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Added a disclaimer on page 662. Many need to post better.
On October 29 2022 04:03 Magic Powers wrote: I did read it and I've looked into it already before I posted my first response. Lesions are not inflammations. Can we stop this now?
Why??
On October 29 2022 03:15 Magic Powers wrote:
On October 29 2022 02:51 Razyda wrote:
On October 29 2022 01:46 BlackJack wrote:
On October 29 2022 01:31 Magic Powers wrote: Yet again BJ is misrepresenting what I said either because he misremembers it or because he doesn't take proper care to represent my words correctly. What I said was that there's not a single case of myocarditis because of covid vaccines. He either still doesn't understand the (very important) difference between "because of" and "after" or he is deliberately lying, again.
First of all, I was responding to your statement in this post
"Furthermore, no hospitalizations or deaths have occured as a result of myocarditis after vaccination. No chronic cases either."
You clearly use the word "after" there so my bad if you actually meant "because of" and I didn't correctly mind-read that. So apologies for misrepresenting you by accurately quoting you.
Second, regardless of whether you meant "after" or "because of", you're wrong either way.
Vaccine-induced myocarditis is a known but very rare side effect of the mRNA vaccinations and it's accepted by every serious body. For example the CDC
Data from multiple studies show a rare risk for myocarditis and/or pericarditis following receipt of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. These rare cases of myocarditis or pericarditis have occurred most frequently in adolescent and young adult males, ages 16 years and older, within 7 days after receiving the second dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna).
As for "very rare" it seems it is no longer the case according to:
Christian Eugen Mueller (Basel, Switzerland): " Myocardial Inflammation/Myocarditis After COVID-19 mRNA Booster Vaccination "
"Apparently, both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have provided non-human animal data on the BA.4/BA.5 boosters to the FDA to state their case for the EUA. But they haven’t yet shown this data to the rest of the scientific community or the public. This data have reportedly included some preliminary findings from eight mice"
Myocardial lesions are not myocarditis. The former are lesions, the latter is an inflammation.
bolded:
from article in french translated to English:
"myocardial lesion, defined by an increase in serum troponin above the norm"
"Possible subclinical acute myocarditis. Subclinical myocarditis, without specific symptoms, may be inferred by transient increases in troponin "
I don't know why this is hard to understand. There's nothing in the text that equates the lesions to inflammation. Lesions may be required for inflammation, but they don't necessitate inflammation. I would need the confirmation of someone who studies this matter, because we're amateurs, not doctors studying viruses and organs. I'm not willing to accept that myocarditis is actually 800 times more likely than we previously thought until there's definitive proof.
I can't be sure but I highly suspect that what you're arguing over is just a poor interpretation by Google translate. "lesions" in this case seems to be used to mean injury/damage and not literal lesions on the myocardium. Otherwise defining having myocardial lesions as having an elevated troponin level makes little sense.
Dr. Prasad offers a good summary in this video
In short, instead of waiting for a patient to have symptoms (chest pain), go to a doctor, and then maybe get a troponin blood test, they decided they were just going to give troponin blood tests to an entire group of people 3 days after they got their booster vaccination. They found that those with elevated troponin levels was many times greater than the risk of myocarditis after mRNA vaccination. That is not to say they are the same thing as Rayzda seems to be implying. One being actual myocarditis and the other being subclinical myocarditis - i.e. not having any symptoms and only being discovered incidentally from being a part of this study. I think it can be safely assumed that the latter is far more mild than the former which already seems to typically be a mild form of myocarditis. The main conclusion from the author being that this seems to be so minor that it's not likely to be a big deal for a COVID vaccination but if people are being asked to take 1, 2, 3, 4, 5+ COVID shots then maybe there will be a cumulative effect of repeatedly insulting the heart.
The video also points out that Pfizer was supposed to do a similar after-market study of testing troponin levels after vaccination but the FDA has given them years to publish this which seems a bit generous for having as much money as Pfizer has.
Thank you. Bolded: Kind of like one being actual covid and another being asymptomatic covid Also thank you for the link to video I liked it and Dr Prasad seems like reasonable fellow. I watched few others after this one and particularly liked Holden Thorpe one.
On October 29 2022 04:03 Magic Powers wrote: I did read it and I've looked into it already before I posted my first response. Lesions are not inflammations. Can we stop this now?
