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> But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. I'm not entirely comfortable with the narrative that the costs and risks weren't weighed car

> But few governments have weighed the costs and risks carefully. I'm not entirely comfortable with the narrative that the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully. It wasn't that the pros and cons weren't weighed. Every human decision involves the weighing of pros and cons. For every decision that harms someone, a person decided that the harms were justified because of some other goal they deemed necessary. The solution is not to generally apply more careful and scientific thinking, because the problem is not a lack of careful and scientific thinking. The agencies in charge are full of people who study this exact problem for a living and are fully qualified and trained for it. What we're really grappling with is a clear mismatch of priorities between the decision makers and the "decision-makees." Why didn't their study and training lead to a decision that we're all comfortable with? If someone is to blame for this poor decision, why have they not been indicted -- and if we, the public, are to blame for our complicity, why haven't yet we acknowledged our mistake? No one wants to point the finger out of fear of being called divisive. But these children will grow up soon and one day ask, "Why us?" I hope we have a better answer for them than, "There was much we didn't know..."

commandlinefan 5y ago
> the costs and risks weren't weighed carefully It's just getting harder and harder, as more and more is revealed, to believe that the costs and risks weren't weighed based on what harm or benefit would come to specific individuals instead of how specific policies would help or hurt specific politicians and political interests. Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk, but nursing homes were forced to accept COVID-positive transfers even though the elderly were at the greatest risk.
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  > Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk Schools aren't closed to (primarily) protect the kids. Where did you get that idea? Schools are closed to protect the teachers, the families, and anyone those people contact that would be infected by those kids spreading infection at schools and then bringing the infection into households.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.” Children, who have the least agency and the least blame for the situation they find themselves in, were being asked to take a pretty big hit for the benefit of many of those who actually did have more agency and blame. We closed the schools just fine but still had a real hard time getting universal mask wearing (for instance) to happen. Yet again, children suffer to pay for the selfish decisions of the adults.
    - CarelessExpert 5y ago
      > If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.” Absolutely, it did! But is that more harm than if their parents, siblings, grandparents, or friends got sick or died from covid? In short: Does that harm outweigh, balance, or is it overwhelmed by the harm caused but not closing schools? That's not an easy question. That being said, while I disagree with how the article's initial positioning on this topic (that governments didn't weigh the harms), I 100% agree with the rest of the article and I hope governments use this as an opportunity to improve education by learning from these experiences. > We closed the schools just fine but still had a real hard time getting universal mask wearing (for instance) to happen. Yet again, children suffer to pay for the selfish decisions of the adults. This is sounding suspiciously like a nirvana fallacy. All solutions for managing COVID are imperfect, and the defenses are layered. I struggle to believe there is any scenario where school closures are not a useful tool in the COVID prevention toolkit. Would it be nice if other measures were more effective and school closures could be used more sparingly? Sure. But we don't live in that world.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  > but nursing homes were forced to accept COVID-positive transfers even though the elderly were at the greatest risk. Yeah. Remind me who ordered that, and whether they're out of office over it? That's so blatantly wrong that it should rise to the level of criminal endangerment, even if nobody died from it. And I'm pretty sure that people did die from it, at which point it's at least manslaughter. Yes, I want that politician charged, because that was the clearly predictable result of that insanely wrong-headed decision.
jfengel 5y ago
It's not clear to me that this was a poor decision. You can't send children to school if there are no teachers. And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Teachers are well aware that whatever is going around among the students will get to them. They get every cold and ever flu. If school boards said, "We're staying open for the sake of the children", teachers would have said, "Fine, watch them yourselves." Compared to that, remote learning was a no-brainer. It's obviously deeply imperfect, and that cost students, but it at least made schooling possible. That literally may not have been the case any other way: send the students to a school building and they may have been the only ones there.
- Natsu 5y ago
  Honestly, I wonder if remote learning couldn't be better for at least some student populations. I have family who were bullied terribly (think on the level of "attacked by a crazy person with a knife at school" and "sexually harassed by teachers") and they probably would've benefited from an easier way of getting away from their tormentors instead of having to quit school and get a GED. I know that's not a one-size-fits-all thing, people are social after all and isolation causes its own issues, but I sort of wonder if remote learning can't become an option for kids, especially those who are poorly-served by their local schools.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  > And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Many of them were at greater risk of death from driving to school than they were from Covid.
  - w-j-w 5y ago
    Does this pass for an argument now? Plenty of teachers are also severely at risk, and there is good reason to think that many would have died painful, preventable deaths had they taught in person.
redis_mlc 5y ago
Fauci admitted in the first month of the lockdown that he only considered medical concerns, not educational or economic. So: 1) He was the wrong guy to be setting policy during corona. 2) This was known a year before his emails were released, which point to an international conspiracy of virologists attempting to maintain corona, and likely GoF, funding. Without billions in govt. funding, their labs (and careers) disappear. The various virologists worked a circuit between US, Canada, Australia and China. All 4 countries are involved in a coverup that various journalists have exposed.
gotoeleven 5y ago
A loud minority of twitter mob participants shouted "You want to kill grandma!" every time anyone tried to discuss the full costs of the lockdowns. People don't want to risk their careers saying things that are unpopular with twitter mobs (especially in academia). So now we're effectively governed by emotional neurotics and government can no longer make reasonable decisions based on a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis.
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  Figuratively speaking, we did kill grandma. We've lost 603,000 human lives during this epidemic, and 90% happened within the first year.
- acatnamedjoe 5y ago
  There is no such thing as dispassionate cost benefit analysis (or at least, there isn't outside of a very narrow range of specific cases). Cost benefit analysis for big complex issues like coronavirus requires the identification and quantification of things that are really difficult to identify and quantify, and there's no easy way to do that without some form of subjective value judgement. CBA done properly is a good way to make these judgements explicit and transparent. CBA done badly is a good way to hide those judgements behind a load of figures. Neither is dispassionate.
  - ryathal 5y ago
    The entire point of a republic and bureaucracy is to have that dispassionate cost benefit analysis. It's to be done by people that shouldn't be subject to the mob mentality.
    - tboyd47 5y ago
      The point of a republic is to limit government, not ensure technocrats can never get fired.
      - ryathal 5y ago
bluefirebrand 5y ago
> But these children will grow up soon and one day ask, "Why us?" I hope we have a better answer for them than, "There was much we didn't know..." It's a good lesson that life is messy and unpredictable and society can only do so much to shield us from that. If they cannot come to grips with the idea that a year of their education was sacrificed to try and save lives during a global pandemic, that's on them. Kids around the world and throughout history lose education for way worse reasons. For instance, when I was growing up I lost at least a year to teacher strikes. My teachers went on strike for months at least once at every level of my education, Elementary, Secondary, and University (Yes, I was paying for it. I lost more than half a semester. No I wasn't refunded or credited for the next year or anything.) I wish I could say I lost that time because we were trying to save lives, instead of "My teachers union was happy to use my education as a bargaining chip in trying to negotiate for a better collective agreement, and my school board would rather let me and everyone else go without than give the teachers union what they wanted" At least "we were trying to slow a pandemic and save lives" sounds heroic.

