6 ms·

I’m curious how much of this increase can be attributed to suicide? If I recall correctly, suicide rates for children ages 5-11 are up dramatically from pre-pan

I’m curious how much of this increase can be attributed to suicide? If I recall correctly, suicide rates for children ages 5-11 are up dramatically from pre-pandemic levels.* I can only imagine that the increase is the same or even worse for ages 18 to 64. We’ve tortured and hindered the youth of this country to protect folks age 60+. Children are struggling academically due to a lost 1+ year of proper education. The reading gap in 1st-3rd grade is real and documented. And the lingering mental damage … well, we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s not looking good. *to be fair, they were increasing at a worrying rate year over year pre-pandemic

boopmaster 5y ago
edit: forget I said anything. There’s unlikely to be civil or sane discourse on this topic.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  You can delete comments within a few minutes of leaving them. (Although if my reply is blocking this, sorry!)
Bergingen 5y ago
Imagine a society which is not able to handle a pandemic in a better way than just to throw people age 60+ under the bus. Interesting thought. For what do we optimize actually? For the working class? For human lives? You know what would have not been an issue if we would talk to each other and would find a global compromise independent of capitalism? A pandemic. We would just take our knowledge and resources we have and transform it temporarily in a setup in were its not an issue to work from home, work less for a year or two, have family and friend clusters were subgroups can visit each other without spreading virusus, high vaccine rate, masks everywere. I don't mind discussing IF our society should throw older people under the bus, but only if we accept that we did a lot of stuff shitty before and we could do it much better. But also lets not forget one thing: This is a pandemic. Our first pandemic in a modern time, unique to our society. We have handled it much better than 100 years ago.
- ilumanty 5y ago
  > We have handled it much better than 100 years ago. Is that so? The pandemic seems far from over. I think it is a little early to draw any conclusions.
  - hagbard_c 5y ago
    The Danish authorities assume the "Omicron" variant will be the "natural vaccine" which will end the pandemic in about 2 months [1]. As far as I'm concerned it has been over since the vaccines became available for anyone who cares to take them. While they have proven to be ineffective with regard to getting and spreading SARS2 they did seem to be moderately effective in reducing the need for hospitalisation for the earlier strains - up to and including "Delta". This does not seem to be true for the "Omicron" variant but fortunately this variant seems to require far fewer hospitalisations and have a much lower mortality. Knowing that natural immunity is both far stronger as well as longer-lasting compared to the temporary boost in antibodies caused by recent vaccination and seeing how "Omicron" infects vaccinated and unvaccinated alike this seems like a done deal. As far as I'm concerned, it is. [1] https://www.dn.se/varlden/danmark-omikron-kan-fa-slut-pa-pandemin-i-var/ https://www.dn.se/varlden/danmark-omikron-kan-fa-slut-pa-pan...
    - eigenrick 5y ago
      That's my hope as well, but I think it's mostly wishful thinking. Best case: Omicron gives everyone a baseline resistance, so that future mutations are more like the flu. We'll get new mutations a couple times a year. Some will contact them, some won't. It will be fatal to those with comorbidities (just like the flu) I don't think covid is ever actually going away, though. It is just too contagious.
      - hagbard_c 5y ago
        "End of the pandemic" does not mean the end of the disease, it means it will become endemic and as such something we have to deal with. Influenza is endemic, it takes many lives yet society abides. The same will be true for SARS2 until it either dies out by itself (like SARS1 did) or some generic coronavirus vaccine takes out this class of pathogen once and for all.
0x0nyandesu 5y ago
I'm not anti mask but people are way too dismissive of the damage done to children who have to wear masks all the time. Especially when it comes to socializing, learning facial cues, and being able to express emotions. We really have dropped the ball and turned valid concerns by parents into a political finger pointing shit storm.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  > We really have dropped the ball and turned valid concerns by parents into a political finger pointing shit storm. Who's "we?" Politicians?
  - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
