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It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this. I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive sc

by lumb63 5y ago

It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this. I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health. However, to propose that forcing (or, at the least, very strongly encouraging) an entire populace into self-isolation would not have negative impacts for a group in one of the most social and formative times of life, is absurd. Imagine you spent half the time you were in high school, alone. I cannot imagine any rational person is capable of believing this to not be a major factor to their mental health. Anecdotally, I am a reasonably strong introvert, and I switched teams at my job during the pandemic after nine months of work from home because it did not feel healthy to my mental state to not have interacted with anyone in so long. I felt that my social abilities had atrophied, and that I had lost sight of a lot of the important things in life that derive from social interaction. I can only imagine that the impact is far greater to someone who can't choose to change their life to obtain the social interaction they are missing, and who (I am generalizing a bit here) probably requires mental/emotional guidance and support from their peers, elders, etc.

PathOfEclipse 5y ago
People may rationalize these things because the alternative is to admit that one may have been wrong and/or caused harm to others in the process. People would rather downplay the harms caused by the pandemic to avoid guilt.
- rjh29 5y ago
  I've used that argument and the counter is: depression due to lockdown can heal once lockdown is over. People dying because hospitals filled up and cases climbed is permanent.
  - henrikschroder 5y ago
    Suicidal ideation among kids in the US is up 100%, suicide attempts are up 50%, actual suicides are up 20%. Dead kids are also pretty &¤#&%#!" permanent. And this is the thing that's been missing for the past two years: A sensible cost/benefit discussion. Hell, we haven't even acknowledged that every single pandemic rule and restriction and measure has a cost in human life. Instead, we've been getting shitty platitudes about how "kids are resilient", or "it's just two weeks", or "your surgery is non-essential and therefore postponed".
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      >> [Column A] People dying because hospitals filled up and cases climbed is permanent. > [Column B] Dead kids are also pretty &¤#&%#!" permanent. > And this is the thing that's been missing for the past two years: A sensible cost/benefit discussion. So, which is higher: Column A or Column B? I haven't checked the numbers, but I'd be astounded if there wasn't at least and order of magnitude more COVID deaths during this pandemic than total number of teen suicides (i.e. all of them, not just the increase due to the pandemic).
  - incrudible 5y ago
    These children will never fully recover their formative years. Also, what impact, if any, did the treatment of young people have on the ultimate death toll from this virus? We will never know, but I am afraid if we could, we would not like the answer.
    - ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
      Closig schools has been the core of the US pandemic influenza control strategy since the second Bush administration. There were detailed simulations showing that shutting schools is the only single intervention that can significantly affect R: schools are the best place for spreading influenza due to the very small spacing between seats in classrooms, the number of students who pack into schoolbusses daily, etc. (However, the studies were done before masking everyone was a possibility.)
      - nradov 5y ago
        Sweden mostly kept primary schools open, and didn't even impose mask mandates on students, and they came through fine.
      - earleybird 5y ago
        Most parents with k-8 children should know this first-hand. Memory is fading but as I recall, two weeks after school year started we could pretty much expect a bug to come home. (continuing through out the winter months of the school year)
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  Acknowledging the damage done by isolation doesn't mean you have to believe it was the wrong choice. In my country a million people have died of covid even with the isolations. Was it "worth it"? I don't fucking know and I don't believe anyone else does either. Would it have been better to just let it rip and hope for the best? How many more would have died that way, and would our mental health be better for it? If it was, could we even live with that? If there was a button that would cure my depression and kill a stranger, I wouldn't push it. EDIT: ok yeah I get it consensus is we should have pushed the button you can stop telling me now.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    Would they have died anyway, or did they die with Covid? It’s the repeated question, together with “Didn’t the flu cause as many deaths”, and even if it was actual death, it’s a transfer of years of life from the young to the elderly.
    - lumost 5y ago
      Curiously the elderly seem to feel the most robbed. In my family, the young locked down while the elderly went about as normal. Discussing this today, the predominant feeling amongst the over 70 cohort was that they had at best a few more years of health with everyone and didn’t want to spend that in lockdown.
  - incrudible 5y ago
