- Missing that in-person school time meant losing a lot of "leaving home" practice for a large chunk of kids. Current second graders were in-person for 6 months of kindergarten, and remote from there. This means there are a lot of mechanical and social things they haven't had to do (sit quietly next to each other, tie their shoes, ask to go to the bathroom).

- The "summer slide" has been much more severe than usual. A large chunk of the students didn't get much education out of being remote for first grade, so a much-larger-than-usual chunk of the cohort are substantially behind grade level for basic skills, especially reading.

- Related to above, there has been a huge backlog of students who need to be evaluated for various special education and disability needs who just haven't been able to be accommodated and who, due to the process difficulties for the last year, probably won't be able to be evaluated based on their data from last year (leaving them severely under-supported for another year while the data is collected).

Only about 10% of the counselors we called would even call back, and of that 10%, almost all of them said they would not accept any new patients, indefinitely. A couple had openings within a year or so, and one or two had any availability in a shorter time frame.

Not sure what all the reasons are, but I'm guessing it's the perfect storm of more kids needing more services in this unprecedented time, more counselors on the older side retiring early, and funding for these programs being a continual battle.

It is undesirable work for undesirable pay with undesirable volatility, to many people.

Call me naive but society needs to evolve and entirely redesign itself around this new problem because it is not going away and it will almost certainly not be the last time something like this happens.

Kids come first. Until this summer the chance of them getting sick or transmitting was super low, with delta it’s a little higher but with sane precautions most of the risk can be alleviated. In a few years time you’re gonna see real disparities between even religious private school kids (which don’t necessarily have better education standards) and public based solely on who was in person.

If you’re trying to win one over your political opponents get out of this, it’s not game.

Teachers' unions are so weak in my state that they're nearly worthless as far as contract negotiation & enforcement goes, yet every district I know of in my city had a well-attended online option last year, if they weren't fully online, and in-person was largely "hybrid" (in-person some days, remote other days). The unions had nothing to do with it. Parents and teachers—not their unions, just teachers, directly—drove most of the decisions.

This is a bit of a side tangent but it never ceases to amaze me that the supposed asymptomatic spread of COVID (which was never proven; pre-symptomatic was but asymptomatic appears to have been a myth) was used as a justification for the necessity of lockdowns and the like, when really it should have been a screaming indicator that we should stop trying to aggressively contain the damn thing and just focus on population health and focused protection of the severely vulnerable.

By the same logic (this is me basically restating my first paragraph), the idea that a variant that infects kids more easily or as was argued above that kids can transmit more easily, is a sign that we should stop trying to close schools, not that we need to double down. And regardless it seems like people seem to have forgotten that we're now in late September 2021. It's almost been two years of this now.

Hell, I remember catching major flak here (on a different account) in early-mid 2020 for saying that we were going to stay locked down until they coerced everyone into being vaccinated, and at the time I was called a conspiracy theorist; nowadays people act like I'm crazy for not wanting vaccine passports, and will turn around and act as if we all collectively knew they were going to happen from the beginning! More than 18 months of this, a third-world child starvation / missed medical appointment crisis, a massive worldwide uptick in missed preventative care like cancer screenings, a >30% rise in y/y fentanyl overdose deaths in the US alone, and yet people still insist on more of these ineffective and outright authoritarian measures?!

[0] https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/reports/vaccine-efficacy-safet...

[0] https://twitter.com/dvir_a/status/1420059124700700677

Our experiment with government-by-hysterical-outrage-mob continues.

Two, WWII was mostly run by letting others (Europe) take most of the heat and then simply outspending everyone when nobody had any money left. America is slow to act, but builds incredible momentum. Same playbook here. We delayed, but when we did act we put so much money on the table that we leapt ahead of Europe in vaccinations.

Today is nothing like WWII. The government can’t do anything without massive pushback. Also things are way more complicated and the level of care we expect from the government is 10x what it was 70 years ago.

People are horrifically misinformed on the risks of covid. It has made it impossible to have a reasoned discussion on public policy.

