As if it wasn't obvious the mass isolation and sedentarism will have massive mental and health impact.
Turns out if you personally avoid people and crowds (social distancing) and if indoor places are closed there's fewer situations to get any virus.
Unless the virus comes on Amazon packages or through the air in the back yard.
Kids have been massively more sheltered too. Either by parents or because schools were literally closed.
It's a good thing that we are reopening the society by Autumn, so we can have a nice wave of colds, flu and COVID by people that didn't catch anything in 1 year. (As in, I worry a bit about what Autumn will bring).
Bubble boy meets bubble society.
For the record, there was nothing special about those after-lockdown-colds compared to regular colds.
Based on my own experience and that of other parents I know, I would say that we've sheltered our kids, but as soon as school was back on it was game over.
LOL
It'll be a while before we know the impact in a data-driven rather than anecdote-driven fashion.
Not sure you need much data when countries like Canada were canceling all elective surgeries during their Covid waves.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/covid-19-ontario-hosp...
This happened in most countries that were hit hard. We’re talking going from a packed schedule of preventative screenings and elective surgeries to zero.
The backlog will take years to clear.
I'm sure a qualified actuary will be able to take this data along with models of expected outcomes and give you (well not you, but an insurance company) a fairly good idea of the consequences in terms of lives lost over the next 5 years or so.
A qualified actuary will likely admit to uncertainty on something unprecedented like the first pandemic in the modern era.
Even if you know nothing about medicine, just from the fact that the COVID vaccines need booster shots you should be able to induce that the immune system in fact has a time component to it, and therefor any timeframe has an impact on it's ability. With a little more knowledge on the topic you can see that a single year of basically blocking everyhing off from your immune system makes it less powerful. The flu season will be devastating, and the long term effects of blocking kids from training their immune systems will be even worse.
How far the immune system is actually depressed from the lockdowns etc., we will find out. Could also be the other way around, i.e. overreaction. What I have not observed since things are getting back to normal in my part of Europe is that everyone gets a cold etc. as soon as they meet more people.
The amount of people that committed suicide due to depression induced by isolation is several orders of magnitude less.
It’s sad and scary that we still have to have this conversations in well educated forums like HN one and a half years in this pandemic.
All that changed is that we've outsourced that direct dependence with indirect dependencies, like supermarkets.
Which would be completely ok, except you never explained how your position has changed nor what it is you are now arguing against.
(To me this is the same observation as that many people first experience schizophrenia at the stage when they are most likely going off to school, the school environment is a change and not obviously more defective for our mental health, those who have crisis might have unhealthy family relationships before hand, etc, etc.)