    In the beginning, it was widely accepted that the virus would spread and ultimately infect most people. Yet, two weeks to flatten the curve somehow turned into two years of flailing about aimlessly with ineffective measures.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > Yet, two weeks to flatten the curve somehow turned into two years of flailing about aimlessly with ineffective measures. 1) Whenever someone mentions "flatten the curve" in that way, the implication always seems to be the CDC et. al should have had this novel disease figured out from day one, but that's an unreasonable expectation. 2) A big reason those measures were as not as effective as they could have been was that people were actively undermining them pretty much from day one.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > People would rather downplay the harms caused by the pandemic to avoid guilt. The pandemic had nothing to do with keeping kids out of school for more than a year. That was all humans doing. The virus didn't wake up some morning and tell us to shut down down schools. Lockdowns and government caused virtually all of the lasting side-effects from the last two years. It is my strong opinion that history will not look kindly to almost every single thing humanity did the last two years. They were humans at their absolute worst... Making knee jerk decisions based on fear and panic never end up well...
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    My state in Australia had a lockdown where for a while it was not permitted to go outside for fitness by yourself. I can't imagine the physical and mental health damage this caused.
    - earleybird 5y ago
      Had those in Canada too. There seemed to be the medical based rules (distancing, limited occupancy, washing hands) which made sense. And then there were the "me too, more must be better" types. For example, closing down provincial parks seemed odd. These parks are not rabbit warrens; but no, you can't. Going for a walk down a trail in an urban woodland park where distancing is not an issue - nope. What is/was sorely lacking was a common (medical) sense approach to the rules and I think that's what tipped the scale for some (many?) folks that there was overreach with the lockdown rules.
    - oulu2006 5y ago
      What state was that? I don't think we had that in NSW, or at least I never took notice of it and always just went out by myself for a walk even during the hard lock down days.
      - Gigachad 5y ago
        South Australia. It was actually only for a few days but they had planned to do it for much longer before they worked out the whole lockdown was based on a lie from one of the cases.
- onphonenow 5y ago
  What a load of crock. My elderly father, terminal illness, was hit by the lockdown days before coming to visit us. He DOES NOT CARE about covid. He is dying anyways. Then they wouldn't let our young son go play with friends or play on beach. This is lifetime impact stuff at 2-3. When I wore an N95 mask I was told over and over it didn't help. Hello, it's an airborne disease, why wouldn't my mask help? So we can't wear an N95, we CAN go to crowded grocery stores, we CAN'T go outside to the beach (huge volume of onshore fresh air and sunshine) and school is remote only (for a 2 year old this is TERRIBLE). Worst of all, despite the talk of being "science driven" they have not been releasing age banded fatality rates by variant and a timely basis so folks can make informed decisions. We got fed so much BS that the hit is going to be very long lasting in terms of credibility of the "establishment". My father has a phd in a hard science. My wife has a phd in a hard science. If you are losing these folks, you are losing LOTS of folks. That makes me wonder, what IS the fatality rate for 5 year olds. Seriously give me a table. Is it lower than just random accidents per 100? Finally, why can't I wear a mask (N95 with ventilator) that is comfortable so easier to wear and protects me. ANd others can make their own decisions. Instead we spent huge amounts of effort trying to force people who may not have believed in mask wearing to wear masks, but these masks (cloth / surgical) were I suspect largely ineffective.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    How do masks work on the flu virus but not on COVID https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4 It sounds like you have been dealing with a lot of ineffective health theater. That is unfortunate. But that's a very different thing from "cloth/surgical masks are largely ineffective".
    - onphonenow 5y ago
      Sure. We are told that an N95 with a vent is "ineffective" and prohibited, but someone wearing a bandana is OK. That at least was the guidance for a long time. So based on this, the cloth masks, bandana's, gators etc need to BEAT an N95 with an exhalation valve to be considered effective. Of course, it turns out that an N95 with an exhalation valve is VERY good at protecting the wearer, and AS GOOD as all these others at protecting others. "The findings in this report are based on tests of 13 FFR models from 10 different manufacturers. These findings show that FFRs with an exhalation valve provide respiratory protection to the wearer and can also reduce particle emissions to levels similar to or better than those provided by surgical masks, procedure masks, or cloth face coverings." https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2021-107/default.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2021-107/default.html "An N95 filtering facepiece respirator will protect you and provide source control to protect others. A NIOSH-approved N95 filtering facepiece respirator with an exhalation valve offers the same protection to the wearer as one that does not have a valve. As source control, findings from NIOSH research suggest that, even without covering the valve, N95 respirators with exhalation valves provide the same or better source control than surgical masks, procedure masks, cloth masks, or fabric coverings." https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirator-use-faq.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirator-use... So, my elderly parents trying to fly United Airlines are BANNED from wearing a comfortable N95 with an exhalation valve that would do a GREAT job protecting them. Instead they are told to wear a surgical mask (which does relatively little by comparison to a well fit N95) especially on INHALATION, where a surgical mask often passes air long the sides. And they sit next to folks barely wearing a light cloth mask that may no almost nothing. Again, why not let folks make their own decisions? Concerned? At high risk? Let my elderly parents wear an N95 with exhalation valve, they can wear that comfortably for 3-4 hours if needed. Instead it is this theatre just as you describe, but based on so little actual research (and so unwilling to change with new research) that it is crazy.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
