But I don't follow the science closely enough. I hope they're making the right call, because it's really hard on the kids. I'm just glad my own little guy is not of school age yet, and in fact is young enough to be mostly oblivious to the whole thing.
There are a lot of confounding variables in these analyses. It’s going to take years to tease them apart, and we may never truly know for certain in some cases.
The point is not "is it wise to take precautions"; that's obvious. The point is we don't necessarily have great data on which precautions work better than others because they're largely all being put into effect at the same time.
We actually do, though, and it's preventing close contact of non-household members and preventing sharing enclosed spaces with non-household members for long periods of time.
People spread the virus before they even know they're sick, and a subset of sick people either need to go to work despite being sick, or they just don't care.
It's going to take time and years of research to tease out things like "did closing schools specifically help".
It wasn’t until we closed schools that the trend reversed.
People are so quick to blame fear without actually looking at the data
The other way to think about it is that it wasn’t until things got bad that people got cautious.
Kind of how people take homeopathic drugs when they are sickest.
In Nov-Feb, I was losing 40-60 employees a week to infection or quarantine. Mostly people in essential IT support positions
My sons school was open most of the year, but shutdown for a month due to teacher quarantines.
> Hospitalization rates in children are significantly lower than hospitalization rates in adults with COVID-19, suggesting that children may have less severe illness from COVID-19 compared to adults.
Less severe response to it, not "less chance of getting it." And then just two lines later:
> Recent evidence suggests that compared to adults, children likely have similar viral loads in their nasopharynx,7 similar secondary infections rates, and can spread the virus to others
I don't know how you arrived at your opinion here.
Unfortunately, some of the things done were disruptive, and if they were also ineffective, that will lead to blame. But our mission should be honesty first, and have faith that reasonable people can accept that the best decisions were taken with the information available at the time.
Regardless, school is being done online. Kids that needed laptops got them.
Right, I forgot University of Phoenix regularly matches their in-person counterparts in terms of quality. Keep telling yourself that teachers who were never trained to do remote teaching are anywhere near the same effectiveness as before. You ever dissect something virtually? Somethings can simply not be learned through a screen. Physical education, dealing when your crush looks at you in the eye, literally anything "hands-on" like swinging a hammer at a nail, the of useful skills that can only be developed in the presence of another human are tremendous. Funnily, most of the useful things learned at school for most people are not the curriculum and it is these things that are missing.
At least in hindsight, the closing of schools might have been a huge mistake.