[tharne]

> The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives and prevent disability through long covid absolutely staggers the mind and erodes my faith in humanity.

Or you could reasonably conclude that the policies enacted during COVID are yet another example of how we prioritize the elderly over children in the United States, arguably because children don't vote and the elderly do.

We sacrificed the educational, emotional, and psychological development of children during the pandemic to help 90 year olds live to 91. Was this the right thing to do? I don't believe there's a clear answer to that - it's a tradeoff and one that many people felt was not worth it. That doesn't make them bad or selfish, they're just on the opposite side of very difficult question with no clear answer.

[wing-_-nuts]

It wasn't just the elderly. Pretty much anyone over 50 was at higher risk.

I'll point out again, covid killed over 1 million people in the US alone. That doesn't even account for the ~ 10% of infected who got stuck with the lingering effects of long covid.

Yeah, we asked kids to attend school remotely from home. Some didn't have parents that kept them on task, and suffered. The pandemic was hard on everyone, but even in places that didn't lock down, loved ones getting sick and dying takes a toil. I felt like I was rolling the dice every time I visited my grandmother.

[op00to]

My child's classmate has a mother who has only one lung, and that one lung is barely functional. If she catches COVID, she will certainly be in the ICU. As a class, we all worried about her mother during the entire pandemic.

[lo_zamoyski]

So we should paralyze a generation? You work to keep the mother safe. You don't sacrifice the well-being of children and whoever else at the altar of her well-being.

The same goes for the elderly. You don't lock down the world to keep them safe (which in NY was a disaster under Cuomo anyway). You take measures to secure their well-being without paralyzing everyone else. And FWIW, there are plenty in that age group who would rather risk COVID to see their grandchildren than live out their remaining years in isolation.

If anything is irrational, it's the ridiculous priorities that were imposed by the lockdown.

[urda]

I think you're letting a bit of emotion get in the way of logic, take a step back and just breath for a second.

Given the information we had at the time, and how violent the virus was ripping through communities it was the best, worst choice we had at the time. Sure it meant you didn't get to go to your social functions or parties you craved, but we kept the curve down and allowed medical facilities and practitioners brace for the infection wave.

It wasn't irrational at all, and if you found wearing a mask a "ridiculous priority" you were part of the problem. Sometimes someone higher up than you needs to impose a restriction or law to protect others.

[peyton]

> Sure it meant you didn't get to go to your social functions or parties you craved

I have to say this is ridiculously callous. My grandmother cried every day until she passed. I would like to see an investigation into pandemic preparedness. I don’t think we have been getting our money’s worth.

[nec4b]

>>So we should paralyze a generation?

A generation was paralyzed because it had 1 year remote school instead of in person? Kids are just fine. I think they rather got a much more valuable lesson on how to act in a crisis.

[op00to]

I don't believe that COVID "paralyzed" a generation. The acute non-vaccine phase in the US was what - 18 months tops? Hyperbole does not help.

People still got paid. Business got done. My kid learned. People got married. People got divorced. Children were born, people died. No evidence of a "paralyzed generation".

My youngest kid has incredibly strong math and verbal skills compared to my older kid, and I suspect that's because the youngest sat and listened to the online instruction along with his sibling.

Absolving all culpability and foisting it on "the government" or "shutdowns" is just as weak as using hyperbole to make misleading claims about how a generation was "paralyzed". Difficult to get shit done? Sure. Not paralyzed.

[CydeWeys]

So maybe students in that situation can do remote education and then everyone else does normal, more effective, in-person education?

[saiya-jin]

I don't generally agree with parent's needless reduction to 'protect 90 years old to get to 91', but can't we agree that whole schooling from home was pretty badly mishandled literally everywhere?

Not sure how we can isolate and measure just school-from-home effect on kids across age groups, various places etc. but I strongly believe there was some harm and it was not tiny. How much, and if not temporary again I can't say (but maybe some huge long term stats on things like grades, counseling frequency, suicides, BMI etc. can, but who knows if they won't show just 2nd order effect of parents suffering too).