Source: http://covid19pulse.usc.edu/

I don't have the link to it but I saw a hilarious pre-print on "long COVID" the other day that was comparing the incidence of long COVID amongst people that had vs never had COVID. In many groups the people with COVID had more long COVID (but not enough to reach significance), but in the age range of like 12-15 years old there were literally more kids who never had COVID who reported long COVID than those who had COVID. It's as if people forgot that fatigue and malaise and chronic inflammation are all things that happened before COVID and will continue to happen long after...

What gets reported however are the extreme outliers, people who are reporting Chronic Fatigue-type symptoms 6+ months later. Some of these people genuinely have a delayed immune response, while others were probably psychosomatic cases (turns out having to live with the fear of a deadly virus does a number on people’s mental state if they actually do get sick). But either way, these cases are likely a minority of what’s included in the ‘long Covid’ umbrella.

It’s irresponsible reporting, and I’m not sure if it happens through ignorance (scary news is fun to talk about) or an ulterior motive (if we can convince our readers that they’ll likely to have long-term effects from getting Covid maybe they’ll mask up and vaccinate). Either way, it’s proof that even ‘mainstream’ media often can’t be trusted to report the facts.

I don't like commenting on internet points (it isn't usually productive) but you'll note that the person you replied to has been downvoted and flagged into oblivion.

Hopefully soon, it will no longer be contraversial to say that lockdowns (especially any that lasted longer than the initial "flatten the curve for 2 weeks" we were all promised) caused more harm than good.

For a (Western) society that is obsessed with helping the needy, it's just incredible that something that obviously would hurt the poorest very hardest was also something that could not be disagreed with.

I would say losing parents or grandparents (any primary caretakers really) to COVID would be far more impactful on a child's development than missing a year of school.

I will gladly concede that lockdowns did cause harm, but "more harm than good" is something I'm still not seeing as true.

It was pretty clear after the first few weeks that Covid was not the horrible killer that leaves people literally dropping dead in the streets, yet the response continued as if it were. Given the incredible disruption our response to it has caused, that I predict will continue for years and decades, the fact that we can't even say (and probably never will be able to) whether it was worth it, is damning enough.

Most kids lose a grandparent at a young age (I did). I really disagree that it was worse than losing a year of school, and being shut in the house for a considerable period of that. If anything, we have forgotten the lessons that death teaches us, and have lost touch with the cycle of life and death. The incredible aversion to a relatively harmless (for most) disease shows this is the case.

Exactly. I assert that for any of these non pharmaceutical interventions to have been worthwhile their effect on “the charts” should be plain and dramatic. You should be able to pull anybody off the street and show them a lockdown state vs a non-lockdown state and have them see plain as day the profound difference.

If you need grad student level statistics to tease apart differences it means even if these things worked, their impact was so minor that the extreme social costs made them not worthwhile at all.

Keep in mind that the constitution protects free travel between states, so such an analysis only shows what results a mixed response gives.

If you compare Australia to the US, you can see that lockdowns very clearly do work: 1K vs 600K deaths. Even accounting for relative size, that suggests lockdowns produced a 50x effect.

(of course, if the question is "should California be draconian" then this is still very useful information! I'm just saying the answer changes depending on whether California is doing this while still being forced to have open borders with states that aren't locking down, or if the entire country coordinate a federal lockdown)

The 50x difference is a starting point, not a declaration that there's no other factors.

And besides, look what they’ve done to their citizens basic human rights. Even if it works, is it worth it?

I work professionally with numerous cities in Australia, along with having friends and family there, so I don't have any particular reason to believe that under-reporting would produce a meaningful effect (keeping in mind that even if they were under-reporting by 10x, you'd still have a 5x result towards "yes, lockdowns work.")

I also follow a few scientists that track things like "rise in natural cause deaths" to look for under-reporting, and none of them has flagged Australia as a major concern.

> Even if it works, is it worth it?

That's a question we can only really ask after we've answered "does it work", but I agree it's an important one.

The thing is, "is it worth it" really depends on what the effect size is. If we can get that entire 50x reduction in deaths, that's amazing and I'd be hard-pressed to argue that the price they paid was too high for that.

But if we can get that 50x without such draconian restrictions, that's even better. And it's possible that over here we can't get anywhere close to that 50x because we can't do things like "completely close our borders" the way Australia can.