Why??
On October 29 2022 03:15 Magic Powers wrote:
On October 29 2022 02:51 Razyda wrote:
On October 29 2022 01:46 BlackJack wrote:
On October 29 2022 01:31 Magic Powers wrote: Yet again BJ is misrepresenting what I said either because he misremembers it or because he doesn't take proper care to represent my words correctly. What I said was that there's not a single case of myocarditis because of covid vaccines. He either still doesn't understand the (very important) difference between "because of" and "after" or he is deliberately lying, again.
First of all, I was responding to your statement in this post
"Furthermore, no hospitalizations or deaths have occured as a result of myocarditis after vaccination. No chronic cases either."
You clearly use the word "after" there so my bad if you actually meant "because of" and I didn't correctly mind-read that. So apologies for misrepresenting you by accurately quoting you.
Second, regardless of whether you meant "after" or "because of", you're wrong either way.
Vaccine-induced myocarditis is a known but very rare side effect of the mRNA vaccinations and it's accepted by every serious body. For example the CDC
Data from multiple studies show a rare risk for myocarditis and/or pericarditis following receipt of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. These rare cases of myocarditis or pericarditis have occurred most frequently in adolescent and young adult males, ages 16 years and older, within 7 days after receiving the second dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna).
As for "very rare" it seems it is no longer the case according to:
Christian Eugen Mueller (Basel, Switzerland): " Myocardial Inflammation/Myocarditis After COVID-19 mRNA Booster Vaccination "
"Apparently, both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have provided non-human animal data on the BA.4/BA.5 boosters to the FDA to state their case for the EUA. But they haven’t yet shown this data to the rest of the scientific community or the public. This data have reportedly included some preliminary findings from eight mice"
Myocardial lesions are not myocarditis. The former are lesions, the latter is an inflammation.
bolded:
from article in french translated to English:
"myocardial lesion, defined by an increase in serum troponin above the norm"
"Possible subclinical acute myocarditis. Subclinical myocarditis, without specific symptoms, may be inferred by transient increases in troponin "
I don't know why this is hard to understand. There's nothing in the text that equates the lesions to inflammation. Lesions may be required for inflammation, but they don't necessitate inflammation. I would need the confirmation of someone who studies this matter, because we're amateurs, not doctors studying viruses and organs. I'm not willing to accept that myocarditis is actually 800 times more likely than we previously thought until there's definitive proof.
I can't be sure but I highly suspect that what you're arguing over is just a poor interpretation by Google translate. "lesions" in this case seems to be used to mean injury/damage and not literal lesions on the myocardium. Otherwise defining having myocardial lesions as having an elevated troponin level makes little sense.
In short, instead of waiting for a patient to have symptoms (chest pain), go to a doctor, and then maybe get a troponin blood test, they decided they were just going to give troponin blood tests to an entire group of people 3 days after they got their booster vaccination. They found that those with elevated troponin levels was many times greater than the risk of myocarditis after mRNA vaccination. That is not to say they are the same thing as Rayzda seems to be implying. One being actual myocarditis and the other being subclinical myocarditis - i.e. not having any symptoms and only being discovered incidentally from being a part of this study. I think it can be safely assumed that the latter is far more mild than the former which already seems to typically be a mild form of myocarditis. The main conclusion from the author being that this seems to be so minor that it's not likely to be a big deal for a COVID vaccination but if people are being asked to take 1, 2, 3, 4, 5+ COVID shots then maybe there will be a cumulative effect of repeatedly insulting the heart.
The video also points out that Pfizer was supposed to do a similar after-market study of testing troponin levels after vaccination but the FDA has given them years to publish this which seems a bit generous for having as much money as Pfizer has.
Thanks a lot for helping clarify this. It seemed obvious that these two conditions are not the same or of the same severity, but it's good to have it confirmed. It's a bit like the difference between a total car crash and a cracked window. Both falls under "damage", but only one carries a high chance of death. Razyda seems to think he can correctly read and interpret scientific textwhen in fact he's misinforming himself and others. A good example for why science interpreters and communicators matter so much these days and are going to play an increasingly important role in society.