[jupp0r]

The 140k children who lost a parent or caregiver to COVID [1] would probably disagree with your statement. Losing your parents is also not great for emotional wellbeing or development.

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/more-140000-us...

[gruez]

>Overall, the study shows that approximately 1 out of 500 children in the United States has experienced COVID-19-associated orphanhood or death of a grandparent caregiver.

What about the other 499 children who missed 2+ years of in-person classes?

[red-iron-pine]

they'll make it up. nothing is going to magically bring a dead parent back.

[gruez]

>they'll make it up

That remains to be seen. The 2022 PISA tests suggests that in developed countries, children have missed on the equivalent of 0.5-0.75 of a year's worth of learning.

[1] https://www.economist.com/international/2023/12/05/the-pande...

> nothing is going to magically bring a dead parent back.

nothing is going to magically bring back those years either, for all 500 students.

[ZoomerCretin]

This happened everywhere, including in the places that only shut down in-person schooling for March 2020-May 2020, and opened up again in August 2020.

Maybe the effect of going through a pandemic was a stressful event harmful to school performance, independent of whether your schooling was in-person or remote?

[gruez]

From the article linked above:

>Education ministries the world over will envy the handful of rich places that have a cheery story to tell amid the gloom. In Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, test scores not only held steady over the pandemic period, they actually ticked up in at least one of the three subjects in which pupils sat exams. Israel and Switzerland are among other countries that appear, at least as judged from these data, to have done reasonably well.

>Some of these outliers protected learning by keeping school closures short. Across the OECD’s dataset there is a modest association between the length of time schools stayed closed and children’s subsequent performance in tests. Teachers in Switzerland ran fully remote or hybrid timetables for only six weeks (the average among countries in Europe was around 29). Closures in Japan were also comparatively zippy: in 2020 schools in that country shortened their summer breaks in order to claw back some of the class hours that children had lost up to then. Singapore, likewise, decided to alter school holidays to maximise learning time.

[nec4b]

They didn't loose those years. How do you even know it wasn't better for some at home than it was in school? Aren't you learning your whole life? Do you use everything you learned in school?

[gruez]

>They didn't loose those years. How do you even know it wasn't better for some at home than it was in school?

But did lose those years of in-class instruction, as the PISA tests have shown, post pandemic scores were down from historical trends. The article says that there was a correlation between lockdown intensity and/or catch-up school days and test performance, so I think it's fairly reasonable to conclude that lockdowns did cause a loss of learning.

>Aren't you learning your whole life?

You can also make money your whole life, but that doesn't mean it's totally fine to steal a year's worth of salary from you.

>Do you use everything you learned in school?

And did the pandemic related lockdowns conveniently only caused students to miss the knowledge that they didn't need?

[jupp0r]

I asked my two kids and they would rather have their parents.

[gruez]

Ah yes, kids who famously care about their educational attainment and are experts on education related policies and outcomes.

[nec4b]

Why would that even be a problem?

[TimPC]

I feel like anyone who feels the way the above poster does hasn't experienced having a kid in school and the way infections spread through those populations. Especially with young kids who still do things like thumb sucking. My child has been home sick from school four separate times since September, the amount of colds children get from being exposed to each other's germs is absolutely staggering.

For all the problems of kids staying home, I'd much rather stay home from school and learn online by being healthy than get COVID and stay home from school without learning anything at all. Especially when you consider the 10% of cases that have long term consequences. We saw a few examples of university age athletes giving up their athletic careers because of potentially permanently reduced lung capacity caused by long COVID so it's not just the older generation that has consequences.

I don't feel it's a fair characterization of these methods to say that the main benefit was getting 90 year olds to live to 91. I think the main benefit was slowing down the spread enough that hospitals weren't badly over capacity so that people who needed emergency care mostly could get it. Letting COVID spread like wildfire through the population would result in more people needing emergency care than we had resources for.

[afavour]

> For all the problems of kids staying home, I'd much rather stay home from school and learn online

Supervised by who, though?

Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you about the risks. But those of us that were working remotely from our office jobs while our kids stayed at home had enormous privilege over the people who still had to go to their jobs in person. Like all the cheering we did for first responders: first responder parents? Oh, well they’re screwed.