Fear causes stress. Chronic fear causes chronic stress. Chronic stress causes chronic cortisol. Chronic cortisol causes immunosupression.

- lack of sleep/exercise (which destroys the body's immunoregulatory capacities, leading to either a sort of acute immunosenescence like you said wrt fear, or alternatively leading to an overreactive immune system that kills via cytokine storm)

- decline in social interaction

- more time spent inside (which apart from the other correlates, very obviously leads to less sunlight). sunlight => vitamin d + nitric oxide; vitamin d is critical for respiratory pathology specifically, as well as just general health, and nitric oxide is very important as an immunoregulatory compound and as a preventer of strokes

- the general environment of fear/stress/anxiety (again, going to screw up the immunoregulatory balance of the body)

I would argue the severe aversion in reaction to the news coming out of NYC wasn't unreasonable, even if it was an overreaction.

Is that really true though? Because what the headlines of these kinds of stories say vs. what the article itself says usually never match.

So... it's sort of true, but it's more of a congestion issue (like rush hour traffic), not a sign of systemic collapse.

Untrue, at least for all of US history [1]. I honestly think this downplaying of the deadliness of COVID belies an agenda. If it was 3x more deadly...

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/20/covid-19-set-to-overtake...

Interesting. I'm not downplaying the deadliness of Covid. The numbers speak for themselves.

Spanish Flu had a mortality rate of between 2% and 10%, and mostly killed healthy young adults. Estimates for Covid put its IFR somewhere aruond 0.4%, and it killed almost entirely elderly people.

Legally, what right do our nations have to shutter businesses as they did? Where in the legal frameworks do they legitimately yield such enormous & violent authority over us? Did they do enough to protect & compenate us all against these violations of our rights?

Ethically, is this even a moral way to conduct statecraft during a pandemic? Is scapegoating appropriate at a time like this, and were we right to erode so much of our monetary base to provide the benefits that states did to their citizenry, necessitated by the lockdowns in the first place?

And practically, how many people have been harmed or killed by the conditions of lockdowns? How many people committed suicide who otherwise wouldn't? How much industrial output was sacrificed and how did this impact the deaths of despair that rose considerably over the last 1.5 years? How many people didn't get their cancer detected early enough to survive it? How many people didn't get their emergency medical care due to the chaos caused by lockdowns and perished as a result? Did these figures remain low enough to make the actual policies of lockdown worth it?

Is it really that impossible that well meaning, intelligent people can completely disagree with how society handled covid?

My family is under much-lauded, short-and-sharp, snap lockdown of over 230 days in Victoria, Australia. With 9pm curfew and 5km chain leash. Homeschooling three kids, oldest in y12 and youngest in kindy. We are being asked by the premier not to worry, the beautifully effective tools of lockdowns and curfews will be with us even after 80% of fully-vaxed. Masks will be mandatory for years to come. Contact tracing too. Riot police is as enthusiastic about enforcing 100% vaxx, as they were about zero-covid. By beautiful logic, because zero-covid is not attainable anymore, the "health advice" changed overnight and all the restrictions must ... stay the same! Until 100% vaxx, perhaps. Take no prisoners! And invitation-only "journalists" only ask "why not locking down earlier and harder"? I had a good friend confronting me with "you must be wanting to kill ten percent of 60+" and "feeling conspiratorial" when I said I do not support most of the actions taken.

I, personally, did step out of house only a handful of times during the last two years. Wearing facemask gives me acute psychosis. Seeing people wearing them makes me cry. I'm scared that I will start throwing punches if I see police or anyone enforcing this madness. There was no moment in the last two years when I did not feel anger, despair or complete apathy. I defy the curfew and walk my dog at midnight, in the middle of nowhere. If stopped, I plan on claiming "providing care", as it is one of the "allowed" reasons to break the curfew. If asked to whom, the answer will be "myself". I flip the police chopper when I see it loitering. Daily.

