot of homework without a severe mental health crisis (we presume). The difference could be that they have control over their time. The remote learning experience seems to be needlessly regimented. My own children have repurposed tools for remote learning to keep in touch with their friends: they probably socialize more now than they did pre-pandemic. He would scream and cry multiple times per hour on Zoom,” she said. “It was all really scary and not in keeping with his personality. The fact that children are being tethered to Zoom for hours in regimented routines is really disturbing. Adults can push back, kids don’t have the authority to do so. Our boss tried a group “good morning” routine as a sly way to do a roll-call when we went remote-first, but a limited number of people took the bait, and she quickly learned to trust us.

runjake 6y ago

Not only mental health, but things like basic nutrition, hygiene, and medical care, as well. Many school districts recognized this and offered free meals, healthcare and other services throughout the pandemic. But this still requires parents motivated enough to take their kids by a meal pick-up site. Working with some of these parents throughout the pandemic, some of them (mostly dads) did not know the correct spelling of their child's first name and/or did not know their child's birthday. This wasn't one or two people, this was many. Except for those who put in the work, such handing out meals or providing medical care for essentially free, "Think of the children" is largely a lie in America.

GiorgioG 6y ago

Sample size of 2 children (my 9 year old and 14 year old): neither want to go back to in-person school. In-person school can create its own set of mental health issues. My 14 year old socializes on her phone. The 9 year old is a type 1 diabetic and out of an abundance of caution we pulled him out a month before the school system decided to go remote learning last year. He loathes going back. Neither of my kids are antisocial, but they prefer not dealing with social drama that pervades school. I don't think my kids have had their growth stunted because of our isolation. Quite the contrary, the 14 year old has had time to mature away from school without the influences of less-than-ideal schoolmates. On the other hand, they've had to learn to learn by themselves sometimes when they're stuck and can't get help (and can't wait for us to finish working.) Learning to help oneself is more valuable than anything I ever learned at school. Our 9 year old will probably be homeschooled through June '22 because his age bracket won't be able to get a Covid-19 vaccine until early 2022. He's already asking if we can homeschool him beyond that. It's not all black and white and there is no one-size fits all.

II2II 6y ago

I live in a part of North America that kept its schools open during most of the pandemic. Children are learning and playing together. The games they play are pretty much the games they would have played a bit over a year ago. The adults in their lives don't transfer the stress that they are feeling to children whenever two kids get the urge to hug each other. It is almost as though the pandemic does not exist. For the most part, it does not exist in our small corner of the continent because adults behaved responsibly. This means that most of the measures we take happen behind the scenes: the children have a few more rules to comply with, adults calmly correct them when those rules are broken, and (most important) the focus is on teaching them good habits and sheltering them from the burden of the emotional stresses of this exceptional time. If we have another outbreak, I am all for shutting down the schools as a part of a swift and hopefully short response. Just as keeping children home for months on end is not good for their mental health, exposing them to a twisted version of the classroom environment for an extended period of time is not good for their mental health.

tinus_hn 6y ago
> as a part of a swift and hopefully short response. Unfortunately that doesn’t work because once you decide to close them, you also need to decide to bite the bullet and open them again. And if it turns out it doesn’t work (or ‘doesn’t work enough’) and cases remain high, that’s a tough decision.
- II2II 6y ago
  I am not going to claim that it will always work, but it did work the one time our schools were shut down. That being said, we have kept numbers very low. This means the response can be targeted since tracing the source of an infection is more realistic. When it looked like schools would be affected, they were temporarily shut down. Since it came during the Christmas break, only seven days were lost for students and two for staff. The most recent increase did not affect schools, so the response was directed towards the most common causes of spread. Now that new cases are due to travel and direct contact with someone who has travelled, those targeted restrictions are being lifted. Is this approach going to be effective in the long run? Probably not. Remaining on guard for an extended duration is stressful and the virus will eventually catch us off guard. On the other hand, our children are still enjoying their childhood and the burden is not so heavy on adults.

fukmbas 6y ago

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.

tinus_hn 6y ago
I suggest we start by not trivializing ‘depression, eating disorders, neglect and emotional, physical or sexual abuse’ as simply ‘a sacrifice that had to happen in order to save lives’.
logicchains 6y ago
>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.

valuearb 6y ago

My kids were never happier when being schooled remotely. Me on the other hand...

permo-w 6y ago

This is what happens when you institutionalise children

dnndev 6y ago

This sucks. Parents are setup for failure with demanding jobs and low wages. They need more time with children. Public school used to be small classes... now they are basically useless and do more harm than good for the majority. Things are going to get worse unless there is a huge reversal with education, nutrition and the idea of success in life.