    Gonna go with everyone. Every day I see some parent go "my kids have no problem wearing masks". Thing is I realized recently that as a kid with a bpd mother one reason I grew up as a shy nerdy shut in was because any time I did anything it would cause a giant fight with my mom so I just gave up and stopped trying. Now I realize it fucked me up in multiple ways being like that. I imagine it's much the same with a lot of these kids. They have zero agency to go against it.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      >They have zero agency to go against it. Regardless of how you or I feel about the usefulness of masks this is a side benefit to many parents and schools. Schools want kids that just bend over and take whatever flavor of capricious BS they're producing on a given week. Few parents want kids with agency and critical thinking skills because you can't just lie to them to get them to do what you want. Everyone says they want critical thinking but look at their actions.
      - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
        Honestly one reason I don't want kids is that I don't want to deal with schools, parents, and the whole infrastructure of child rearing in today's day. Even five generations ago you had 5 kids and just fed and clothed them..maybe sent them to school if you could but generally they helped you out at home and then went to work and got married and became largely independent by age 20. In today's era the entire concept of raising children is exhausting and not really sustainable. Society wants you to put in literally 10x the amount of hours into child rearing in contrast to what my great grandmother had to deal with. And everyone acts so insanely self righteous and judgy about it.
causi 5y ago
Children are struggling academically due to a lost 1+ year of proper education. Covid-19 causes brain damage in children: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2777392 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2... Even non-hospitalized covid-19 cases cause measurable cognitive impairment: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... Mental damage vs brain damage, take your pick. Personally I pick the one that doesn't kill their grandparents, seeing as childhood trauma also causes cognitive impairment.
- Hendrikto 5y ago
  This black and white "Wear your mask or your grandparents will die." viewpoint is not helpful. One can discuss (dis)advantages of certain approaches without entirely discounting them.
  - Arnt 5y ago
    Difficult in this case; some of those anti-vaccine people are terrible about misreading and misquoting. You may have seen statements recently along the lines of "high vaccination rates don't lead to improvement, study says" that started out as something more like "dropping lockdowns and other measurements in favour of high vaccination rates doesn't lead to improvement" in the study. Depressing.
- Proven 5y ago
- hallihax 5y ago
  It's not black and white; a lost year of education is a terrible thing on its own in terms of future prospects - but kids need to be around their peers for reasons that go beyond academic success. Lengthy periods of isolation are normally considered a punishment for a reason. It's not supposed to last indefinitely or be a constant threat based on factors they can't control, and appeals to the greater good can only be justified for so long (and only when the effects of the restrictions put in place are actually effective and not overridden by other harms they may cause).
nenadst 5y ago
at least in 2020 suicides in the US actually decreased .. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234
hagbard_c 5y ago
There will be a future reckoning with the paranoid pandemic policies, unfortunately [1] this will mostly likely ignore those who put them in place. I happen to live in Sweden where we've been mostly spared in this regard but even the relatively mild measures have left there mark on my children, mostly my oldest (now 17) daughter. She was forced online for a few months which markedly lowered her results. It ended with me more or less home-schooling her (something which is forbidden in Sweden) to get her back on track - not to mention to get her out of bed in the morning. [1] unfortunately because this means there is no disincentive against future regulatory misbehaviour
gadders 5y ago