I gained 20 kilos, got myself a proper diabetes (I never even had elevated blood sugar before this), losing my eyesight, having chest pains and all that. My wife has been cut from minuscule support for a life-long medical condition, under premise that she is not successful enough in mitigating the symptoms of that condition. Apparently, the support is a reward now. We lost all trust in governments, police, doctors and all sorts of public service orgs. I absolutely not going to any medical place for checkup or vax until mandates are lifted. Which may be never or too late, so realistically I'm looking to meet my end long before my youngest reaches 18. By diabetes, covid, or by my own hand. There is no light. There is no escape. There is no place on Earth where we, realistically, could move. Heck, we cannot look at houses to buy in Vic, yet alone in another state. Cannot visit parents overseas, cannot invite them here. Cannot even send a parcel! There is no advice I could give to my sons. There is only regret that we chose Victoria, that we chose Australia, that we chose to have kids, that we were born at all. We've gone from normal, relatively positive and healthy people to complete wrecks in less than a year. So, however "worthwile" it was for the world, I guess my family will be dismissed as collateral damage.

I'm done for. My capacity to fight is gone. To those utilitarians, who are lockdown enthusiasts and covid evangelists - you may rejoice in knowing the world will be better without people like me. After all, it will raise the vaxxed percentage by decreasing the denominator. This is what we hear from all sides. The feeling that you killed a bunch of people to improve overall mortality statistics must be delightful. I wish you all to live forever with this feeling, cannot think of anything more horrible.

End of story.

Why so many people, even the smartest most grounded people I know, flipped a bit and ignored both common sense and easily accessible data is really beyond me. I truly don’t understand how so many people can ignore what their own eyes and brains tell them.

This whole thing is really something else. It’s gonna piss people off to say it but… this is really the first true mass hysteria of the internet age and while it sucks to be a skeptic it is truly both an amazing and frightening aspect of human behavior to witness.

Ironically, Bernstein had nothing to say about our response to Covid, and only occasionally parroted the accepted platitudes about the pandemic.

The formation of large blocs of people who will not tolerate any dissent to the current state of Covid thought, and the scapegoating of those who question or do not fall in line, and a corresponding decline in the social, moral, and economic health of a country, certainly bear striking similarities.

There is a wide spread of pandemic responses from different countries and regions, so yes, we can make pretty good guesses as to what the effect would have been.

All the various lockdown-supporting studies compare lockdowns to a do-nothing base scenario, where people are essentially assumed to be rolling around naked in a big heap, licking everything and everyone. This is completely false, because people everywhere acted on their own to protect themselves from spread.

And when you compare the effects of the decreased mobility due to ordered lockdowns vs. what people voluntarily achieve anyway, the effect is zero. No benefit, all harm.

You can support working-from-home and furloughing without forcing it. And that's enough.

Last autumn in Sweden, cases started rising, still no lockdown, and people voluntarily decreased their mobility. Everyone I talked to decreased their social activity, skipped out on things, stayed home more. Without being told to. Without being ordered around. It's enough.

Source?

This is https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/changes-visitors-covid?ti...

Shows the trend becomes clear on March 12th, which is 7 days before the first lockdowns in New York. Are you suggesting that the one week delay when everyone bought out all the toilet paper because they thought the world was ending is evidence that the lockdowns weren't needed to affect mobility?

This is nothing compared to the "stay in your flat for a month" lockdowns in Italy and Spain. Or shutting almost everything in the UK, France, Australia, NZ, etc.

At the time I recall significant disagreement on this point between politicians, the news media, the school boards in my area, and my neighbors. After much debate, our local public schools ultimately did decide to maintain full-in person school for as long as possible due in no small part to equity concerns. Everyone seemed uncertain about whether this was the right thing to do, and I don't recall anyone on either side insisting that disagreement was forbidden.

I'm not sure how you prevent folks like that from getting a foothold, but seems like it's worth figuring out.

Disagreement with the narrative still gets you exiled in many parts. I’ve gotten called all kinds of extremely horrible things by people I know in real life just for asking basic questions. It’s really amazing what fear does to people.