Bolded: I think more fitting comparison would be like symptomatic covid and asymptomatic covid. Italic: I can and if I have issue with some parts I research it. Bolded 2: I dont. Italic 2: Just lol
On October 28 2022 22:24 BlackJack wrote: Yes, one would think that I wouldn't have to carefully add the same qualifiers to every single post here for the sake of eliminating wordiness, but obviously that's wrong and I'll take the blame for that since I should have known better by now
Wording things clearly and carefully is pretty important, but your entire approach was flawed from the start of that new set of posts (#12730 onward). Your argument was that the United States should have just kept their schools open, because covid doesn't severely affect children anyway, so all we were getting out of school closures were students failing math and a bunch of kids wanting to commit suicide. And your evidence was data from Sweden.
What you didn't say - which is a huge difference - was: Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Or, if you really wanted to talk about Sweden: Sweden's decision to not close down schools during the pandemic seemed risky, but appears to have paid off, at least academically. Did they just get lucky, or were they in a particularly favorable position to try out this approach (perhaps because of their medical infrastructure or school/community environments or something else)? And if there were indeed key, beneficial factors that helped Sweden persist through this crazy period, is it possible for other countries to learn from Sweden, so that we all may be better prepared for the next pandemic?
Do you see how those two approaches are more neutral, and probably would have been received a lot better?
This conversation started by me posting data that showed children's education was heavily impacted during the pandemic and opining that children paid the biggest sacrifice during the pandemic despite the fact that they are least affected by the disease itself.
The first person to make a claim of the necessity of school closures was you who immediately called it a "necessary evil" without providing any data to support this claim.
But go ahead and lecture me about my need to remain neutral and use better data while you get to make whatever claims you want while offering zero data yourself. That's some next-level hypocrisy.
You didn't post data first; you didn't even post a link to your source. You paraphrased a few results in three sentences, without accounting for a variety of influential factors, and then talked about other things. After that, several people (Artisreal, then me, then Gorsameth, etc.) asked you questions about different parts of your first post. When I responded to your #12730 with my #12733 post, I clearly outlined which parts I was fine with, and which were problematic for me. Then you said that we should have kept American schools open, and pivoted to Sweden, which several people rightly criticized.
Feel free to completely ignore my advice about wording things more productively, but there's a reason why people are not only disagreeing with your arguments, but also literally having a meta discussion about your sincerity and underlying agenda. I wrote out those two alternative paragraphs in an effort to lead you to water, but it's up to you to drink.
So are you going to acknowledge that you were the first one to make a claim on the necessity of schools being closed while providing zero data to support your claim?
Plenty of us have provided data showing that closing schools helped reduce the spread and helped communities/hospitals manage their cases, including me, throughout this thread. That's why businesses were also closed, and why social distancing was stressed. Remember that one of our main criticisms of your #12730 post is that you conveniently ignored that important benefit of closing schools, which was shocking to a lot of us because we already covered that, several times, and it had appeared (at least, to me) that that benefit was also worthy of recognition to you, in the past... yet your recent set of posts seems to no longer take that into consideration.
If you're pointing out that that specific post of mine didn't repeat the data that has already been established, then you're correct. If you don't think that closing schools reduced the spread of infection, then we can definitely post more data about the importance of social distancing and closing down areas where large groups congregate, but I think this is something you already know, so I don't know why you're deflecting with this line of reasoning. Seems like you're trying to score a weird semantics point against me, right as I'm trying to help you smooth things over in the thread. You and I have disagreed on plenty of points in this thread, but that doesn't mean I enjoy watching conversations between you and other people constantly devolve into mudslinging.
Oof. Yes keeping schools closed helps reduced the spread. That's an obvious truth, you don't need to provide data on that. Just like keeping schools closed harmed the education and upbringing of children is an obvious truth.
They are competing interests/problems with keeping schools open vs closed.
The problem is that you seem to think that just showing that closing schools helps reduce the spread (obvious truth) is proof-pudding that your stance that schools should have been closed is the correct one but me showing that children's educations being harmed from closed schools (obvious truth) is not proof-pudding that schools should have opened sooner or remained open.
Essentially you are saying that schools being closed is the correct and necessary evil and I have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute this by showing that children's education was harmed more than the benefit in spread reduction.
But if I say the opposite - that schools should have opened sooner and worsening the spread is the necessary evil because the harm to students is too great otherwise and you have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute that, then I'm the heretic.