From the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (via the Spectator): https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/masks-in-schools-how-convincing-is-the-government-s-evidence- https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/masks-in-schools-how-con... "The Evidence Summary from the Department for Education (DfE) accepts the harm inflicted by face masks in class. It cites research showing that: ‘80 per cent of pupils reported that wearing a face covering made it difficult to communicate, and more than half (55 per cent) felt wearing one made learning more difficult’ ‘Face coverings may have physical side effects and impair face identification, verbal and non-verbal communication between teacher and learner.’ ‘Almost all secondary leaders and teachers (94 per cent) thought that wearing face coverings has made communication between teachers and students more difficult, with 59 per cent saying it has made it a lot more difficult.’" And also in the article: "The DfE study of 123 schools says that in schools with masks, Covid absences fell to 3 per cent, from 5.3 per cent — a 2.3 per cent drop. In schools that did not have masks — 1,192 of them — there was a 1.7 per cent drop: a small difference of 0.6 percentage points. As the DfE accepts, the 123-school analysis is 'non-peer reviewed' and 'shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow-up period'. So the results are within the margin of error, in a study that has not been properly assessed in the standard academic way."
Pyramus 5y ago
> We’ve tortured and hindered the youth of this country to protect folks age 60+. I don't understand how this extreme rhetoric will lead anywhere. It distracts from the actual discussion about how to distribute the burden of the pandemic, and is dishonest in two ways: a) It makes a whole lot of difference whether you lose one year in education vs. actually dying, b) It frames the pandemic as a problem of the folks 60+, when instead the collapse of health systems and economies harms all members of society. It is certainly a possibility that as a society, we have under-estimated the burden on children, and time will tell. However, in every single jurisdiction I know schools were the last public system to be locked down, and the first to re-open.
- disambiguation 5y ago
  a) This is a false dichotomy, it isn't a binary choice between education and death. 0-17 accounts for 678 *total covid deaths* [0] b) This IS a problem of people 60+ and 50+. Collapse affects everyone, but the vast majority of deaths and hospitalizations are among individuals in this age cohort (~93%). If hospitals collapse it won't be because the kids went to school. The goal of this rhetoric should be to guide everyone towards consensus so we can plan better for the next time around. If it sounds extreme, maybe that's because it should be treated with urgency. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  > I don't understand how this extreme rhetoric will lead anywhere So what do you think about the ‘if you go to school you’re killing grandma’ rhetoric?
GiorgioG 5y ago
> We’ve tortured and hindered the youth of this country to protect folks age 60+. Have we become so mentally weak that the last 2 years have been considered "torture"? > Children are struggling academically due to a lost 1+ year of proper education. The worst kept secret is that schools in the US are little more than babysitting services. > And the lingering mental damage … well, we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s not looking good. My son is a type 1 diabetic and we pulled him out of school a month before schools went virtual and he hasn't been back. He hasn't played with his friends in 18 months. He's still a happy go lucky kid. Kids are adaptable. It's not all doom and gloom.
wayoutthere 5y ago
Suicides were actually down. This is entirely due to Covid deaths. This effect is so large you can’t minimize it, and some of these kids who didn’t die will have lifelong issues because of Covid. It doesn’t only kill old people. And it always amazes me that people are just now caring about kids education. Our school systems have been demonstrably backsliding for 20 years. The ranks of teachers are thinner than ever, and the pay/benefits are so low teachers aren’t going to risk their lives to go into the classroom — many were already working second jobs, which made it really easy to stop teaching. You want to improve kids education? Invest in the school systems, because a big part of the reason the pandemic was so negative for kids’ learning is that we had starved our public school systems of resources for decades before anyone ever got sick.
pwinnski 5y ago
There was much fear about a rise in suicide among children during any sort of lockdown, but actual evidence suggests that suicide rates fell rather than rising.[0] One might infer that school itself drives suicide among children, or one might say only that correlation should not be confused with causation, and we don't know why the suicide rate fell during the pandemic. What one should never do, of course, is to claim that suicides are up dramatically when they aren't. Anecdotally, although my 11-year-old daughter has been back at school since September of last year, she loves wearing masks at school and in public generally. She plays volleyball while wearing a mask. Not all children are struggling or feel tortured or hindered. 0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8110323/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8110323/

