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>>The pandemic also revealed that when left to their own devices, people make judgements based on their own individual circumstances without any consideration w

>>The pandemic also revealed that when left to their own devices, people make judgements based on their own individual circumstances without any consideration whatsoever given to the circumstances of others. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but generally people adjusted their behavior based on rational risk benefit assessments: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19... >>Atkeson (February 2021) then used the same model with a simple behavioral adjustment that allowed individuals to change behavior in light of the value of Rt . >>The new forecast of daily deaths is shown as the blue line in panel (b) of Figure 2. Adding the single behavioral response completely changed the model’s predictive power. The model now tracks the actual progression of the daily deaths very closely. In correspondence with Atkeson he provided the reason for this result: The intuition for this result is simple. If new infections and daily deaths from the disease grow too high, people take costly efforts to avoid interaction and thus slow disease spread. Likewise, if the prevalence of the disease falls toward zero, then the demand for costly disease prevention efforts also falls towards zero, and so the >>– >>disease will come back unless the population has already achieved herd immunity measured at pre-pandemic levels of behavior. Regarding this: >>The idea that we can let young people do whatever they want while isolating and protecting the old and vulnerable has always been false in our society. Many vulnerable people died as a result. It's created paradoxes where we send kids to school because they are not vulnerable; meanwhile their teachers are in fact vulnerable and have predictably died at a frequency that has created teacher and substitute shortages. Young people should take priority over the old. This is not acceptable: "Longitudinal Trends in Body Mass Index Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic Among Persons Aged 2–19 Years — United States, 2018–2020" https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm7037a3_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm... Neither is this: "Covid-19: Children born during the pandemic score lower on cognitive tests, study finds" https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2031 https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2031 And for what? The lockdown proponents projected 96,000 COVID deaths by July 1st 2020 in Sweden without a lockdown. The real number was approximately 20 times lower, at 5,400, the vast majority the elderly. Is robbing a million young people of a year of their development worth maybe reducing this 5,400 death toll? I think clearly it's not. You need to consider the damage done by lockdowns, not just by COVID. Just this alone makes the whole exercise unacceptable: "30-40 percent of minority and low-income students weren’t learning during lockdowns" https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leading-through-the-crisis/charting-the-path-to-the-next-normal/30-to-40-percent-of-minority-and-low-income-students-werent-learning-during-lockdowns https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi... And the premise of your argument - that young people being able to live normally was such an unacceptably high risk to those older than them that it should have been forbidden - is very tenuous, with some findings suggesting that there was very little COVID spread through schools: "Incidence and Secondary Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Schools " https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/147/4/e2020048090/180871/Incidence-and-Secondary-Transmission-of-SARS-CoV-2 https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/147/4/e20200... >>Fentanyl has been a problem long before the pandemic I never implied otherwise. My only comment was on the spike in deaths. >>and many of the places that are most affected by increased fentanyl deaths over the last 2 years have imposed the least restrictive lockdown measures [0]: Alaska had a stay-at-home order, and in any case would have been amongst the most affected by the lockdowns, as it severely impacted travel between Alaska and the continental US. I don't see anything in that list suggesting that less locked down states saw a bigger spike in fentanyl deaths. In your list, all had stay-at-home orders: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-stay-at-home-order.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-stay... And all of them had restrictions that persisted long after the stay-at-home order was lifted. Which of those states didn't shut down in person schooling? >>Florida, a state which advertises itself as the state of freedom, and whose governor has positioned himself as an anti-lockdown champion, has the worst fentanyl deaths in the entire nation. So I don't know how much you can say about the causation between lockdowns and fentanyl overdoses. Completely irrelevant to my point, which again, is about the spike in fentanyl deaths. Yes Florida has for a long time a massive drug problem, probably due to being the largest gateway for drugs entering the US. Obviously this massive spike in fentanyl deaths is due to behavioral changes relating to the pandemic. And by far the behavioral change most likely to have contributed is social isolation, which is a known risk factor for drug use. You can't simultaneously argue that people are not risk averse enough to be left to their own devices, and thus we need lockdowns, while arguing that lockdowns did not contribute to the spike in fentanyl deaths through their impact on behavior. >>One demographic that has seen the highest increase and absolute rates of fentanyl deaths has been African Americans, particularly young men and teens. If your contention is that fentanyl is a drug of despair, why are you assuming lockdowns are the source of that despair? During the summer of 2020, African Americans (and Americans of all backgrounds) highlighted one of the most pressing concerns in their community: police violence against black men and teens. Have you considered this despair as a possibility for the increase in overdose deaths (particularly considering many of the states hit hardest have very high black populations)? The spike in fentanyl deaths was seen in all demographics. And to me it's common sense that being forced to stay home, and prevented from socially interacting, is going to be a far more likely source of despair, than some perception of police brutality stemming from the video of George Floyd's death. I don't see how you are so easily dismissing the damage that lockdowns/social-isolation can do to people. People being negatively affected by social isolation and economic decline is completely predictable. Social isolation in particular is known to massively increase mortality risk: "Social Isolation: A Predictor of Mortality Comparable to Traditional Clinical Risk Factors" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3871270/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3871270/ Even George Floyd had lost his job as a bouncer at a club due to the lockdowns before his attempt to use a fake $20 bill led to the deadly police interaction that killed him.