Imagine you spent half the time you were in high school, alone. I don’t speak for anyone but myself, and I am an extreme outlier. But I would have been delighted. Alone, I could spend my time how I want, learn what I want, and associate with who I wish. There is also a much larger pool of love interests online than offline, especially in small town Missouri. People just feel differently.
- newsclues 5y ago
  I’m a loner. I’m happy alone with a PC and internet, when it’s my choice. During the pandemic, I live alone and have had minimal contact with family. Going months on end, lack of sun in northern climate, not seeing human faces in real life… the government said we had stay at home. Nope, I’m going out for a bike ride. Choosing to be a basement dweller is one thing but this has been close to prison.
sva_ 5y ago
There was a discussion on here, about how the Covid pandemic may have been one of the, or even the biggest transfers of wealth from "the poor" to "the rich" in the history of our civilization. Somebody remarked, that it has also been the biggest transfer of lifetime from the young to the old, as the lockdowns were mostly to protect the old. The measures taken against the pandemic undoubtedly had a huge impact on young people's mental health, but the effects of it will only really unfold in the coming years, and are probably not measurable. People who deny this must be willfully ignorant.
- after_care 5y ago
  From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about managing hospital capacity. While this might disproportionally benefited older folks, hospitals are a service anyone could need at any time for a wide range of reasons.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    > From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about managing hospital capacity And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk. We should have relaxed our approach to all this when cities across the country were closing their unused field hospitals. Instead of celebrating the fact that covid wasn't nearly as lethal as the earliest models predicted, governors across the country doubled down on their covid restrictions. Two years later, they are finally almost gone. Did any of these restrictions provide enough benefit to justify their immense social cost? It will probably take much cooler heads to find out. It troubles me that we went into this mess with little understanding if the measures even worked. In effect, we took millions and millions of people and had them partake in a massive uncontrolled experiment without anybody's consent.
    - kevinventullo 5y ago
      there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk I know several people who had to delay surgeries and other medical procedures because of hospital capacity due to COVID.
thr0wawayf00 5y ago
You're absolutely right, and I've heard firsthand accounts of this. My sister-in-law is a middle school counselor at a large midwest US public school system and her stories about kids dealing with the pandemic are heartbreaking, the mental health support system in some US schools is completely falling apart due to the workload. She's never seen a mental health crisis on this scale in schools in her entire career. She remarks that kids really weren't able to learn much during the pandemic due to remote learning and in many cases are now playing catch-up to get back on track. The school system she works for basically didn't hold anyone back for a year because they had no real way of knowing who progressed as her school district cancelled standardized testing. Anyone who believes that the pandemic wasn't a serious setback for many kids developmentally is woefully out of touch with reality.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > they had no real way of knowing who progressed as her school district cancelled standardized testing. The schools want to remove all evidence that would contradict their claims of doing a great job.
  - thr0wawayf00 5y ago
    ...or they lacked the resources and infrastructure to accurately assess students as nobody had been prepared to move the entire public education system online for an extended period of time.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      The drive to eliminate all standardized testing has been going on for many years.
      - alar44 5y ago
        Because it's being directly tied to funding. Do well, more funds. Tests are low, less funds. It's completely ass backwards. Teachers aren't afraid of being graded, the issue is what's being done with that information.
henrikschroder 5y ago
Not just the isolation, there are so many crazy covidian rules that some schools have pushed on the kids to uphold the safety theatre. In California, it was absolutely forbidden for anyone to be indoors without a mask for more than 15 minutes, but you still have to serve school lunch to kids. Some schools solved this by moving lunch outside. No matter the temperature. Some schools solved this by giving the kids a 14 minute lunch break. No talking, no socializing, no enjoying the meal together in peace. This is how you give kids eating disorders.
- henrikschroder 5y ago
  Of course, while these rules were in place, any schoolkid could go to a restaurant with their parents and enjoy a meal together in peace for hours if they so wished. No rhyme, no reason.
  - sieabahlpark 5y ago
  - alar44 5y ago
    Yeah it's weird that a place that has 1000s of people in it at once has different rules than a place with 50. We may never know why that is. Truly, a mystery. An enigma for the ages. Scholars will be working on this for 1000s of years. Who could know the answer to such a question? Puzzling indeed.
