I mean you may disagree with the choices which were made, but surely you have to recognize that it's a bit more complicated than what you're suggesting?
That's not to say that what was done wasn't the best of a suite of bad options. But I saw nothing but fairly extreme downplaying of the consequences of lockdowns from people who wanted long (the only effective) ones.
One problem I've seemed to notice in the US is that you have the "somewhat reasonable" side and the "batshit insane" side of every discussion, and the "somewhat reasonable" side over-corrects. A clear example of that is the mask discussion; you have the "batshit insane" side which claimed that masks literally deprived you of oxygen, and then the "somewhat reasonable" side would over-correct and downplay any negative sides to having to wear a mask. Whereas outside of the US, I feel like there was a much more reasonable conversation about how masks suck and are really annoying to wear, especially when you're exerting yourself physically or wear glasses, but are overall a good thing.
So it wouldn't surprise me if you had the same effect regarding schools, where the "batshit insane" side wants no response at all and doesn't even think COVID exists/thinks it's manufactured by the illuminati to control citizens/is no worse than a flu/whatever, and the "somewhat reasonable" side overcorrects by downplaying any negative sides to a COVID response.
In reality, the "batshit insane" people were closer to the truth, which is that the shitty cloth masks that were considered acceptable and worn by the majority of people did little to nothing to stop the spread of Covid.
this seems to be a false dichotomy. you can certainly fit all of the opinions into a binary if you'd like, but nowhere near enough people believed what you are calling "batshit insane" to constitute one side.
more reasonably, you could talk about how one side advised not wearing masks at all, proclaiming they were totally useless, and the other "over-corrected" by mandating wearing cloth masks, which we knew all along were practically useless.
That's at best a huge misuse of the word 'literally', and at worst you're claiming an insane idea. Like you condemn.
My wife had a negative response to a vaccine as well as her brother. My mother-in-law passed before we had children and never thought to ask for more details until we had a kid. When we were touring hospitals for our first, we asked about vaccination policies. We tried to explain that we didn't want our kid vaccinated at the hospital but at the pediatrician's appointment a couple days later so we could first develop a base line so could identify any negative response if one shows up. The nurse talked over us about how important vaccines are, acting like we didn't want them at all. Turns out my daughter did have an unexplainable neurological response after the second dose. Our first pediatrician's office was fully supportive of us not continuing just that series (I suspect their "expert" we saw after the incident was anti-vax). We moved and had to find a pediatrician's office that carried the combo shot without the problematic one. We found an office that had it but the pediatrician they assigned us kept giving us problems until we saw a neurologist and the neurologist told them to back off (they were the one to classify it as unexplainable).
We understand the value of vaccines and encourage them. While our kid isn't completing a series, we understand the importance of everyone around them completing it to keep our kid safe. Pro-vaccine people treat us like we are anti-vaxxers. I could easily see this leading other people into the anti-vax camp because most people don't listen but anti-vax people would. Another social pressure that could push someone in our circumstance to be anti-vax is the laws. Anti-vax people have been abusing the system so pro-vax people have been tightening things down. We've been keeping an eye on this, worried what it'll take to get our kid through these legal requirements if we live in some of those states. The only political group that would protect our kid is the anti-vaxxers.
it's a trade-off, I think we did what we had to do.
Germany and the Netherlands are more suitable comparisons.
So why not remote school just the children with elders in the house, and not hurt the others' schooling ?
Perhaps this hinges on your definition of "fine" - will most of these children become functional well adjusted adults? Sure, people can weather far worse things than this. But will they be set back on their education? Unquestionably.
As a parent of an elementary school child, I can tell you that if "people" were saying schools closures were of no consequence, they were idiots or charlatans. From the beginning it was obvious that a "remote only" learning plan for kids this age was going to be terrible, and it would exacerbate any underlying inequality that was already in place.
"People" can and do state absolute nonsense all the time, so the fact that "people have stated" something dumb is, on its own, a useless data point. The more useful question is whether these people who were making bold claims that there would be no harm successfully manipulated public policy.
> from people who wanted long (the only effective) ones.
Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I think this kind of wording maybe sets up a straw man. Nobody _wanted_ lockdowns. I know hardly anyone who was genuinely excited and happy about quarantine and stay-at-home. Your wording sounds like there are some significant group of people who want everyone isolated in their homes (for what reason?), and when COVID came along, they could finally get their way! There is no mustache-twirling villain gleefully plotting to lock people in their homes just because.
