Technically correct! The best kind of correct.

Those silly parents, overreacting by dying, losing their jobs, and and not being available 100% during a generation-defining global crisis of confidence.

hmmm I was generally not that much available during confinment while the kids were kind of let on their own at home...

But there are so many things they did with just fabrics, colored papers, pencils, paint, glue, tape and things in general. I let my daughters on their own for hours without a screen. Sometimes they would complain about not knowing what to do and wanting to watch a show but when I give them hard no I perfectly knew I will find them hours later totally entertained having made a big mess in their room by building things, be them clothing for their puppets, decors for their figurines, cardboard swords and axes, building a giant lego construction, among other things.

Those silly governments, making sure the medical system was slowly whittled down from something that was once actually pretty good at taking care of it's citizens to a system that forced/required society to completely grind to a halt from a pandemic because of exterior motives (votes, profits, etc.)

Those silly large media/news companies, not being responsible and considering the results and after-effects of their always-online, constant fear-mongering instead of focusing on delivering factual information and minimizing sensationalism.

Governments and media worked together to cause this mass panic resulting in mass lockdowns and a failure of healthcare systems in the first world. The world should have been ready for this but governments were focusing on profits and ulterior motives over people.

It's a massive shame that so many children will have been mentally affected by the short-term and long-term damage of these relatively short but extremely harmful lockdowns - socially, mentally, and physically - not to mention all the adults whose lives have been irreparably changed by the inactions of their governments. "Society" should be ashamed of itself for causing so much harm but we're all too busy being distracted with perceived differences between each other and trying to survive with the after-effects of a mis-managed pandemic (inflation, food/supply shortages) still running rampant.

I hope when/if I have children that we don't have another pandemic - I don't want the government forcing my children to stay locked in their home from panicked officials and a broken healthcare system.

> Those silly governments, making sure the medical system was slowly whittled down from something that was once actually pretty good at taking care of it's citizens to a system that forced/required society to completely grind to a halt from a pandemic because of exterior motives (votes, profits, etc.)

Lockdowns were almost universal, and also happened in countries where the healthcare systems are robust.

Healthcare systems are statistical mechanisms. They can't treat abnormal amounts of people at once. And no, we can't overbuild them to cover extreme contingency, it's not economically viable.

It's the same thing as with bank runs or your ISP's network bandwidth.

The overrunning of the hospital system never happened. All sorts of impromptu covid facilities were constructed all around the country but never used. This was not because of the "flatten the curve" efforts - it just was not necessary.

We now know that, by far, the overwhelming majority of folks that needed medical treatment and/or died from covid had existing health - specifically respiratory - conditions that made them far more likely to succumb to the virus. The rest were elderly and at risk of all sorts of virus related deaths, including the common cold and flu.

We panicked, and overreacted as a society, and made an awful lot of mistakes and bad decisions. In the process we crushed a lot of people and children unnecessarily.

There's an entire generation of kids that are simply broken for life now. We just swept them into the next grade level and said "they'll make it up, don't worry"... except they are not making it up. There's a lot more to childhood than reading text books and solving multiplication problems - we robbed all of that for literally no good reason.

There's a lot of lessons to learn from the pandemic. Can we pass the final exam though? I think probably not...

> This was not because of the "flatten the curve" efforts - it just was not necessary.

Citation needed. How can you be sure of a broad conclusion like this?

Because the overwhelming majority of people who contracted covid did not require any medical attention. Even the CDC admits covid statistics were largely projections because of significant under-reporting (because people did not visit their medical provider).

Additionally, the "flatten the curve" efforts were based on falsehoods issued by NIH and CDC, such as cloth masks preventing transmission. If there was going to be an overrun of the hospital system, it would have occurred during the time the public was being mislead about prevention techniques. It didn't...

It seems the forced termination of a significant portion of hospital staff would have had the greatest impact on overloading the system - yet even that didn't matter.

So, flipped on it's head - I think a citation is required when we argue these efforts prevented an overloaded system.

Well except to the ones that died from it.

While tragic, the numbers are so close to zero they are statistically zero.

Over 3 years, CDC has logged 650 total (~216 per year)[1] covid-related deaths for the 0-4 age group. 5-18 years is a grand total of 997 (~332 per year)[1].

These numbers rival fatalities that we don't even blink an eye at, such as automotive related deaths[2].

WHO statistics indicate the US loses around 20,000 - 30,000 children under the age of 5 every year[3].

None of this is to say child covid related deaths are not tragic - of course they are. But the numbers are so small that it makes little sense to worry about them.

[1] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...

[2] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/child...

[3] https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...