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      believe it or not there is more to life than a myopic obsessive fixation on Covid to the literal sacrifice of everything else. It is complete BS that restaurants were open but schools closed. There is more to the world than just Covid you know… All the lockdown people thought mattered was Covid. They completely ignored every other problem and mocked people who pointed it out.
      - 5y ago
legulere 5y ago
It also astonishes me that people put all blame of the pandemic's effects on the counter-measures and none on the pandemic itself. Having seen the situation in Wuhan or Bergamo, fearing about loved ones also puts a lot of stress on kids.
- onos 5y ago
  I agree with you: fundamentally a bad thing happened. Mitigating the harm may have been possible to some degree but perhaps a more significant degree of freedom was simply choosing which form the negative consequences would take: more deaths or more isolation / economic problems. Since they are in different units, I’d say it’s subjective how to decide what’s optimal there.
mindslight 5y ago
Does it make sense to specifically focus on Covid response here? By which I mean, is this not really just the same problem of an overbearing system continuing to turn the screws, and now the system input contains the additional stressor of Covid? Some of the response is seemingly necessary, and ignoring the issue is certainly not the answer. But administrators craft obtuse top-down policies, announce "Mission Accomplished", and don't particularly examine their effectiveness from the perspective of those on the receiving end of their blunt tools. It's the same exact dynamic as how the media scares everyone with sensationalized school shootings, and then schools respond by making kids go through metal detectors and draconian zero tolerance policies and the like (also horrible for kids' mental health). We've built this no-win bureaucracy where the primary dynamic is avoiding any blame. Because if the blame does come, it will itself be merciless and unempathetic, despite how reasonable or well-intentioned an administrator's motive was.
ranger_danger 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895642
tablespoon 5y ago
> It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this. I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health. However, to propose that forcing (or, at the least, very strongly encouraging) an entire populace into self-isolation would not have negative impacts for a group in one of the most social and formative times of life, is absurd. It shouldn't be so astonishing. People who wanted to take a laissez faire approach to COVID (especially pre-vaccine) would often incoherently throw literally every idea they could think of against all the mitigation measures, including various mental health arguments. Of course, that approach didn't change a thing except 1) lead to more polarization, 2) harden people against those arguments forever. COVID was a serious problem, and it's rare that serious problems can be addressed without cost.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  [flagged]
- nradov 5y ago
  COVID was a serious problem, but that doesn't mean any of the mitigation measures were helpful or justified. That's a total non sequitur. Many of the areas which took a more laissez faire approach came through fine.
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  > COVID was a serious problem It's still killing >4000 per week just in the USA.
joaogui1 5y ago
Wasn't there a reduction in suicides? Not that that's the only factor when it comes to mental health, but it's probably something to take into account when you talk about the mental health toll of the past 2 years
- henrikschroder 5y ago
  Total suicides went down, but child and teen suicides are way up, and "deaths of despair", i.e. people drinking or drugging themselves to death are up considerably. So while it's true that total suicides went down, it's masking the reality of the situation.
antattack 5y ago
Lock-downs didn't just have effect on social life. Young people's education during lockdown have been pretty much written off as a casualty of pandemic. Suspending state testing or admission requirements was just a band-aid solution. Now young people are left to fend for themselves, to try to plug holes in education they received. No wonder their stress levels are high.
zeckalpha 5y ago
I agree with your high notes, but also imagine the adults in your life sending you to a place that is unsafe every day. There’s a double edged sword effect of the pandemic here.
- nradov 5y ago
  Where were children sent that was unsafe? I don't understand your point.
incomingpain 5y ago
>It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this. The CDC study was specifically in relation to covid lockdowns. Virtually everyone pointed out how this would happen and that this unprecedented move to lockdown the healthy vs the standard for thousands of years of quarantining the sick. The cost is far worse than the healthcare system melting down. Then again you look at Quebec nurses... they literally went to the United Nations to say they are slaves. Provincial government is doing it to them. Federal government is tyrannical. They had to go to the UN. Insanity how bad our healthcare system is collapsing. > I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health. So something that north america doesnt seem to have that most of the world does have... imagine you are poland or somewhere in the middle east. You fear war every single day. People who live there think about having to escape every day. North America doesn't have that. Nobody fears a surprise war because thousands of nukes will launch out of fear wiping out whoever is attacking. Flipside, Russia's new threat of imminent nuclear war means North American teens will now have to worry about their impending doom. This return of the cold war will make things worse; not measured in this study.