I was in favor of sustained stay-at-home because it seemed like the only way to at least slow the pandemic from causing even more sickness and death, but that doesn't mean I liked or wanted lockdowns.
It sounds like, if it had come to a vote, you would have voted for them.
Were you aware of the tradeoffs for children in less fortunate situations? And while being aware, did you still support schools closing early? Do you stand by your support knowing the trauma it has inflicted now?
The school closings have had catastrophic effects on children with poor home lives. School for me was a place to eat, and in middle school, even just showering when the gas or electricity had been cut at home. Many of these kids were dodging abusive relatives, gangs, and drugs by going to school. The more fortunate kids were lucky to drop high school in exchange for working to support their families.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-11-year-old-...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-online-sex-a...
https://www.wbez.org/stories/to-help-their-families-during-t...
There were no reports of "a mountain of dead children" anywhere in the world.
It's not about what we did know, it's about what we didn't. Early on, we had no idea how the virus was interacting with children and the school system. Being under-cautious would have been the wrong move, because the worst case scenario was horrifying.
The basic understanding of the contagion, what drove the pandemic, and mortality numbers across age groups was known. The data has become more specific since, but not dramatically different.
The worst case scenario is bound to be horrifying, by definition. That’s not an excuse for waffling out of making a tough call.
We did not know how the pandemic was interacting with children and the school system. But we did know that it had deathly, chaotic, fast moving properties. The worst case outcome was not a fantasy. We had reasons to think that the worst case outcome was not improbable. Because we were dealing with an existential threat to possibly our most precious resource, we acted defensively, even though many of us were aware of the deep, problematic tradeoffs.
It was the right decision.
Yes, at the very earliest part of the pandemic, we had no data. We had to prepare for the worst.
Very quickly, we started to see the relative impact of different measures taken in different jurisdictions, we learned about the relative impact of the disease on different age groups and populations, and we started having tools and strategies for detecting, tracing, and inhibiting the disease.
These became the priors that informed (or should have informed) the evolving decision-making process for disease response. But instead, in many cases, we saw a ton of inertia on many fronts, due to fear, political face-saving / ass-covering, or willful ignorance.
That’s the part I take issue with. It wasn’t “the” right decision, it was “an” early and uninformed decision, followed by many opportunities for additional, more informed, better decisions.
Be a kind interlocutor if you want dispassionate, reasoned engagement.
But I stand by the assertion that your previous comment does not make sense.
Acting from an assumption that an infectious disease spreads more if children from every family gather daily in crowded classrooms doesn't seem like an unreasonable one.
I would also love more data on this, preferably before the next pandemic.
There was data from many flu pandemics. It led to the standard public health recommendation being against school closures. One more thing that just got tossed out without a moments thought for COVID. And no, COVID is not so novel that all prior knowledge of viruses and respiratory disease became irrelevant.
Calling covid "novel" is only true in some pedantic, insider-talk sense.
What’s your point?
I think I mistook you as agreeing with the GP that we had no chance to improve the outcome with the info at hand.
You’re also talking like we only get one chance to make the decision, rather than update that decision as facts roll in and more is known; as assumptions become proven unfounded and wrong.
So, yes, let’s see that data.
We know very few kids in school have parents or guardians that are "elderly" and that not many have parents or guardians that are "chronically unhealthy", and we knew that Covid (pre-delta) had a very low complication and death rate on school-aged children (not too dissimilar from the flu).
It seems like the smarter thing to do would've been to let parents have their kids stay home if they wanted, and let teachers stay home if they had an excuse, and make efforts to make the environment as safe as possible.
Instead - it became entirely political. One side wanted to go to the extreme for safety. The other side wanted to pretend like it was a hoax.
Once Delta came around - all adults had access to vaccines. Once fully vaccinated - Covid again is not materially worse than the flu (unvaccinated). Again - at this point - the decision for students could've been left up to the parents, rather than just forcing everyone to stay home.
Do we? 40% of US adults are obese.
The IFR for people under 50 (the vast majority of parents and guardians of school-aged children) is 0.427% [1]. If you assume the median age is 45, it drops down to 0.286%. at 35, it's 0.104%. When you factor in vaccines, these rates are reduced by >90%.