All over a virus with a 99.5+% survival rate, with 92% of the deaths in the UK in over 75s (and mostly with diabetes and dementia).

https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/social-spending.htm

Western society has a historically unique obsession with social insurance programs, to the point where between 20-30% of GDP is spent on social insurance, whereas in other socities the number is much lower. In fact the modern version of these programs were invented in Germany under Bismarck, and the ancient version in the Roman Empire with their bread dole. From the Roman Empire's 'dole' to the hospitals in the middle ages, there was a tradition in Western societies with having the government help the needy. That's not to say that individuals didn't help the needy in many different societies (begging was an occupation in early Islamic societies) but having organized government programs on a mass scale simply to help the poor was the invention of Western civilization during the Roman Empire and continued as a Western obsession to the present day.

Even in the US, the share of national wealth spent on social benefits is 19%, the dirty secret being not that the US spends much less than Europe on things like publicly funding healthcare and education (because the US government spends about the same amount as in Europe), but in the US those public funds are pocketed by well-paid professionals and still the private sector is left with large individual bills, whereas in Europe those same institutions have to get by on the public funds only.

If you want a quick way of shutting someone up who is arguing that the US should have European style funding of universities, tell them we already spend as much as they do in Europe with public subsidies, so the missing step is just making tuition and fees illegal with no increase in government spending. Same thing for healthcare. That will be a cold dose of reality.

Europe isn't a homogeneous place and you have a lot of private healthcare and educational institutions here. They might not form a majority, but richer people will often make use of them, if they dislike the public option or consider it subpar.

Sometimes not even richer people. I know a lady in Madrid who does not make much money, but gives about half of her income for her son's schooling. He visits a semiprivate school where he gets reasonable education. In her own words, a fully public option would mean that he might not even learn proper Spanish, as only kids of the poorest immigrants frequent it.

But my main point is that the difference between the national healthcare you see in Europe versus the U.S. is not the level of public spending, but the universal nature of service delivery achieved for roughly the same total public spending. The same thing for university education.

In both cases, the government spends an enormous amount and in Europe that covers a baseline of service (with private spending optional to supplement it) but in the US that covers maybe 1/2-1/3 of your bill, leaving private citizens to still face huge costs for things that are fully covered in Europe. The natural solution -- to cut employment and wages on the part of US healthcare or education workers so that they make do with the public funds they are already receiving -- is rarely advocated by those who want a more european-style system of social insurance.

I think we still have a notion of “the right sort” of needy though, compare starving African kids to any of the wretched opioid addicts (and their families) that shuffle around North American cities and the sympathy given to each.

I definitely got better at socializing when I left school and started to interact with much more age diverse groups in the wider world.

Especially with girls it’s important for kids to learn self esteem and agency, and they can’t do that when bigger, stronger, smarter and faster older kids are dominating everything in the classroom.

With that reasoning, you could also decide that classes shouldn't be mixed-gender, because boys might bully girl or girls might bully boys, and it's better to keep everyone in a group of people exactly like them.

Educators are finding that mixing genders actually puts a lot of pressure on boys to behave like girls, ie less excited etc so when they act out, they are medicated or sent to the principals office. Separating boys from girls in the classroom might help boys when they are younger.

And girls benefit from being separated especially during puberty. My friend just sent her daughter to an all-girls middle school that specifically targets girls this age so that they can learn to be more confident during the most awkward age of their lives.

Interactions, yes, but I wouldn't call those interactions socialising.

In my entire time as a child and teenager at multiple schools, I don't recall spending any time socialising with teachers and other faculty. Not once, and not even with my favourite teachers who made the most lasting impressions through their teaching, and willingness to teach me more advanced things than on the standard curriculum.

It was pretty minimal at university too. Socialising was with other students.

But the post by inglor_cz you replied to was specifically about socialising being limited to peer ages as a child, not social eduction in general.

Therefore your reply "this isn't really true though" and "how can you not categorise .. teachers" implied socialising with teachers and faculty, not just formal social interactions.

It really is true that many children don't have the opportunity to socialise with people outside a narrow age range at school, and that seems like a legitimate thing to dislike.

These are interactions, but form just a very limited subset of socializing. Most teachers remain fairly distant and unknown. Or at least that was my experience when going to school.

YMMV.