by lumb63 5y ago

PathOfEclipse 5y ago

People may rationalize these things because the alternative is to admit that one may have been wrong and/or caused harm to others in the process. People would rather downplay the harms caused by the pandemic to avoid guilt.

rjh29 5y ago
I've used that argument and the counter is: depression due to lockdown can heal once lockdown is over. People dying because hospitals filled up and cases climbed is permanent.
- henrikschroder 5y ago
  Suicidal ideation among kids in the US is up 100%, suicide attempts are up 50%, actual suicides are up 20%. Dead kids are also pretty &¤#&%#!" permanent. And this is the thing that's been missing for the past two years: A sensible cost/benefit discussion. Hell, we haven't even acknowledged that every single pandemic rule and restriction and measure has a cost in human life. Instead, we've been getting shitty platitudes about how "kids are resilient", or "it's just two weeks", or "your surgery is non-essential and therefore postponed".
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    >> [Column A] People dying because hospitals filled up and cases climbed is permanent. > [Column B] Dead kids are also pretty &¤#&%#!" permanent. > And this is the thing that's been missing for the past two years: A sensible cost/benefit discussion. So, which is higher: Column A or Column B? I haven't checked the numbers, but I'd be astounded if there wasn't at least and order of magnitude more COVID deaths during this pandemic than total number of teen suicides (i.e. all of them, not just the increase due to the pandemic).
- incrudible 5y ago
  These children will never fully recover their formative years. Also, what impact, if any, did the treatment of young people have on the ultimate death toll from this virus? We will never know, but I am afraid if we could, we would not like the answer.
  - ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
    Closig schools has been the core of the US pandemic influenza control strategy since the second Bush administration. There were detailed simulations showing that shutting schools is the only single intervention that can significantly affect R: schools are the best place for spreading influenza due to the very small spacing between seats in classrooms, the number of students who pack into schoolbusses daily, etc. (However, the studies were done before masking everyone was a possibility.)
    - nradov 5y ago
      Sweden mostly kept primary schools open, and didn't even impose mask mandates on students, and they came through fine.
    - earleybird 5y ago
      Most parents with k-8 children should know this first-hand. Memory is fading but as I recall, two weeks after school year started we could pretty much expect a bug to come home. (continuing through out the winter months of the school year)
giraffe_lady 5y ago
Acknowledging the damage done by isolation doesn't mean you have to believe it was the wrong choice. In my country a million people have died of covid even with the isolations. Was it "worth it"? I don't fucking know and I don't believe anyone else does either. Would it have been better to just let it rip and hope for the best? How many more would have died that way, and would our mental health be better for it? If it was, could we even live with that? If there was a button that would cure my depression and kill a stranger, I wouldn't push it. EDIT: ok yeah I get it consensus is we should have pushed the button you can stop telling me now.
- laurent92 5y ago
  Would they have died anyway, or did they die with Covid? It’s the repeated question, together with “Didn’t the flu cause as many deaths”, and even if it was actual death, it’s a transfer of years of life from the young to the elderly.
  - lumost 5y ago
    Curiously the elderly seem to feel the most robbed. In my family, the young locked down while the elderly went about as normal. Discussing this today, the predominant feeling amongst the over 70 cohort was that they had at best a few more years of health with everyone and didn’t want to spend that in lockdown.
- incrudible 5y ago
  In the beginning, it was widely accepted that the virus would spread and ultimately infect most people. Yet, two weeks to flatten the curve somehow turned into two years of flailing about aimlessly with ineffective measures.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > Yet, two weeks to flatten the curve somehow turned into two years of flailing about aimlessly with ineffective measures. 1) Whenever someone mentions "flatten the curve" in that way, the implication always seems to be the CDC et. al should have had this novel disease figured out from day one, but that's an unreasonable expectation. 2) A big reason those measures were as not as effective as they could have been was that people were actively undermining them pretty much from day one.
spookthesunset 5y ago
> People would rather downplay the harms caused by the pandemic to avoid guilt. The pandemic had nothing to do with keeping kids out of school for more than a year. That was all humans doing. The virus didn't wake up some morning and tell us to shut down down schools. Lockdowns and government caused virtually all of the lasting side-effects from the last two years. It is my strong opinion that history will not look kindly to almost every single thing humanity did the last two years. They were humans at their absolute worst... Making knee jerk decisions based on fear and panic never end up well...
- Gigachad 5y ago
