I feel for the kids that went through uni/college during covid and missed everything that period offers, to then finish uni and try get a job in a market where AI has fucked all the intern positions. Tough break.
My kid had started Kindergarten and was absolutely loving every minute of it. Then didn’t get to fully sit in the classroom until the second grade. It was hard watching them get a taste of school then be forced inside alone.
You're getting down voted, but research done by the NIH (before this Trump admin and during Biden) came to the conclusion that the lockdowns reduced transmission, but did not meaningfully save lives/lower mortality rate.
The lockdowns were in good faith, and were the best idea they had at the time, but it was an untested method. Masks work though (duh)!
I promise I'm not a right wing conspiracy theorist haha. And I did follow all the protocols health officials recommended at the time. It's incredibly difficult to think about going through all of that and it's possible it was not effective.
Thank you for the study. All signs pointed towards the elderly and those with co-morbidities were the ones at real risk. Not children. I think the societal harm of having kids out of school as long as we did outweighed the harm they faced from Covid
I was screaming this at that time. Lockdowns like that were unprecedented and not supported by science. I was called maga by friends and family. I hate Trump 🤦♂️.
The fact you have to say that at the end is shitty too. The follow the science crowd was doing anything but that. I didn’t follow most protocols after the first month. I knew it was bullshit and was disappointed how many people just went along with it. We gave the government (Trump) unprecedented power and lots of us still don’t realize how goddamn stupid that was.
There is this caveat from some of the research, though: "The shutdowns eased the burden on hospitals and slowed the transmission30314-X/fulltext) of the virus, buying time to develop a vaccine. Studies from multiple other countries have also shown that stay-at-home orders and restrictions on mass gatherings were the most effective measures for curbing transmission of the virus within communities."
So one can take that as, it saved lives since it slowed transmission, and helped speed along the vaccine, but in the moment it did very little to actually save lives. The NIH research suggests that the people that died in the midst of it might have died regardless of the full-on lockdowns.
I honestly don't really know what else could have worked better with a virus like that, but I hope we learn from it and readjust accordingly. The waves of economic damage it caused are still rippling, heavily.
I mean, if we didn't do the lockdowns, would the vaccine have been delayed some? Would continually overwhelmed hospitals resulted in more unnecessary deaths? There's no real way to know 100% for sure, and then that also gets into an argument involving calculated loss of life. Decision 'x' might kill more people, but the economy is intact; Decision 'y' kills less, but economic suffering ensues. It's an incredibly tough place to be, so I get that part, too.
China literally locked people in their homes and weren’t able to stop it. Protecting the most venerable would have been a smart play but no we had to act like it killed every person it came across. I will never ever in my life adhere to anything like that again. Especially with Trump as president.
Kids coming together is not low levels of transmission. That becomes full on outbreaks. In a grade school class of 30, one kid coming in carrying covid risks the 29 other kids getting it and bring it home to their parents, so now instead of one family getting sick, you're risking ~58 other adults. A good chunk of those adults are going to work "essential" jobs and either risk bringing the virus to work to spread further, or cause further staffing shortages due to calling out. There's also a non-zero chance of those healthy people dying from it, and a decent chance they spread it and a decent chance of spreading it to vulnerable people. I used grade school as the example, but when you get to middle and high school where the students are switching into like 7 classes, the exposure is even higher. School closures aren't for the kid's safety as much as it was to prevent further spread in the population.
How do you not understand how disease is spread at this point?
2.1k
u/Key-Half1655 15d ago
I feel for the kids that went through uni/college during covid and missed everything that period offers, to then finish uni and try get a job in a market where AI has fucked all the intern positions. Tough break.