This is one thing home schooling has going for it, where the social life is built around activities with other home schooled kids who likely differ in age. It's much harder for kids to get caught up in the typical pet immaturities and stupidities of their age group.

Kids that have siblings, neighborhood friends, or social activities like boy scouts, which generally include children over a range of ages, really appreciate it.

It sounds like your school had access to this stuff already though, do you think it was valuable?

In standard school, there are very rigid age-based hierarchies. Sixth graders rule over fifth graders, who rule over fourth graders. And the adults rule over all of them. And then you have the cliques, etc.

You'll find that such hierarchies do not exist in the homeschool world, and the kids are better for it. If the homeschool environment is religion-based, you'll probably find that the children do not know how to interact well with people in other religions, but you still have excellent interactions between age groups.

They all did pretty heavy extracurricular activities. Keep in mind that i met them in a particular time, either as a youth camp counselor or as a "street educator" (not really, basically i animated open physics classes with experiments/construction for kids, think Kiwico but free and with social settings).

They also were quite late in STEM, even those with engineers parents (definitely not the majority), but at least bilingual (i saw a 10 year old girl speaking 4 languages and playing violin better than i did). The most "advanced" i saw (at least in mathematics principles and understanding) where those with a formal musical education. Most of them could play at least one instrument, but those who understood underlying music principle were definitely more likely to "get" physics and engineering for some reasons. I think pattern recognition is definitely important for people to understand STEM work, and that can explain my limited, anecdotal data.

Another common point is that each of their familly were fairly religious (or spiritual rather), but not close-minded. I think around half were christian (not really defined), and the other half were more new-age. No Chomsky day for any of the famillies.

[edit] It's quite unfair from me, putting them in boxes like christian and new-age. Let say around half of them believed in a single entity we could call god creating the universe and guiding humanity, and the other half believing that the universe himself (or Nature, or the soul) guide them. I'm pretty sure one couple were active dualist proponents

Maybe these traits are specific to Christian homeschoolers and not homeschoolers in general, but frankly I have never met someone who was homeschooled because of secular, rather than religious reasons.

These last two years have changed my perspective. While the vast majority of people were bathing in hand sanitizer, hoarding toilet paper, locking themselves away in quarantine, and avoiding elevator buttons, the people who were least in tune with popular culture (Religious, rural, etc.) seemed like the most rational actors. In my opinion turning off the TV and ignoring mass media, sports, culture is probably the most healthy thing a person could do.

IME, the homeschooled people raised by people (homeschooled or not) to whom that description does not apply also do not tend to fit it, but people to whom (again, homeschooled themselves or not) that description does apply are overrepresented among those choosing homeschooling for their kids.

I'm not a luddite and would love to see successful online education that works at least as well as offline. So far, I'm not hugely optimistic, for the median student: https://seliger.com/2013/08/19/computers-and-education-an-ex....

I have no formal teaching experience, but I taught several competitive mathematics seminars for elite high school students. Transposing the classroom model is unsatisfactory, working remotely strongly encourages you to pursue asynchronous models. But on the other hand a lesson is more than just a youtube video, you definitely want some degree of interactivity.

It sounds really silly, but I wonder if internet-first models like Twitch streams with rich interactive chats are actually closer to the solution.

Maybe reading, a bit, because a lot of people will get most of the way there with learn by example and a couple check ins. And then lots of practice.

Writing seems difficult to computerize. And having a classroom full of students doing roughly the same thing seems a lot less labor intensive than each student at their own pace with a teacher available with enough context to appropriately critique and encourage and provide useful resources.

The arithmetic portions of elementary mathematics seem a lot more amenable to computerization. The computer can easily judge the answers, and while it takes a lot of time and practice to master some of the skills, the breadth of skills is really not that deep, so there's not a whole lot of context that needs to be considered when help is needed. I don't know that this still holds at higher level math, but there's parts that might. On the other hand, group instruction can allow for peer assistance with tricky things which may help both parties understand the material more.

I'm starting to think most classes could be split in two when doing online education.

There's a percentage of students that are highly motivated and that don't really need a lot of supervision. A teacher could split them into a group and assign them (a lot) of reading and follow up at a regular cadence. They should be encouraged to have a daily conference call, not necessarily with the teacher, to work together on problems or discuss books.