  My state in Australia had a lockdown where for a while it was not permitted to go outside for fitness by yourself. I can't imagine the physical and mental health damage this caused.
  - earleybird 5y ago
    Had those in Canada too. There seemed to be the medical based rules (distancing, limited occupancy, washing hands) which made sense. And then there were the "me too, more must be better" types. For example, closing down provincial parks seemed odd. These parks are not rabbit warrens; but no, you can't. Going for a walk down a trail in an urban woodland park where distancing is not an issue - nope. What is/was sorely lacking was a common (medical) sense approach to the rules and I think that's what tipped the scale for some (many?) folks that there was overreach with the lockdown rules.
  - oulu2006 5y ago
    What state was that? I don't think we had that in NSW, or at least I never took notice of it and always just went out by myself for a walk even during the hard lock down days.
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      South Australia. It was actually only for a few days but they had planned to do it for much longer before they worked out the whole lockdown was based on a lie from one of the cases.
onphonenow 5y ago
What a load of crock. My elderly father, terminal illness, was hit by the lockdown days before coming to visit us. He DOES NOT CARE about covid. He is dying anyways. Then they wouldn't let our young son go play with friends or play on beach. This is lifetime impact stuff at 2-3. When I wore an N95 mask I was told over and over it didn't help. Hello, it's an airborne disease, why wouldn't my mask help? So we can't wear an N95, we CAN go to crowded grocery stores, we CAN'T go outside to the beach (huge volume of onshore fresh air and sunshine) and school is remote only (for a 2 year old this is TERRIBLE). Worst of all, despite the talk of being "science driven" they have not been releasing age banded fatality rates by variant and a timely basis so folks can make informed decisions. We got fed so much BS that the hit is going to be very long lasting in terms of credibility of the "establishment". My father has a phd in a hard science. My wife has a phd in a hard science. If you are losing these folks, you are losing LOTS of folks. That makes me wonder, what IS the fatality rate for 5 year olds. Seriously give me a table. Is it lower than just random accidents per 100? Finally, why can't I wear a mask (N95 with ventilator) that is comfortable so easier to wear and protects me. ANd others can make their own decisions. Instead we spent huge amounts of effort trying to force people who may not have believed in mask wearing to wear masks, but these masks (cloth / surgical) were I suspect largely ineffective.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  How do masks work on the flu virus but not on COVID https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4 It sounds like you have been dealing with a lot of ineffective health theater. That is unfortunate. But that's a very different thing from "cloth/surgical masks are largely ineffective".
  - onphonenow 5y ago
    Sure. We are told that an N95 with a vent is "ineffective" and prohibited, but someone wearing a bandana is OK. That at least was the guidance for a long time. So based on this, the cloth masks, bandana's, gators etc need to BEAT an N95 with an exhalation valve to be considered effective. Of course, it turns out that an N95 with an exhalation valve is VERY good at protecting the wearer, and AS GOOD as all these others at protecting others. "The findings in this report are based on tests of 13 FFR models from 10 different manufacturers. These findings show that FFRs with an exhalation valve provide respiratory protection to the wearer and can also reduce particle emissions to levels similar to or better than those provided by surgical masks, procedure masks, or cloth face coverings." https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2021-107/default.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2021-107/default.html "An N95 filtering facepiece respirator will protect you and provide source control to protect others. A NIOSH-approved N95 filtering facepiece respirator with an exhalation valve offers the same protection to the wearer as one that does not have a valve. As source control, findings from NIOSH research suggest that, even without covering the valve, N95 respirators with exhalation valves provide the same or better source control than surgical masks, procedure masks, cloth masks, or fabric coverings." https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirator-use-faq.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirator-use... So, my elderly parents trying to fly United Airlines are BANNED from wearing a comfortable N95 with an exhalation valve that would do a GREAT job protecting them. Instead they are told to wear a surgical mask (which does relatively little by comparison to a well fit N95) especially on INHALATION, where a surgical mask often passes air long the sides. And they sit next to folks barely wearing a light cloth mask that may no almost nothing. Again, why not let folks make their own decisions? Concerned? At high risk? Let my elderly parents wear an N95 with exhalation valve, they can wear that comfortably for 3-4 hours if needed. Instead it is this theatre just as you describe, but based on so little actual research (and so unwilling to change with new research) that it is crazy.