Wolfenstein98k 6y ago

Lockdowns after the first month fail any and all cost-benefit analyses. I'm not making political claims or favouring any political causes or parties - but the tremendous costs simply cannot be justified any longer now that they are clearer, and the "at risk" populations are much clearer. Side note: even if you take public choice theory seriously and bake in the assumption that lockdowns will continue to happen despite being devastatingly costly, then the onus becomes vaccination - there is no reason not to approve AstraZeneca's vaccine this instant and roll it out into every arm you can find ASAP, starting with the elderly and the obese. Even if the blood clot thing was real (which is appears not to be), you lose more people to covid than the supposed blood clots. Roll them out, yesterday. PPS: Every major Western country is doing wacky things on this topic, so don't take my comment as commentary on any given country (except re: approval of the AZ vaccine, which is a commentary directly on the FDA of the US).

catholicparent 6y ago

My eldest started kindergarten this year at our local parochial school. We’re so happy they did “in-person”. It was a great success Effect on my kid: 1. My kid was getting really weird by the end o August, after not seeing other peers since March. Her mental well being changed completely. 2. English is not her native tongue, and KG have her a great opportunity to catch up before starting 1st. grade The role of the school: 1. The school has had three cases of COVID all year (k-Gr8. Maybe about 320 kids?). There was no spread of COVID to others. 2. The school implemented a strict regiment to ensure safety. They had strict rules, and trusted the parents to respect them. 3. Only once were we asked to go “online” for two weeks because one of the three cases was a faculty member that worked in our class. That person had gottenCOVID elsewhere and was quickly identified due to periodic testing. 4. Parents were (are) offered virtual learning. No one I know took it except a women who gave birth in January; she pulled her kid once the baby was born. Overall the gratitude my family has of our parochial school is immense. Tuition is very cheap (much cheaper than day care), and it’d be free if we couldn’t afford it.

fullshark 6y ago

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 lifetime, it became even worse in multiple directions. Very few people come out looking good in this, except the scientists and regulators who pushed the vaccine forward.

ghaff 6y ago
And, yet, were there significant differences in behavior in Europe overall?
silvi9 6y ago
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 forever known as The Lonely Generation if something won't be done to help. Recently, RTE News in Ireland did a segment covering short films that young people made about their experiences in lockdown (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jZWm6tzpQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jZWm6tzpQ), and it was truly harrowing to hear what they had to say and the short films that resulted.
- ip26 6y ago
  I'm mainly thinking about whether we can get the pendulum to swing the other way now, after ~50 years of increasing isolation.
- staplers 6y ago
  Terrifyingly, this isolation makes it easier to manipulate and polarize the population. Paired with capitalistic engagement-hungry algorithms, I see a dark future.

sabujp 6y ago

parents also

lazyasciiart 6y ago

This article doesn't even attempt to show differences between mental health effects in school districts with in-person school vs those that stayed in person. It might as well be an opinion piece.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lazyasciiart 6y ago

An interesting development - students in LA object to returning to school buildings for the sake of being physically present https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdNO2pWrKD7IY9zPi2HI66lmK1ycTXujHL-FnT3t1PfQIVYYw/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdNO2pWrKD7IY9zPi2H...

bumbada 6y ago

It is really nothing particular about schools. In Spain the first day schools were closed children started playing on the streets, or playing basketball and soccer(you can play soccer anywhere). They were quite happy doing that. Then the authorities said: No, no no! Kids must stay in house all day, closed all public spaces, something contranature for kids. It was the get "in house", secluded, don't do anything socially. Too many don'ts with no does. I can stay indoors playing guitar or piano. Reading books,or HN, or cooking. Even then I need to get out from time to time. It is not realistic to expect children doing the same. Most of those activities were not really dangerous with some restrictions. You can go in a bus or car with mask if people don't talk and introduce air from the outside. You can play different basketball or football games with little risk. You can jump rope. But bureaucrats decided they were little monks. They are not. School is not the necessary thing here. It is playing socially and exercising what children need like water and air.

SiempreViernes 6y ago
Sure, but the entire point of closing the schools is to force the kids to stay home (or at least stay isolated from others) so just accept the terms mean basically the same thing.
- Peckingjay 6y ago
  Having 30-ish (or more) children crammed inside a classroom is not the same as having smaller groups of children play together outside in terms of potential transmission.
gizmo 6y ago
> You can go in a bus or car with mask if people don't talk and introduce air from the outside. Don't talk don't breathe wear two masks don't leave the house we're all gonna die. In reality kids are not an at-risk group and there used to be a healthcare maxim "first, do no harm". When did it become OK to hurt one group (young healthy people) in exchange for hypothetical benefits to another group?
- 6y ago

freddealmeida 6y ago

I'm rather against the lockdowns, shutting of schools and businesses or gathering. As adults we should be able to judge correctly based on real data. I think people just lost touch with what makes them human. They should never have agreed to any of this for the mild security they gained. I can go into detail why but it won't convince anyone. You have to look yourself.

lambdaba 6y ago
I agree, we only went this way because the discussion about the downsides never had a chance, but I was easy to speculate about the potential upsides (this is also why I believe a large part of the public is clinging on to the narrative that they did, because we can't / won't conceive of them being ineffectual or even detrimental, it wouldn't be "fair").
- frockington1 6y ago
  Not just never stood a chance, socially outlawed. Last year you were bigoted, racist, un-eductated etc.. if you dared to think differently than the state Science of the time.

helen___keller 6y ago

Neither a parent nor an epidemiologist, so I'm going to stay out of the discussion of whether or not various lockdowns were worth it, but > Of the 74 districts that responded, 74% reported multiple indicators of increased mental health stresses among students. More than half reported rises in mental health referrals and counseling. Hasn't this been a trend for years pre-covid anyways? It will probably take many years to get reliable conclusions on how 2020-2021 actually affected the trajectory of young people, and I'm not convinced either way as of yet.