COVID Fudge Factors

Guille said:
I grok better than you. Your entire shtick from the day you joined here is trying to play both sides in a futile attempt to appear non-partisan while making it clear you are partisan. Good luck with that.
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You're confused. I have never claimed to be non-partisan. You may have me confused with some other poster. Try rereading. Good luck.
 
Mina said:
You seem to have had trouble following my argument. Although COVID did kill a lot of kids (1,070, so far, in the US), my argument isn't based on COVID killing kids. It's about the question of whether non-lethal impacts on children might be great enough to outweigh whatever short-term educational advantage may have existed from keeping the kids doing in-person schooling through the worst of the pandemic. I don't know the answer to that, and neither do you. We're just guessing. But the non-lethal impacts we're talking about include health impacts on the kids themselves (if the disease was bad enough to outright kill over a thousand of them, one would expect far more than a 1,000 to have had serious negative health impacts that fell short of death, including the brain shrinkage that's been reported among COVID survivors). Even mild cases appear to impact the brain negatively:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/ja...re, researchers at,smell, and more brain size

Then there are the sociological/psychological impacts from sick or dead loved ones. Picture, for example, that a kid picks up COVID at school, infects a parent, and then the parent dies. An old enough kid will understand what happened and potentially feel a devastating level of guilt about it, which will have long-standing negative academic impacts.

So, that's why I'm eager to see what the standardized testing tells us, once that's available. My first guess is that places that shut down schools less had kids who lost less ground academically. But that's just a guess, and we could well learn the opposite.
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The reason schools were closed was to help curb the spread of the disease to older folks. The health depts. weren't particularly concerned that lots of children would die; all evidence even at the beginning of the pandemic showed that children in general had mild cases. In addition, at least in our area, many schools had to close due to staff being infected and unable to work.
 
ThatOwlWoman said:
The reason schools were closed was to help curb the spread of the disease to older folks. The health depts. weren't particularly concerned that lots of children would die; all evidence even at the beginning of the pandemic showed that children in general had mild cases. In addition, at least in our area, many schools had to close due to staff being infected and unable to work.
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Understood. Though I think it's worth comparing the COVID death toll to other child safety concerns we freak out about.

For example, CNN documented 356 dead in school shootings over the course of 10 years:

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/07/us/ten-years-of-school-shootings-trnd/

So, 35.6 per year. By comparison, 1,070 kids have been killed by COVID in the US. That means, it's a threat on the scale of 30 years' worth of school shootings. Yet we, as society, flip out over the school shootings, where we dismiss the COVID threat for kids as if it were a non-issue, and the only consideration is kids infecting older folks.
 
Mina said:
Understood. Though I think it's worth comparing the COVID death toll to other child safety concerns we freak out about.

For example, CNN documented 356 dead in school shootings over the course of 10 years:

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/07/us/ten-years-of-school-shootings-trnd/

So, 35.6 per year. By comparison, 1,070 kids have been killed by COVID in the US. That means, it's a threat on the scale of 30 years' worth of school shootings. Yet we, as society, flip out over the school shootings, where we dismiss the COVID threat for kids as if it were a non-issue, and the only consideration is kids infecting older folks.
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Maybe the reason is because a virus is an "Act of God" but school shootings are acts of man and entirely preventable, if we only had the political will to do so.
 
ThatOwlWoman said:
Maybe the reason is because a virus is an "Act of God" but school shootings are acts of man and entirely preventable, if we only had the political will to do so.
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Perhaps. That "Reasoning" doesn't hold water for me, though. A life is a life. If anything, the virus is more terrible, in that the kids who die of it wind up suffering for weeks, before gasping out their last breaths, whereas the victims of the school shooters are generally dead pretty quickly, with their suffering ended. And "political will" could have saved a lot of lives when it came to the virus. Comparable countries with better pandemic response had about half our COVID death toll per capita, so we probably could have saved enough children's lives to account for fifteen years of school shootings, with some better policies.
 
Mina said:
Perhaps. That "Reasoning" doesn't hold water for me, though. A life is a life. If anything, the virus is more terrible, in that the kids who die of it wind up suffering for weeks, before gasping out their last breaths, whereas the victims of the school shooters are generally dead pretty quickly, with their suffering ended. And "political will" could have saved a lot of lives when it came to the virus. Comparable countries with better pandemic response had about half our COVID death toll per capita, so we probably could have saved enough children's lives to account for fifteen years of school shootings, with some better policies.
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I definitely agree that we blew it on the pandemic response. It started at the top and with the collusion of the Fox propaganda machine and willing dupes, it went downhill from there.
 
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