ModernMech 5y ago
Your arguments are very confusing to me, because on the one hand you are arguing that lockdowns are not good and that they should not have been done because of the damage due to social isolation and other economic follow-on effects. But then you link to a post that argues that we didn't need to lock down, because people would have taken costly (what costs? They don't say afaict) measures to lock themselves down anyway. I mean, take the passage you linked. What is this supposed to show? They have one model that is unreasonably bad, and then they refine it so that it is more reasonable, and then they show it better tracks the data. The intuition for this result is simple. If new infections and daily deaths from the disease grow too high, people take costly efforts to avoid interaction and thus slow disease spread. So basically lockdowns. But how does this avoid any of the damage you're talking about? How do schools and businesses stay open under these circumstances, where everyone has decided independently on their own volition to isolate? > Young people should take priority over the old. Yes, I'm a teacher so I'm not going to argue with you there. I spend a lot of time putting children first. But this line of reasoning always seems to forget the fact that there's a lot of old people involved in teaching children. The people who demand to keep schools open usually seem to stop short of demanding that teachers are protected. Let's look at your linked study for instance. This study shows that they had a successful start of the Fall 2020 semester in North Carolina. How did they do it? In weekly superintendent meetings, several key contributors to success were noted: daily screening of students and staff, high rates of mask wearing adherence for children and adults, transparency in publicly reporting confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections (eg, via Web site), efficient contact tracing, close collaboration with local health departments, regular updates with staff and principals to encourage adherence and report secondary transmission cases or any breaches in safety protocols, detailed schedule for all aspects of the school day to adhere to the 3W’s, definitive plans for the special needs community, and opening in the hybrid model of instruction. These refinements informed the 12 Principles for Safer Schools. There was also full buy in from participating faculty, and plenty of training and education. During the period of Aug-Oct 2020 in North Carolina, community spread in general was low. It's true that schools are safer than many places if the proper precautions are taken. But that goes out the window when community spread is high. This distinction has been lost on many. This is a far cry to the environment of 2021, when community spread was quite high and parents were demanding teachers back to school in front of mask-less, unvaccinated children. Look what happened in Georgia at the beginning of their school year: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/60-georgia-teachers-staff-lost-covid-19-since-start-school-year/SFURXQOXAJH25E3VGVZGTEU3HI/ https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/60-georgia-teachers... The average age of the 42 teachers on this list who have died is 46 years old. The youngest was in their 20s. I don't know if this needs to be said, but dozens of young teachers do not usually die before the school year starts. There's a substitute teacher shortage [2], a bus driver shortage [3], school closures due to staffing shortages (not even COVID) [4], and yet people are out there demanding that this system be fully operational for their kids, immediately. That's not normal, and young people cannot expect normalcy given the above. Whatever aggregate statistics you have about this situation, what they will fail to note is that even a single teacher death can throw an entire school and even a district into disorder in this environment. Because there are no replacements. No one wants to sub. No one wants to be a teacher anymore so it's hard to hire. When one teacher goes down then you have to tap unqualified people to teach a subject they aren't used to, and everyone is already oversubscribed. I mean, you're so worried about student outcomes, what happens to outcomes when teachers die and they are replaced with clueless substitutes? That's not a good learning environment either. > My only comment was on the spike in deaths. Right, but you immediately go to the idea that it's a spike due to despair from lockdowns. But if fentanyl has been a problem for a long time, maybe it's due to other reasons. For instance, the report you linked puts forth the notion that covid disrupted supply chains, leading to an increase in supply of tainted fentanyl batches, leading to a spike in deaths for people who potentially had already been using fentanyl before any lockdowns. So how would their deaths be due to despair at lockdowns? > And all of them had restrictions that persisted long after the stay-at-home order was lifted. Which of those states didn't shut down in person schooling? That's not the point, the point is that if loneliness due to lockdowns is causing fentanyl related deaths, then why are the states affected the most in the South or a border state? Like you said, Florida is a gateway for that stuff, so what if it's just that supply and opportunity increased, it comes over the border and affects those states most, but then it's also distributed across the country so it'll have an effect everywhere. Where is the connection from loneliness to deaths? You just have not shown it conclusively. > Obviously this massive spike in fentanyl deaths is due to behavioral changes relating to the pandemic. And by far the behavioral change most likely to have contributed is social isolation, which is a known risk factor for