sillysaurusx 5y ago

Imagine you spent half the time you were in high school, alone. I don’t speak for anyone but myself, and I am an extreme outlier. But I would have been delighted. Alone, I could spend my time how I want, learn what I want, and associate with who I wish. There is also a much larger pool of love interests online than offline, especially in small town Missouri. People just feel differently.

newsclues 5y ago
I’m a loner. I’m happy alone with a PC and internet, when it’s my choice. During the pandemic, I live alone and have had minimal contact with family. Going months on end, lack of sun in northern climate, not seeing human faces in real life… the government said we had stay at home. Nope, I’m going out for a bike ride. Choosing to be a basement dweller is one thing but this has been close to prison.

sva_ 5y ago

There was a discussion on here, about how the Covid pandemic may have been one of the, or even the biggest transfers of wealth from "the poor" to "the rich" in the history of our civilization. Somebody remarked, that it has also been the biggest transfer of lifetime from the young to the old, as the lockdowns were mostly to protect the old. The measures taken against the pandemic undoubtedly had a huge impact on young people's mental health, but the effects of it will only really unfold in the coming years, and are probably not measurable. People who deny this must be willfully ignorant.

after_care 5y ago
From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about managing hospital capacity. While this might disproportionally benefited older folks, hospitals are a service anyone could need at any time for a wide range of reasons.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about managing hospital capacity And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk. We should have relaxed our approach to all this when cities across the country were closing their unused field hospitals. Instead of celebrating the fact that covid wasn't nearly as lethal as the earliest models predicted, governors across the country doubled down on their covid restrictions. Two years later, they are finally almost gone. Did any of these restrictions provide enough benefit to justify their immense social cost? It will probably take much cooler heads to find out. It troubles me that we went into this mess with little understanding if the measures even worked. In effect, we took millions and millions of people and had them partake in a massive uncontrolled experiment without anybody's consent.
  - kevinventullo 5y ago
    there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk I know several people who had to delay surgeries and other medical procedures because of hospital capacity due to COVID.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

You're absolutely right, and I've heard firsthand accounts of this. My sister-in-law is a middle school counselor at a large midwest US public school system and her stories about kids dealing with the pandemic are heartbreaking, the mental health support system in some US schools is completely falling apart due to the workload. She's never seen a mental health crisis on this scale in schools in her entire career. She remarks that kids really weren't able to learn much during the pandemic due to remote learning and in many cases are now playing catch-up to get back on track. The school system she works for basically didn't hold anyone back for a year because they had no real way of knowing who progressed as her school district cancelled standardized testing. Anyone who believes that the pandemic wasn't a serious setback for many kids developmentally is woefully out of touch with reality.

WalterBright 5y ago
> they had no real way of knowing who progressed as her school district cancelled standardized testing. The schools want to remove all evidence that would contradict their claims of doing a great job.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  ...or they lacked the resources and infrastructure to accurately assess students as nobody had been prepared to move the entire public education system online for an extended period of time.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    The drive to eliminate all standardized testing has been going on for many years.
    - alar44 5y ago
      Because it's being directly tied to funding. Do well, more funds. Tests are low, less funds. It's completely ass backwards. Teachers aren't afraid of being graded, the issue is what's being done with that information.

henrikschroder 5y ago

Not just the isolation, there are so many crazy covidian rules that some schools have pushed on the kids to uphold the safety theatre. In California, it was absolutely forbidden for anyone to be indoors without a mask for more than 15 minutes, but you still have to serve school lunch to kids. Some schools solved this by moving lunch outside. No matter the temperature. Some schools solved this by giving the kids a 14 minute lunch break. No talking, no socializing, no enjoying the meal together in peace. This is how you give kids eating disorders.

henrikschroder 5y ago
Of course, while these rules were in place, any schoolkid could go to a restaurant with their parents and enjoy a meal together in peace for hours if they so wished. No rhyme, no reason.
- sieabahlpark 5y ago
- alar44 5y ago
  Yeah it's weird that a place that has 1000s of people in it at once has different rules than a place with 50. We may never know why that is. Truly, a mystery. An enigma for the ages. Scholars will be working on this for 1000s of years. Who could know the answer to such a question? Puzzling indeed.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    believe it or not there is more to life than a myopic obsessive fixation on Covid to the literal sacrifice of everything else. It is complete BS that restaurants were open but schools closed. There is more to the world than just Covid you know… All the lockdown people thought mattered was Covid. They completely ignored every other problem and mocked people who pointed it out.
    - 5y ago

legulere 5y ago

It also astonishes me that people put all blame of the pandemic's effects on the counter-measures and none on the pandemic itself. Having seen the situation in Wuhan or Bergamo, fearing about loved ones also puts a lot of stress on kids.