Else these students are stuck in a lecture where, let's face it, half the time is spent doing "classroom management" for problematic students.

I always take it back to a conversation I've had with co-workers about meetings. Frequently, people all leave the same meeting with different expectations and understandings. This is despite a long meeting, discussion, white boards and back and forth. Communication is hard and a skill we tragically under develop. Education is the same, you have abstract concepts that must be converted into internal mental models by students at different levels and abilities.

Overall though, agree that it has been a total disaster apart from being a rare learning opportunity for policy makers.

I'm a big believer that meritocracy and an ethics of self-motivation can genuinely help disadvantaged but talented people, but that requires offering them a place where they can dedicate themselves to developing that talent. I worry that talented but poor people would actually those that get hit the most by mixed solutions like that.

> I agree with this for like 95-99% of people.

Honestly, K-12 education is completely useless for the top 5% in the first place. You simply can't design a system around those people.

No doubt. Perhaps ironically, outliers that thrive on independent study (I likely would have been one of these people) drive inequality up!

in general i dislike the notion of 'unmotivated students' more often ime you have kids who not being provided an educational experience that aligns with their motivations.

But you can carve out a path for them.

I'll also admit to not thinking that a missed semester of school was a big deal. Why'd I ever think that? I only thought of the glacial pace of American middle and high schools and elementary grades simply skipped my mind entirely. There's no way to teach a child to read over Zoom.

I'm a software developer, I have been working from home since the pandemic started and that's probably what led me to my initial opinion - I had almost no drop in productivity and I (wrongly) assumed school wasn't kinda sorta like my job.

> I also found school to be a huge waste of time but I was a very high IQ kid.

I was top ~1% as well. I agree K-12 is inherently useless for the top few percent, but I still think "normal" school is massively wasteful, even when you only take into account the middle 90%. Most of it just felt fake if I'm being honest: dumbed down versions of reality fed by teachers to students with the mutual understandment that it's all bullshit, so that eventually there's going to be a garbage test where the teacher knows the grades in advance.

I'm Italian though, not American, so YMMV.

> average income family may not have a private room for the kid to study, may have abusive situations at home, etc.

Yes, completely agree. I thought they'd be second-order effects but they weren't. My parents were working class but I don't recall money ever being a pressing issue, we were "poor" but not "really poor", so that might have skewed my perspective as well.

This is not to say it doesn't affect kids in other income classes but the effect is far worse on the lower class.

The younger the child is the worse as well.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics

If you want to stick to deaths, we have by age

Under 5: 183

5-11: 119

12-15: 152

16-17: 125

That's a total of 579 deaths among kids 17 or less in spite of the fact that schools and most activities were closed. We don't know what the total death count would have been with everything open, but 579 child deaths used to be considered a lot, and it would have been a lot higher without the precautions that were taken.

Schools stayed open in half of the US and many other countries, and they didn't have noticeably worse results.

579 child deaths used to be considered a lot

Bluntly, it's not. There were over 20,000 childhood deaths in 2016 (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmsr1804754). That level of risk doesn't remotely justify shutting down schools and massively disrupting their lives.

There's also a slight problem of overcounting covid deaths in the US, so a few of those kids actually died of car accidents, and then tested positive for the virus, so into the pile of covid deaths they went...

The actual risk of death from covid for a healthy child is 1:1000000. There are so many things in life that are much riskier than that, and yet many places closed schools over such a tiny risk. It's absolute insanity.

Recounts already happened like a year ago due to this specific criticism, revised down for miscounts and further resulting in a greater total due to missed ones. This is such an old argument that never got updated, just added to the pile of frustrations that never get revisited.

The other issue with this argument is that the numbers are for indicative seriousness, and all other diseases especially respiratory illnesses have the same counting flaws, which means for relative seriousness everyone is still getting an accurate signal, compared to other ailments.

Can we have a sane debate about the drawbacks of lockdowns and school closures? Weigh the pros and cons? Estimate the cost of each option?

Nope! Hysteria it is, and if you disagree you're a grandma-killing science-hating Trumper.