commandlinefan 5y ago

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

CarelessExpert 5y ago
> Schools were closed even though children were at the least risk Schools aren't closed to (primarily) protect the kids. Where did you get that idea? Schools are closed to protect the teachers, the families, and anyone those people contact that would be infected by those kids spreading infection at schools and then bringing the infection into households.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.” Children, who have the least agency and the least blame for the situation they find themselves in, were being asked to take a pretty big hit for the benefit of many of those who actually did have more agency and blame. We closed the schools just fine but still had a real hard time getting universal mask wearing (for instance) to happen. Yet again, children suffer to pay for the selfish decisions of the adults.
  - CarelessExpert 5y ago
    > If the schools weren’t closed to protect the kids, then that seems to bolster the claim in the headline, “closing the world’s schools caused children great harm.” Absolutely, it did! But is that more harm than if their parents, siblings, grandparents, or friends got sick or died from covid? In short: Does that harm outweigh, balance, or is it overwhelmed by the harm caused but not closing schools? That's not an easy question. That being said, while I disagree with how the article's initial positioning on this topic (that governments didn't weigh the harms), I 100% agree with the rest of the article and I hope governments use this as an opportunity to improve education by learning from these experiences. > We closed the schools just fine but still had a real hard time getting universal mask wearing (for instance) to happen. Yet again, children suffer to pay for the selfish decisions of the adults. This is sounding suspiciously like a nirvana fallacy. All solutions for managing COVID are imperfect, and the defenses are layered. I struggle to believe there is any scenario where school closures are not a useful tool in the COVID prevention toolkit. Would it be nice if other measures were more effective and school closures could be used more sparingly? Sure. But we don't live in that world.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
> but nursing homes were forced to accept COVID-positive transfers even though the elderly were at the greatest risk. Yeah. Remind me who ordered that, and whether they're out of office over it? That's so blatantly wrong that it should rise to the level of criminal endangerment, even if nobody died from it. And I'm pretty sure that people did die from it, at which point it's at least manslaughter. Yes, I want that politician charged, because that was the clearly predictable result of that insanely wrong-headed decision.

