> By the end of May [2022] pupils in 13 countries were still enduring some restrictions on face-to-face learning—among them China, Iraq and Russia.
Your suggested approaches aren't reflective of current circumstances. We have vaccines; yet, lockdowns affecting early education are still in effect.
What fraction of Chinese students are currently doing in-person learning?
This information is available - there are regular updates from every Chinese city about CoVID measures.
The Economist is just too lazy to actually go tabulate the data, so what we get instead is a vague statement about "enduring restrictions," which affect some unspecified number of students. Are we talking about 10% of students, 1% of students, 0.1% of students? Hint: it's probably nearest to the final figure.
It's not just The Economist that is lazy when it comes to reporting about China. Most Western outlets are. The standard of reporting is incredibly low, and it is colored by some massive biases. For people who actually know something about the country, it's incredibly frustrating.
I don't have the figures. You're right.
But, I'm betting against your gut feeling that the impact to the CN school population is a rounding error when mega-cities in CN are shutting down their schools due to CV19.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-shanghai-shuts-sc...
But to put this in context, Shanghai makes up 2% of China's population.
China reopened schools very early in the pandemic, all the way back in March-April 2020. That's because it ended (as in, zero new infections) its initial outbreak very quickly. Schools have been open in the vast majority of the country for the vast majority of the time since.
Acknowledging the impact as absolute and sizeable (millions of kids in Shanghai, CN alone) undermines any argument that the impacts are muted and immaterial (See your percentage basis rationale.) Tracing to the original thread, you're acknowledging the significance (and claims by the Economist) , which you opposed earlier.
> That's because it ended (as in, zero new infections) its initial outbreak very quickly.
I don't know man. That "zero new infections" might be true, but it's hard to take China's self-reported figures credibly. See this study showing how CN advertised a death/infection rate ONLY of 1 per 100,000 [0] when all peers are orders of magnitude higher. CN's claims are statistical anomolies.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Just to take mainland China as an example:
1. Economically, China has outperformed almost every country during the pandemic. It was the only major economy to grow in 2020, and it had solid growth in 2021.
2. We always hear about lockdowns in China, but most of China hasn't experienced a serious lockdown since early 2020. Shanghai went from April 2020 to April 2022 without a lockdown. Then it had one severe lockdown (ironically, triggered by a failed attempt to follow a "living with the virus" approach). Most cities have not had the type of lockdown that Shanghai had. Schools, restaurants, bars, etc. have been open throughout the vast majority of China for most of the pandemic.
There are three approaches to dealing with the virus:
1. Do nothing: 0.5% of your population dies.
2. Mitigation: social distancing, closures or restrictions for certain businesses, mask-wearing. Lots of people die, but hopefully a vaccine comes out before most people are infected. Most rich countries did some variant of this. Notably, after the first wave, the US was much closer to the "do nothing" approach, and lost 0.3% of its population.
3. Zero-CoVID: maximum effort to eliminate the virus, followed by much lower-intensity measures to prevent the virus from regaining a foothold. Long-term, this requires border quarantine for people coming in from abroad, regular testing to catch new outbreaks quickly, and extremely good contact tracing and localized lockdowns to nip new outbreaks in the bud. This policy has to be continued at least until there are vaccines or effective therapeutics.
> A properly functioning society does not sacrifice the future of its young to protect the old.
From an East Asian perspective, this is an incredibly immoral thing to say. Old people built the world that young people live in, and they deserve respect and care. That might be why most of East Asia followed either a zero-CoVID policy or a much more rigorous mitigation policy than the West.