Lockdowns, Not the Pandemic, Created Havoc

[Boom]

It may be years before we fully realize the ramifications of the lockdown policies governments around the world have imposed on their citizens in response to covid-19, but evidence of the costs is starting to trickle in.

A recent study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) surveyed thousands of high school students on the effects of the pandemic. “Since the beginning of the pandemic,” the study reports, “more than half of students found it more difficult to complete their schoolwork (66%) and experienced emotional abuse by a parent or other adult in their home (55%),” which correlated heavily with students who “experienced insecurity via parental job loss (29%), personal job loss (22%), and hunger (24%).”

A related CDC study, released the same day, examined the effects the pandemic has had on the mental health of high school students. It found that “during the 12 months before the survey, 44.2% experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, 19.9% had seriously considered attempting suicide, and 9.0% had attempted suicide.”

https://mises.org/wire/lockdowns-not...-created-havoc




Is the generation coming up today really this broken???

[entropy]

This will become a multi generational issue. The damage done mentally and socially to children is criminal. Combine this with all the other garbage being fed to school age kids and we’re being guaranteed societal problems that will impact us for years to come. Another issue entirely, but hopefully this will lead to a total collapse of the traditional public schooling system and the rise of private/semi-private schooling in the future. There are still plenty of dedicated individuals out there who want to work with kids (along with the parents) to create solid, well rounded adolescents.

[BillSWPA]

Since the lockdowns first began, I was telling everyone who would listen that they were the stupidest thing we have ever done. The damage done is more than I anticipated.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[blues]

I was avoiding people before it was cool policy.

[baddean]

I was avoiding people before it was cool policy.

Me, this..^

[peterb]

The Swedish no-restriction approach had its costs.



https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01097-5

Reasonable tradeoff? I don’t know how to calculate that.

[TheRoland]

Two things can both be bad at the same time.

[entropy]

Soon we will be able to post nice graphs showing how 16yr olds are reading at the second grade level and how their speech and social skills fall about the same. Then, maybe a nice pie graph showing the percent of education dollar going to remediate these same issues instead of teaching critical thinking and other items needed for a healthy child and a healthy society. Teachers and parents (who care) are already dealing with it. We haven’t even scratched the surface yet. I can tell you that honest, hard working, dedicated teachers we know are literally frightened at what is coming down the road. These are folks that have spent decades devoting their lives to the education of children.

You can see the effects in other aspects too. Overall lack of productivity within the economy, structural issues within the (post pandemic) workplace, and lack of skilled workers to feed the whole thing.

There was no “trade off”. We lost.

More appropriately, we should be asking ourselves “who won?”.

[Totem Polar]

Is the generation coming up today really this broken???

Short answer: yes, IMHO. I don’t have time to go into why right now, but suffice to say that I’ve had this same conversation with several other educators in disparate areas and age levels recently, and we are all in agreement so far.

[peterb]

Two things can both be bad at the same time.

Agree. I was just talking with a teacher friend who spoke of “packs of feral kids roaming the hallways”, and of how they’ve had to lower standards for the kids who essentially missed a year with remote classes. My friends who work in health care are dealing with the fallout and burnout from what they went through.

We may well have been overprotective of children, who were best able to tolerate Covid, while at the same time too many adults were dying despite widely available and known protective measures.