boopmaster 5y ago

edit: forget I said anything. There’s unlikely to be civil or sane discourse on this topic.

AussieWog93 5y ago
You can delete comments within a few minutes of leaving them. (Although if my reply is blocking this, sorry!)

Bergingen 5y ago

Imagine a society which is not able to handle a pandemic in a better way than just to throw people age 60+ under the bus. Interesting thought. For what do we optimize actually? For the working class? For human lives? You know what would have not been an issue if we would talk to each other and would find a global compromise independent of capitalism? A pandemic. We would just take our knowledge and resources we have and transform it temporarily in a setup in were its not an issue to work from home, work less for a year or two, have family and friend clusters were subgroups can visit each other without spreading virusus, high vaccine rate, masks everywere. I don't mind discussing IF our society should throw older people under the bus, but only if we accept that we did a lot of stuff shitty before and we could do it much better. But also lets not forget one thing: This is a pandemic. Our first pandemic in a modern time, unique to our society. We have handled it much better than 100 years ago.

ilumanty 5y ago
> We have handled it much better than 100 years ago. Is that so? The pandemic seems far from over. I think it is a little early to draw any conclusions.
- hagbard_c 5y ago
  The Danish authorities assume the "Omicron" variant will be the "natural vaccine" which will end the pandemic in about 2 months [1]. As far as I'm concerned it has been over since the vaccines became available for anyone who cares to take them. While they have proven to be ineffective with regard to getting and spreading SARS2 they did seem to be moderately effective in reducing the need for hospitalisation for the earlier strains - up to and including "Delta". This does not seem to be true for the "Omicron" variant but fortunately this variant seems to require far fewer hospitalisations and have a much lower mortality. Knowing that natural immunity is both far stronger as well as longer-lasting compared to the temporary boost in antibodies caused by recent vaccination and seeing how "Omicron" infects vaccinated and unvaccinated alike this seems like a done deal. As far as I'm concerned, it is. [1] https://www.dn.se/varlden/danmark-omikron-kan-fa-slut-pa-pandemin-i-var/ https://www.dn.se/varlden/danmark-omikron-kan-fa-slut-pa-pan...
  - eigenrick 5y ago
    That's my hope as well, but I think it's mostly wishful thinking. Best case: Omicron gives everyone a baseline resistance, so that future mutations are more like the flu. We'll get new mutations a couple times a year. Some will contact them, some won't. It will be fatal to those with comorbidities (just like the flu) I don't think covid is ever actually going away, though. It is just too contagious.
    - hagbard_c 5y ago
      "End of the pandemic" does not mean the end of the disease, it means it will become endemic and as such something we have to deal with. Influenza is endemic, it takes many lives yet society abides. The same will be true for SARS2 until it either dies out by itself (like SARS1 did) or some generic coronavirus vaccine takes out this class of pathogen once and for all.

0x0nyandesu 5y ago

I'm not anti mask but people are way too dismissive of the damage done to children who have to wear masks all the time. Especially when it comes to socializing, learning facial cues, and being able to express emotions. We really have dropped the ball and turned valid concerns by parents into a political finger pointing shit storm.

ErikVandeWater 5y ago
> We really have dropped the ball and turned valid concerns by parents into a political finger pointing shit storm. Who's "we?" Politicians?
- 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
  Gonna go with everyone. Every day I see some parent go "my kids have no problem wearing masks". Thing is I realized recently that as a kid with a bpd mother one reason I grew up as a shy nerdy shut in was because any time I did anything it would cause a giant fight with my mom so I just gave up and stopped trying. Now I realize it fucked me up in multiple ways being like that. I imagine it's much the same with a lot of these kids. They have zero agency to go against it.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >They have zero agency to go against it. Regardless of how you or I feel about the usefulness of masks this is a side benefit to many parents and schools. Schools want kids that just bend over and take whatever flavor of capricious BS they're producing on a given week. Few parents want kids with agency and critical thinking skills because you can't just lie to them to get them to do what you want. Everyone says they want critical thinking but look at their actions.
    - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
      Honestly one reason I don't want kids is that I don't want to deal with schools, parents, and the whole infrastructure of child rearing in today's day. Even five generations ago you had 5 kids and just fed and clothed them..maybe sent them to school if you could but generally they helped you out at home and then went to work and got married and became largely independent by age 20. In today's era the entire concept of raising children is exhausting and not really sustainable. Society wants you to put in literally 10x the amount of hours into child rearing in contrast to what my great grandmother had to deal with. And everyone acts so insanely self righteous and judgy about it.

causi 5y ago

Children are struggling academically due to a lost 1+ year of proper education. Covid-19 causes brain damage in children: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2777392 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2... Even non-hospitalized covid-19 cases cause measurable cognitive impairment: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... Mental damage vs brain damage, take your pick. Personally I pick the one that doesn't kill their grandparents, seeing as childhood trauma also causes cognitive impairment.

Hendrikto 5y ago
This black and white "Wear your mask or your grandparents will die." viewpoint is not helpful. One can discuss (dis)advantages of certain approaches without entirely discounting them.
- Arnt 5y ago
  Difficult in this case; some of those anti-vaccine people are terrible about misreading and misquoting. You may have seen statements recently along the lines of "high vaccination rates don't lead to improvement, study says" that started out as something more like "dropping lockdowns and other measurements in favour of high vaccination rates doesn't lead to improvement" in the study. Depressing.
Proven 5y ago
hallihax 5y ago
It's not black and white; a lost year of education is a terrible thing on its own in terms of future prospects - but kids need to be around their peers for reasons that go beyond academic success. Lengthy periods of isolation are normally considered a punishment for a reason. It's not supposed to last indefinitely or be a constant threat based on factors they can't control, and appeals to the greater good can only be justified for so long (and only when the effects of the restrictions put in place are actually effective and not overridden by other harms they may cause).