onos 5y ago
I agree with you: fundamentally a bad thing happened. Mitigating the harm may have been possible to some degree but perhaps a more significant degree of freedom was simply choosing which form the negative consequences would take: more deaths or more isolation / economic problems. Since they are in different units, I’d say it’s subjective how to decide what’s optimal there.

mindslight 5y ago

Does it make sense to specifically focus on Covid response here? By which I mean, is this not really just the same problem of an overbearing system continuing to turn the screws, and now the system input contains the additional stressor of Covid? Some of the response is seemingly necessary, and ignoring the issue is certainly not the answer. But administrators craft obtuse top-down policies, announce "Mission Accomplished", and don't particularly examine their effectiveness from the perspective of those on the receiving end of their blunt tools. It's the same exact dynamic as how the media scares everyone with sensationalized school shootings, and then schools respond by making kids go through metal detectors and draconian zero tolerance policies and the like (also horrible for kids' mental health). We've built this no-win bureaucracy where the primary dynamic is avoiding any blame. Because if the blame does come, it will itself be merciless and unempathetic, despite how reasonable or well-intentioned an administrator's motive was.

ranger_danger 5y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895642

tablespoon 5y ago

> It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this. I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health. However, to propose that forcing (or, at the least, very strongly encouraging) an entire populace into self-isolation would not have negative impacts for a group in one of the most social and formative times of life, is absurd. It shouldn't be so astonishing. People who wanted to take a laissez faire approach to COVID (especially pre-vaccine) would often incoherently throw literally every idea they could think of against all the mitigation measures, including various mental health arguments. Of course, that approach didn't change a thing except 1) lead to more polarization, 2) harden people against those arguments forever. COVID was a serious problem, and it's rare that serious problems can be addressed without cost.

ryandrake 5y ago
[flagged]
nradov 5y ago
COVID was a serious problem, but that doesn't mean any of the mitigation measures were helpful or justified. That's a total non sequitur. Many of the areas which took a more laissez faire approach came through fine.
MaxBarraclough 5y ago
> COVID was a serious problem It's still killing >4000 per week just in the USA.

joaogui1 5y ago

Wasn't there a reduction in suicides? Not that that's the only factor when it comes to mental health, but it's probably something to take into account when you talk about the mental health toll of the past 2 years

henrikschroder 5y ago
Total suicides went down, but child and teen suicides are way up, and "deaths of despair", i.e. people drinking or drugging themselves to death are up considerably. So while it's true that total suicides went down, it's masking the reality of the situation.

antattack 5y ago

Lock-downs didn't just have effect on social life. Young people's education during lockdown have been pretty much written off as a casualty of pandemic. Suspending state testing or admission requirements was just a band-aid solution. Now young people are left to fend for themselves, to try to plug holes in education they received. No wonder their stress levels are high.

zeckalpha 5y ago

I agree with your high notes, but also imagine the adults in your life sending you to a place that is unsafe every day. There’s a double edged sword effect of the pandemic here.

nradov 5y ago
Where were children sent that was unsafe? I don't understand your point.

incomingpain 5y ago

>It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this. The CDC study was specifically in relation to covid lockdowns. Virtually everyone pointed out how this would happen and that this unprecedented move to lockdown the healthy vs the standard for thousands of years of quarantining the sick. The cost is far worse than the healthcare system melting down. Then again you look at Quebec nurses... they literally went to the United Nations to say they are slaves. Provincial government is doing it to them. Federal government is tyrannical. They had to go to the UN. Insanity how bad our healthcare system is collapsing. > I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health. So something that north america doesnt seem to have that most of the world does have... imagine you are poland or somewhere in the middle east. You fear war every single day. People who live there think about having to escape every day. North America doesn't have that. Nobody fears a surprise war because thousands of nukes will launch out of fear wiping out whoever is attacking. Flipside, Russia's new threat of imminent nuclear war means North American teens will now have to worry about their impending doom. This return of the cold war will make things worse; not measured in this study.