Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a source regarding the suicide rate you can share?

Everything I'm finding suggests they went up (the CDC "morbidity and mortality weekly report" indicated a 22% spike in 2020 relative to 2019).

View on HN

I would follow Dr Tyler Black, https://twitter.com/tylerblack32 for data on that. He reviews data (with source links) from multiple sources and provides interpretations, and imho a pretty good job of breaking down nuances in the data, how it is grouped and summarized vs the ground conditions.

The CDC data was reviewed by him on this thread. This is perhaps the simplest summary:

https://twitter.com/tylerblack32/status/1470785676316663820?...

Edit: There is actually an interesting presentation of data on this and other school mental health impacts on a even more macro basis in the Urgency of Equity website data packet which tries to provide a scientifically backed set of recommendations for schools going forward on Covid. It is biased to taking more specific actions than the anti-vax/anti-mask crowd, and even the current Covid policies of many governments.

http://urgencyofequity.org

Notably from the graphic, not having school early in lockdown was great! Lower suicides.

Once Hybrid/Remote started, suicides worse, implying worse than baseline. But slightly within error bars for most.

So order of good > bad: No School > In-Person school > Hybrid

And even outside of the specific school scheme, looking at overall rates of child suicide in the US and Canada, the rates aren't out of variance from historical trends vs during covid years.

(see pg 25 for the graphs on the Urgency of Equity packet).

I don't have kids or anything more than an academic interest, but from what I gathered, "hybrid/remote" involved the most brain-dead approach to learning environments possible. It seems/seemed like they just looked at the most popular videoconferencing options and used them as designed. From what I read, that did not provide a very good classroom simulation, and classroom simulations was the only option sought.

It was awful for our kids in middle / high school. 6 hours a day of zoom meetings with cameras required to be on at all times was exactly as bad in every way as you can imagine.

I have been really surprised that there hasn't been any apparent innovation in educational technologies and classroom concepts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com