IMO we should have prioritized (in the areas where it’s climate appropriate) outdoor schooling. I’m sure there would have been a steep learning curve but it would have been possible, a lot of schools have plenty of outdoor space available.

[kspacewalk2]

>My child has been home sick from school four separate times since September, the amount of colds children get from being exposed to each other's germs is absolutely staggering.

That's just a normal part of being a child in in-person school, temporarily made somewhat worse by lack of in-person schooling for 1, sometimes 2 years.

>I'd much rather stay home from school and learn online by being healthy than get COVID and stay home from school without learning anything at all.

All dependent on timescales. I'd rather my child get COVID or any other respiratory virus and stay home from school without learning anything at all for a week max, than keep them home from school for months on end. Even though it wasn't too bad for me as a parent to have my kid home, I'm also part of the laptop class.

>We saw a few examples of university age athletes giving up their athletic careers because of potentially permanently reduced lung capacity caused by long COVID so it's not just the older generation that has consequences.

Yes, we saw a few examples. We didn't see those few examples pre-COVID when it came to bad flu complications because it wasn't click-worthy so no one bothered to write the article. This isn't to say long COVID or COVID complications in under-50s isn't a problem, just trying to put context into the equation.

>I don't feel it's a fair characterization of these methods to say that the main benefit was getting 90 year olds to live to 91.

It's about as simplistic and dismissive as "pfft kids will be fine without in-person school, they're so resilient". Which I've heard far too many times.

[op00to]

> Was this the right thing to do? I don't believe there's a clear answer to that

I'm not sure how you reconcile your claim that you don't believe there's a clear answer to whether it was wright with the emotion-laden and leading statement you made just before.

Everyone suffered during the pandemic. There was no way to spare anyone, it was a traumatic experience for everyone. Having a dead grandmother and grandfather would be much more impactful on their life than the school they missed.

[tharne]

> I'm not sure how you reconcile your claim that you don't believe there's a clear answer to whether it was wright with the emotion-laden and leading statement you made just before.

The parent commenter stated that the way we handled COVID made them lose their faith in humanity. I was pointing out that there were a series of choices to make, none of them good, but just because someone wanted to make a different tradeoff does not ipso facto make them a bad or uncaring person.

Was I snarkier than I should have been, sure. That was immature of me.

[ghaff]

I'd add that there were a variety of different approaches in different countries and regions and, unless I've missed something, there's no smoking gun that "WOW This approach vastly slashed deaths vs. that approach." You can make arguments that this similar country did a bit better than that similar country but did anyone (with reliable data) really come out as having clearly found the magic formula?

[hattmall]

> Having a dead grandmother and grandfather would be much more impactful on their life than the school they missed.

I'm not really too sure about that.

[unethical_ban]

>another example of how we prioritize the elderly over children in the United States, arguably because children don't vote and the elderly do.

Or arguably because death is final, death came for the elderly more than the children with this disease, and we were trying to save lives.

We can debate the philosophy of saving people near end of life vs. allowing children to continue with close-contact education. But it's revolting that the first place your mind went was "save the vote".

Hell, old people who vote lean Republican, so if you're going to play a shrewd voting population game with a pandemic, wouldn't it have been in the interests of the "pro-isolation" coalition to let it run amok?

---

One final note, moving away from your premise: The reason we needed to lock down besides saving lives from COVID directly was that our hospitals and funeral homes couldn't handle the burden. You can't treat people with heart attacks and broken bones if the ICU is filled with people dying of influenza-class viruses.

Maybe if our healthcare system can keep up with a disease's infection rate, we let society chug on - as we have each year when preventable, transmissible diseases kill tens of thousands of people per year.

[CydeWeys]

> Or arguably because death is final, death came for the elderly more than the children with this disease

Death always comes for the elderly though. The metric of "years of high quality life saved" is important to apply here.

I was all for the shutdowns starting in March 2020, and was arguing in favor of it, but it then went on for way too long. NYC schools remained closed until fall 2021, and even then they kept shutting down individually for awhile afterwards as part of the COVID protocol. In hindsight it went on for way too long.