It's not black and white; a lost year of education is a terrible thing on its own in terms of future prospects - but kids need to be around their peers for reasons that go beyond academic success. Lengthy periods of isolation are normally considered a punishment for a reason. It's not supposed to last indefinitely or be a constant threat based on factors they can't control, and appeals to the greater good can only be justified for so long (and only when the effects of the restrictions put in place are actually effective and not overridden by other harms they may cause).

> Mental damage vs brain damage, take your pick. Personally I pick the one that doesn't kill their grandparents, seeing as childhood trauma also causes cognitive impairment.

I think this is overly simplistic, and doesn't consider the relative rates of both.

Besides - The goal of managing Covid shouldn't be to reduce total cognitive impairment, it should be to maximise the total quality of life for everyone. For me, forcing kids to wear a mask throughout school is a significant quality of life reduction, as well as loss of high-quality education which will no doubt continue to drive inequality in the years ahead.

There is no 'right' and 'wrong' approach here.

This black and white "Wear your mask or your grandparents will die." viewpoint is not helpful.

One can discuss (dis)advantages of certain approaches without entirely discounting them.

Difficult in this case; some of those anti-vaccine people are terrible about misreading and misquoting. You may have seen statements recently along the lines of "high vaccination rates don't lead to improvement, study says" that started out as something more like "dropping lockdowns and other measurements in favour of high vaccination rates doesn't lead to improvement" in the study.

Depressing.

> Covid-19 causes brain damage in children

Boy is this editorialized, did you even read your own study?

> Conclusions and Relevance In this study, many children and adolescents hospitalized for COVID-19 or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children had neurologic involvement, mostly transient symptoms. A range of life-threatening and fatal neurologic conditions associated with COVID-19 infrequently occurred. Effects on long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes are unknown.

1. this is among survivors of severe covid. The cohort of under 21's that get severe covid in the first place is extremely low.

2. symptoms are described as "mostly transient".

i.e you're not getting brain damage from casual covid, which is 99.9% of cases.

Even your lancet study shows for non-hospitalization cases, the "cognitive decline" is under SD=0.1 which is arguably within margin of error.

Concerns about the efficacy of cognitive aptitude tests notwithstanding. [0]

[0] https://www.apa.org/monitor/dec03/measuring