Pandemic policies are a huge elephant in the room, and it's extremely annoying to see people like you trying to pin the blame on the pandemic itself. School closures were a disastrous policy, full stop. This is the price of that choice of policy.
How can we measure this effect?
How do you know that it’s not the measured cognitive deficit after the infection and only school closures? How was it measured?
We’d want to analyse and investigate the effect, right?
The effect is not present in countries that did not close schools. The effect strongly correlates with the level of disruption to schools and schooling caused by policy choices. The effect does not correlate with infection levels among that cohort of the population.
There is a strong political desire for politicians who enacted these disastrous policies to avoid blame for them, one strategy is to frame all the policy choices as unavoidable, i.e. claiming that you "had to close schools". Another political strategy is to blameshift all the bad effects onto the virus itself, which is exactly what you're doing.
Your post is a prime example of "JAQing off"; you are "just asking questions", saying things like "shouldn't we study this?", or "there are no studies showing it's because of <insert obvious explanation here>".
What’s up with this “you are like this and that”? What’s with the accusations and insults? What’s your problem? Take it elsewhere!
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On topic, we’re diverging on the word effect. I am using the word effect to mean “something that the illness is known to do in certain measure” – an effect of the disease on the population. You’re using the word effect to mean effect size in a particular study. It’s an understandable divergence.
Just to make sure: I am not saying. That the grades dropping. Is caused by post COVID cognitive impairment.
I said that it was interesting to think about how you’d design a study so it would control for such an effect.
I see studies about cognitive impairment on the individual level. I see studies about this and that on a population level. I see lots of people saying there’s no connection. I don’t see how they know that.
Your first was a legitimate comment for discussion. The recent one doesn't seem interested in a reasonable discussion. The prior commenter makes a solid point and you get hand-wavey because there's not a study supporting it... when your initial comment was just as theoretical (does your study show this is applicable to kids, at what rate, in which countries, what are their test score results, etc).
Note that this is the only data which has been provided in this discussion as far as I can see right now. What made the commenter’s solid point a solid point? Was there data?
"In sum, there is clear evidence for a negative effect of COVID-19-related school closures on student achievement"
Here's one example of shutdown harm.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481663/
So now who has the only pertianate data? Don't you have a study pointing the school test scores being lower due to physiological impairment?
Please stop trolling this topic now.
Of course it did!
In part: Closing schools was poorly executed, and the lockdown/closure style of mitigation was never based in the scientific facts of the main mode of transmission, so it was always a blunt and stupid instrument.
For the avoidance of doubt: I’m raising the point that we should look at other things too. And interested in thinking about how we would look.
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I don’t have pediatric studies on cognitive impairment.
I’ve seen quite a bit of literature on the mechanisms that cause it in adults, and only poor reasoning for children being exempt from severe and/or long-term effects. (Is this disputed?) So I’m for monitoring and studying and looking. And thinking about how to do it.
Essentially you can't. Multiple other factors have changed that would affect grades.
If you strictly want intelligence and not just grades, then you'll have to identify kids that had recent intelligence tests before the pandemic and compare them to others. This is problematic because types of intelligence can vary, so some areas might not be covered by the tests. In general, few kids recieve IQ tests and so there's likely to be observation bias with a higher number of kids being tested for some reason. Finally, it's unlikely you could track pre-/post-infection since kids haven't typically been testing every week and mild to asymptomatic cases are fairly common I'm children.
Best case, you can do very small studies on an individual level without control groups, essentially individual case studies. Even if you can, it's not going to answer the questions related to this article/thread.
Is this a calculated likelihood given certain established premises? How do you figure that injury to the physiology that performs cognition has a trivial impact compared to not showing up to school for some time? From what basis do we derive that certainty?
We haven’t done so, have we?
We’d want to be sure, right?
And: In what way were lockdowns unnecessary? It isn’t and it never was safe for children to be infected. There is irreversible harm to children from it at an indefensibly high rate. It is obvious in children in my vicinity. I’m fairly sure my own son has lingering digestive issues after his bout. I may never know because society will not look.
Nonetheless, lockdowns certainly were a bad fit to the main mode of transmission which is infectious aerosol.
There are plenty of pre-pandemic studies about truancy and poor curricula leading to lower test scores. It's practically a tautology that if you aren't going to school and studying for the tests that you will score poorly on those tests (the measure here). Could there be some trivial (in aggregate) physiological impact at play? Maybe, but that's not the biggest factor based on this established research.
"I may never know because society will not look."
It's not that society won't look, but rather that minor issues are deprioritzed. If you have a new disease, there are likely to be tens of thousands unanswered questions around it. It will take decades to get to most of the questions. Some may never be answered or explained. It's unlikely anyone cares enough about an individual with digestive issues (or recurring intermittent swelling after vaccination) to do a study looking at it. If it's sufficiently rare, they may not be able to even identify it as an issue worth looking into.