drug use. No, not obviously, that's the whole point here. None of this is obvious. You say "by far" and "most likely" with such confidence, but I am not as confident as you, and I don't know where you get your confidence from because it's not reflected in the articles you've posted as evidence for your positions. What about the other risk factors, and what's the interplay between those and the pandemic? Such as for instance, would someone's family member or friend dying due to COVID correlate to an increase in drug use? How does that compare to someone being lonely and isolated? What about someone who is feeling isolated and then their family dies? Did they start drugs because they were lonely or grieving a loss? I just don't see any accounting for these nuances in your posts, and so I just have to wonder what makes you so sure of your position, that you speak in superlatives? > You can't simultaneously argue that people are not risk averse enough to be left to their own devices, and thus we need lockdowns, while arguing that lockdowns did not contribute to the spike in fentanyl deaths through their impact on behavior. I'm not arguing Covid didn't increase fentanyl related deaths of despair; I'm arguing that you didn't show causation. But while you mention it, you can't simultaneously argue that lockdowns are the result of despair related deaths, at the same time you argue that when left to their own devices, people will lock down on their own when confronted with COVID. Everyone around you voluntarily choosing to isolate themselves would have the same isolative effect on you as if the government told them to do it. > Even George Floyd had lost his job as a bouncer at a club due to the lockdowns before his attempt to use a fake $20 bill led to the deadly police interaction that killed him. I assume you said this in response to my having brought up the BLM protests of 2020, but to be clear those protests were not in fact about George Floyd; he was the catalyst, but 2020 was in response to a long string of murders. If you're trying to insinuate that lockdowns caused those protests by proxy, no. Cops murdering black men well before lockdowns caused those protests. [0] https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/least-50-georgia-te https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/least-50-georgia-te... [1] https://www.ajc.com/education/get-schooled-blog/teacher-my-p https://www.ajc.com/education/get-schooled-blog/teacher-my-p... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/labor-shortage-georgia-schoo https://www.businessinsider.com/labor-shortage-georgia-schoo... [3] https://thegeorgiavirtue.com/georgia-news/bus-driver-shortag https://thegeorgiavirtue.com/georgia-news/bus-driver-shortag... [4] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/entire-south-ga-school-dis https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/entire-south-ga-school-dis...

ModernMech 5y ago

Your arguments are very confusing to me, because on the one hand you are arguing that lockdowns are not good and that they should not have been done because of the damage due to social isolation and other economic follow-on effects. But then you link to a post that argues that we didn't need to lock down, because people would have taken costly (what costs? They don't say afaict) measures to lock themselves down anyway. I mean, take the passage you linked. What is this supposed to show? They have one model that is unreasonably bad, and then they refine it so that it is more reasonable, and then they show it better tracks the data. The intuition for this result is simple. If new infections and daily deaths from the disease grow too high, people take costly efforts to avoid interaction and thus slow disease spread. So basically lockdowns. But how does this avoid any of the damage you're talking about? How do schools and businesses stay open under these circumstances, where everyone has decided independently on their own volition to isolate? > Young people should take priority over the old. Yes, I'm a teacher so I'm not going to argue with you there. I spend a lot of time putting children first. But this line of reasoning always seems to forget the fact that there's a lot of old people involved in teaching children. The people who demand to keep schools open usually seem to stop short of demanding that teachers are protected. Let's look at your linked study for instance. This study shows that they had a successful start of the Fall 2020 semester in North Carolina. How did they do it? In weekly superintendent meetings, several key contributors to success were noted: daily screening of students and staff, high rates of mask wearing adherence for children and adults, transparency in publicly reporting confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections (eg, via Web site), efficient contact tracing, close collaboration with local health departments, regular updates with staff and principals to encourage adherence and report secondary transmission cases or any breaches in safety protocols, detailed schedule for all aspects of the school day to adhere to the 3W’s, definitive plans for the special needs community, and opening in the hybrid model of instruction. These refinements informed the 12 Principles for Safer Schools. There was also full buy in from participating faculty, and plenty of training and education. During the period of Aug-Oct 2020 in North Carolina, community spread in general was low. It's true that schools are safer than many places if the proper precautions are taken. But that goes out the window when community spread is high. This distinction has been lost on many. This is a far cry to the environment of 2021, when community spread was quite high and parents were demanding teachers back to school in front of mask-less, unvaccinated children. Look