nenadst 5y ago

at least in 2020 suicides in the US actually decreased .. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234

hagbard_c 5y ago

There will be a future reckoning with the paranoid pandemic policies, unfortunately [1] this will mostly likely ignore those who put them in place. I happen to live in Sweden where we've been mostly spared in this regard but even the relatively mild measures have left there mark on my children, mostly my oldest (now 17) daughter. She was forced online for a few months which markedly lowered her results. It ended with me more or less home-schooling her (something which is forbidden in Sweden) to get her back on track - not to mention to get her out of bed in the morning. [1] unfortunately because this means there is no disincentive against future regulatory misbehaviour

gadders 5y ago

From the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (via the Spectator): https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/masks-in-schools-how-convincing-is-the-government-s-evidence- https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/masks-in-schools-how-con... "The Evidence Summary from the Department for Education (DfE) accepts the harm inflicted by face masks in class. It cites research showing that: ‘80 per cent of pupils reported that wearing a face covering made it difficult to communicate, and more than half (55 per cent) felt wearing one made learning more difficult’ ‘Face coverings may have physical side effects and impair face identification, verbal and non-verbal communication between teacher and learner.’ ‘Almost all secondary leaders and teachers (94 per cent) thought that wearing face coverings has made communication between teachers and students more difficult, with 59 per cent saying it has made it a lot more difficult.’" And also in the article: "The DfE study of 123 schools says that in schools with masks, Covid absences fell to 3 per cent, from 5.3 per cent — a 2.3 per cent drop. In schools that did not have masks — 1,192 of them — there was a 1.7 per cent drop: a small difference of 0.6 percentage points. As the DfE accepts, the 123-school analysis is 'non-peer reviewed' and 'shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow-up period'. So the results are within the margin of error, in a study that has not been properly assessed in the standard academic way."

Pyramus 5y ago

> We’ve tortured and hindered the youth of this country to protect folks age 60+. I don't understand how this extreme rhetoric will lead anywhere. It distracts from the actual discussion about how to distribute the burden of the pandemic, and is dishonest in two ways: a) It makes a whole lot of difference whether you lose one year in education vs. actually dying, b) It frames the pandemic as a problem of the folks 60+, when instead the collapse of health systems and economies harms all members of society. It is certainly a possibility that as a society, we have under-estimated the burden on children, and time will tell. However, in every single jurisdiction I know schools were the last public system to be locked down, and the first to re-open.

disambiguation 5y ago
a) This is a false dichotomy, it isn't a binary choice between education and death. 0-17 accounts for 678 *total covid deaths* [0] b) This IS a problem of people 60+ and 50+. Collapse affects everyone, but the vast majority of deaths and hospitalizations are among individuals in this age cohort (~93%). If hospitals collapse it won't be because the kids went to school. The goal of this rhetoric should be to guide everyone towards consensus so we can plan better for the next time around. If it sounds extreme, maybe that's because it should be treated with urgency. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
tinus_hn 5y ago
> I don't understand how this extreme rhetoric will lead anywhere So what do you think about the ‘if you go to school you’re killing grandma’ rhetoric?

GiorgioG 5y ago

> We’ve tortured and hindered the youth of this country to protect folks age 60+. Have we become so mentally weak that the last 2 years have been considered "torture"? > Children are struggling academically due to a lost 1+ year of proper education. The worst kept secret is that schools in the US are little more than babysitting services. > And the lingering mental damage … well, we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s not looking good. My son is a type 1 diabetic and we pulled him out of school a month before schools went virtual and he hasn't been back. He hasn't played with his friends in 18 months. He's still a happy go lucky kid. Kids are adaptable. It's not all doom and gloom.

wayoutthere 5y ago

Suicides were actually down. This is entirely due to Covid deaths. This effect is so large you can’t minimize it, and some of these kids who didn’t die will have lifelong issues because of Covid. It doesn’t only kill old people. And it always amazes me that people are just now caring about kids education. Our school systems have been demonstrably backsliding for 20 years. The ranks of teachers are thinner than ever, and the pay/benefits are so low teachers aren’t going to risk their lives to go into the classroom — many were already working second jobs, which made it really easy to stop teaching. You want to improve kids education? Invest in the school systems, because a big part of the reason the pandemic was so negative for kids’ learning is that we had starved our public school systems of resources for decades before anyone ever got sick.

pwinnski 5y ago

There was much fear about a rise in suicide among children during any sort of lockdown, but actual evidence suggests that suicide rates fell rather than rising.[0] One might infer that school itself drives suicide among children, or one might say only that correlation should not be confused with causation, and we don't know why the suicide rate fell during the pandemic. What one should never do, of course, is to claim that suicides are up dramatically when they aren't. Anecdotally, although my 11-year-old daughter has been back at school since September of last year, she loves wearing masks at school and in public generally. She plays volleyball while wearing a mask. Not all children are struggling or feel tortured or hindered. 0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8110323/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8110323/