jfengel 5y ago

It's not clear to me that this was a poor decision. You can't send children to school if there are no teachers. And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Teachers are well aware that whatever is going around among the students will get to them. They get every cold and ever flu. If school boards said, "We're staying open for the sake of the children", teachers would have said, "Fine, watch them yourselves." Compared to that, remote learning was a no-brainer. It's obviously deeply imperfect, and that cost students, but it at least made schooling possible. That literally may not have been the case any other way: send the students to a school building and they may have been the only ones there.

Natsu 5y ago
Honestly, I wonder if remote learning couldn't be better for at least some student populations. I have family who were bullied terribly (think on the level of "attacked by a crazy person with a knife at school" and "sexually harassed by teachers") and they probably would've benefited from an easier way of getting away from their tormentors instead of having to quit school and get a GED. I know that's not a one-size-fits-all thing, people are social after all and isolation causes its own issues, but I sort of wonder if remote learning can't become an option for kids, especially those who are poorly-served by their local schools.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
AndrewBissell 5y ago
> And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Many of them were at greater risk of death from driving to school than they were from Covid.
- w-j-w 5y ago
  Does this pass for an argument now? Plenty of teachers are also severely at risk, and there is good reason to think that many would have died painful, preventable deaths had they taught in person.

redis_mlc 5y ago

Fauci admitted in the first month of the lockdown that he only considered medical concerns, not educational or economic. So: 1) He was the wrong guy to be setting policy during corona. 2) This was known a year before his emails were released, which point to an international conspiracy of virologists attempting to maintain corona, and likely GoF, funding. Without billions in govt. funding, their labs (and careers) disappear. The various virologists worked a circuit between US, Canada, Australia and China. All 4 countries are involved in a coverup that various journalists have exposed.

gotoeleven 5y ago

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

matthewdgreen 5y ago
Figuratively speaking, we did kill grandma. We've lost 603,000 human lives during this epidemic, and 90% happened within the first year.
acatnamedjoe 5y ago
There is no such thing as dispassionate cost benefit analysis (or at least, there isn't outside of a very narrow range of specific cases). Cost benefit analysis for big complex issues like coronavirus requires the identification and quantification of things that are really difficult to identify and quantify, and there's no easy way to do that without some form of subjective value judgement. CBA done properly is a good way to make these judgements explicit and transparent. CBA done badly is a good way to hide those judgements behind a load of figures. Neither is dispassionate.
- ryathal 5y ago
  The entire point of a republic and bureaucracy is to have that dispassionate cost benefit analysis. It's to be done by people that shouldn't be subject to the mob mentality.
  - tboyd47 5y ago
    The point of a republic is to limit government, not ensure technocrats can never get fired.
    - ryathal 5y ago

bluefirebrand 5y ago

> But these children will grow up soon and one day ask, "Why us?" I hope we have a better answer for them than, "There was much we didn't know..." It's a good lesson that life is messy and unpredictable and society can only do so much to shield us from that. If they cannot come to grips with the idea that a year of their education was sacrificed to try and save lives during a global pandemic, that's on them. Kids around the world and throughout history lose education for way worse reasons. For instance, when I was growing up I lost at least a year to teacher strikes. My teachers went on strike for months at least once at every level of my education, Elementary, Secondary, and University (Yes, I was paying for it. I lost more than half a semester. No I wasn't refunded or credited for the next year or anything.) I wish I could say I lost that time because we were trying to save lives, instead of "My teachers union was happy to use my education as a bargaining chip in trying to negotiate for a better collective agreement, and my school board would rather let me and everyone else go without than give the teachers union what they wanted" At least "we were trying to slow a pandemic and save lives" sounds heroic.