what happened in Georgia at the beginning of their school year: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/60-georgia-teachers-staff-lost-covid-19-since-start-school-year/SFURXQOXAJH25E3VGVZGTEU3HI/ https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/60-georgia-teachers... The average age of the 42 teachers on this list who have died is 46 years old. The youngest was in their 20s. I don't know if this needs to be said, but dozens of young teachers do not usually die before the school year starts. There's a substitute teacher shortage [2], a bus driver shortage [3], school closures due to staffing shortages (not even COVID) [4], and yet people are out there demanding that this system be fully operational for their kids, immediately. That's not normal, and young people cannot expect normalcy given the above. Whatever aggregate statistics you have about this situation, what they will fail to note is that even a single teacher death can throw an entire school and even a district into disorder in this environment. Because there are no replacements. No one wants to sub. No one wants to be a teacher anymore so it's hard to hire. When one teacher goes down then you have to tap unqualified people to teach a subject they aren't used to, and everyone is already oversubscribed. I mean, you're so worried about student outcomes, what happens to outcomes when teachers die and they are replaced with clueless substitutes? That's not a good learning environment either. > My only comment was on the spike in deaths. Right, but you immediately go to the idea that it's a spike due to despair from lockdowns. But if fentanyl has been a problem for a long time, maybe it's due to other reasons. For instance, the report you linked puts forth the notion that covid disrupted supply chains, leading to an increase in supply of tainted fentanyl batches, leading to a spike in deaths for people who potentially had already been using fentanyl before any lockdowns. So how would their deaths be due to despair at lockdowns? > And all of them had restrictions that persisted long after the stay-at-home order was lifted. Which of those states didn't shut down in person schooling? That's not the point, the point is that if loneliness due to lockdowns is causing fentanyl related deaths, then why are the states affected the most in the South or a border state? Like you said, Florida is a gateway for that stuff, so what if it's just that supply and opportunity increased, it comes over the border and affects those states most, but then it's also distributed across the country so it'll have an effect everywhere. Where is the connection from loneliness to deaths? You just have not shown it conclusively. > Obviously this massive spike in fentanyl deaths is due to behavioral changes relating to the pandemic. And by far the behavioral change most likely to have contributed is social isolation, which is a known risk factor for drug use. No, not obviously, that's the whole point here. None of this is obvious. You say "by far" and "most likely" with such confidence, but I am not as confident as you, and I don't know where you get your confidence from because it's not reflected in the articles you've posted as evidence for your positions. What about the other risk factors, and what's the interplay between those and the pandemic? Such as for instance, would someone's family member or friend dying due to COVID correlate to an increase in drug use? How does that compare to someone being lonely and isolated? What about someone who is feeling isolated and then their family dies? Did they start drugs because they were lonely or grieving a loss? I just don't see any accounting for these nuances in your posts, and so I just have to wonder what makes you so sure of your position, that you speak in superlatives? > You can't simultaneously argue that people are not risk averse enough to be left to their own devices, and thus we need lockdowns, while arguing that lockdowns did not contribute to the spike in fentanyl deaths through their impact on behavior. I'm not arguing Covid didn't increase fentanyl related deaths of despair; I'm arguing that you didn't show causation. But while you mention it, you can't simultaneously argue that lockdowns are the result of despair related deaths, at the same time you argue that when left to their own devices, people will lock down on their own when confronted with COVID. Everyone around you voluntarily choosing to isolate themselves would have the same isolative effect on you as if the government told them to do it. > Even George Floyd had lost his job as a bouncer at a club due to the lockdowns before his attempt to use a fake $20 bill led to the deadly police interaction that killed him. I assume you said this in response to my having brought up the BLM protests of 2020, but to be clear those protests were not in fact about George Floyd; he was the catalyst, but 2020 was in response to a long string of murders. If you're trying to insinuate that lockdowns caused those protests by proxy, no. Cops murdering black men well before lockdowns caused those protests. [0] https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/least-50-georgia-te https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/least-50-georgia-te... [1] https://www.ajc.com/education/get-schooled-blog/teacher-my-p https://www.ajc.com/education/get-schooled-blog/teacher-my-p... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/labor-shortage-georgia-schoo https://www.businessinsider.com/labor-shortage-georgia-schoo... [3] https://thegeorgiavirtue.com/georgia-news/bus-driver-shortag https://thegeorgiavirtue.com/georgia-news/bus-driver-shortag... [4] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/entire-south-ga-school-dis https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/entire-south-ga-school-dis...