90% of these deaths come from people with co-morbidities. So you wouldn't multiply these numbers by 1.42 to get the IFR for obese people. It would be less than that. But I'll do that any way - for a worst case scenario.
Some 35 year olds might have their kids stay home because they'd have an extra 0.042% chance of dying (assuming their kid going to school means they definitely get Covid and their kid not going to school means they definitely wouldn't get Covid - which is a strange assumption). At 45, with those assumptions AND you being obese, it's about an extra 1 in 1000 chance of dying. Some people might not be willing to take that risk. A lot would gladly. If you're vaccinated - the rate is close to 1 in 90,000.
If you're 80, unvaccinated, and a 400 pound chain smoker - yeah, you definitely want to minimize your exposure as much as possible.
The reality is that you have about a 40% chance of getting Covid unless you live in a bubble. Sending your kids to school isn't even going to give you a 100% chance. So the risks of sending your kid to school are about cut in half (or less).
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
There were lots of alternate futures, ranging from “the whole world, everywhere, utterly locked down schools for the past 2+ years” to “the whole world, everywhere, utterly refused to lock down schools for the past 2+ years”, and everywhere in between in terms of which schools, which policies, when, and for how long.
We can definitely talk about what sets of choices would have had better outcomes.
> We can definitely talk about what sets of choices would have had better outcomes.
Sure, and again, after the fact.
Refusing to take action as soon as data were available to justify better methods got people killed.
(Thanks for the link, btw. Had no idea “dildo” dates to the 16th century. The things you learn...)
That I have no idea if you would have wanted more lockdown or less lockdown or more masks or less masks, etc, etc, should indicate the difficulty in decision making.
But for the record, I'm not defending any decisions made by any government, I'm merely defending the difficulty of the process, and they will be dragged for any decision they make regardless because, again, there is no win scenario in a pandemic.
> Early evidence indicated that schools were low risk and children were unlikely to be very infectious, but it is becoming clear that children and youth can acquire and transmit COVID-19 in school settings and that transmission clusters and outbreaks can be large.
Most of the protocols (besides the baseline, do-nothing protocol) have some effect, but aren’t perfect.
> None of the mitigation protocols we modeled, initiated by a positive test in a symptomatic individual, are able to prevent large transmission clusters unless the transmission rate is low (in which case large clusters do not occur in any case). Among the measures we modeled, only rapid universal monitoring (for example by regular, onsite, pooled testing) accomplished this prevention.
But as it says there, prevention can be achieved by emphasizing frequent on-site testing (which is super consistent with what we know about avoiding spread events generally).
> Without closing schools down entirely, if we want to prevent large clusters from occurring altogether, this leaves approaches to detect potential index cases before they show symptoms. Pooled testing, wastewater monitoring and airflow monitoring have all been proposed with this aim [42, 43]. We simulated introduced cases and resulting transmission under the baseline of no regular testing (with the same baseline as above, symptomatic individuals going home) and compared this to weekly or every three day testing or environmental monitoring covering all individuals in the class. The results for the total cluster size are shown in Fig 6. Regular pooled or otherwise universal testing dramatically reduces the sizes of even the most unfortunate clusters (infectious index, higher-risk room), for example from a median of 12 to a median size of 3 if the index is asymptomatic. But even with regular pooled or otherwise universal testing, testing in a matter of hours (e.g. onsite) has a substantially greater impact than testing at a centralized laboratory (if that takes 2 days including shipping time).
This doesn’t seem like a strong argument in favor of virtual school?
It is in particular useful for cases where virtual schools are just not an option (on the top of my head, toddlers and lower age kids for instance. If their parents can't teach them for whatever reasons, in-person teaching will be critical to their development, and they can't wait 3 years that the dust settles)
Now this study might have a lot more different political stuff going on, but I generally think the situation with kids is complicated and there is no one single solution to the learning problem. We'd need to adjust to a lot of cases.
The paper concludes that an effective testing regimen can, in fact, contain spread. This is the lesson we should take from this whole experience. This is the heart of why Japan and South Korea did so comparatively well during the pandemic: test, trace, and isolate.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7688188/
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...
Obviously paediatrics is not the same as schooling, but I recall this sort of attitude being prevalent.
Prove it. You can't draw wild conclusions like that and get away with it. Hardly any children die from COVID-19, and the ones that do often had extreme comorbidities.
What we did to the young generation the last two years is awful.