At the end of the day we're both guessing and neither of us are providing a cost-benefit analysis. According to Magic Powers source even the people in charge to make these decisions weren't really doing a cost-benefit analysis to make their decisions.
The difference is I'm not the one lecturing you to remain neutral while not remaining neutral myself.
A) Schools being closed reduces the spread B) Schools being closed harms children's education
DPB: A > B BJ: No, B > A because X
DPB: X does not prove B > A so next time remain neutral unless you have proper data BJ: But you didn't provide anything to support A > B other than saying that A is true.
Sorry, that "closing schools" is reducing the spread is NOT an obvious truth. For the flu, the spread has been equal or even worse when closing schools, as the youngsters will meet anyway, and in more fluctuating groups, less regulated. You need to close schools AND make sure they don't have any social life elsewhere either, which is an absolutely awful thing to force upon youngsters, and it is much worse for the ones who struggle already.
Then, you need to remember that the goal is really to reduce deaths and hospitalisations, not only a raw number number of cases. Proving that closing schools achieved this goal is not easy, but if you have some studies, bring them on!
This was an experiment, not based on science. Remember that there are powerful incentives to justify these decisions, so we might have to wait a bit to get solid unbiased proof. But, I know Norway and Denmark opened their schools late spring 2020, and still had some of the best covid numbers in the world.
On October 28 2022 22:24 BlackJack wrote: Yes, one would think that I wouldn't have to carefully add the same qualifiers to every single post here for the sake of eliminating wordiness, but obviously that's wrong and I'll take the blame for that since I should have known better by now
Wording things clearly and carefully is pretty important, but your entire approach was flawed from the start of that new set of posts (#12730 onward). Your argument was that the United States should have just kept their schools open, because covid doesn't severely affect children anyway, so all we were getting out of school closures were students failing math and a bunch of kids wanting to commit suicide. And your evidence was data from Sweden.
What you didn't say - which is a huge difference - was: Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Or, if you really wanted to talk about Sweden: Sweden's decision to not close down schools during the pandemic seemed risky, but appears to have paid off, at least academically. Did they just get lucky, or were they in a particularly favorable position to try out this approach (perhaps because of their medical infrastructure or school/community environments or something else)? And if there were indeed key, beneficial factors that helped Sweden persist through this crazy period, is it possible for other countries to learn from Sweden, so that we all may be better prepared for the next pandemic?
Do you see how those two approaches are more neutral, and probably would have been received a lot better?
This conversation started by me posting data that showed children's education was heavily impacted during the pandemic and opining that children paid the biggest sacrifice during the pandemic despite the fact that they are least affected by the disease itself.
The first person to make a claim of the necessity of school closures was you who immediately called it a "necessary evil" without providing any data to support this claim.
But go ahead and lecture me about my need to remain neutral and use better data while you get to make whatever claims you want while offering zero data yourself. That's some next-level hypocrisy.
You didn't post data first; you didn't even post a link to your source. You paraphrased a few results in three sentences, without accounting for a variety of influential factors, and then talked about other things. After that, several people (Artisreal, then me, then Gorsameth, etc.) asked you questions about different parts of your first post. When I responded to your #12730 with my #12733 post, I clearly outlined which parts I was fine with, and which were problematic for me. Then you said that we should have kept American schools open, and pivoted to Sweden, which several people rightly criticized.
Feel free to completely ignore my advice about wording things more productively, but there's a reason why people are not only disagreeing with your arguments, but also literally having a meta discussion about your sincerity and underlying agenda. I wrote out those two alternative paragraphs in an effort to lead you to water, but it's up to you to drink.
So are you going to acknowledge that you were the first one to make a claim on the necessity of schools being closed while providing zero data to support your claim?
Plenty of us have provided data showing that closing schools helped reduce the spread and helped communities/hospitals manage their cases, including me, throughout this thread. That's why businesses were also closed, and why social distancing was stressed. Remember that one of our main criticisms of your #12730 post is that you conveniently ignored that important benefit of closing schools, which was shocking to a lot of us because we already covered that, several times, and it had appeared (at least, to me) that that benefit was also worthy of recognition to you, in the past... yet your recent set of posts seems to no longer take that into consideration.
If you're pointing out that that specific post of mine didn't repeat the data that has already been established, then you're correct. If you don't think that closing schools reduced the spread of infection, then we can definitely post more data about the importance of social distancing and closing down areas where large groups congregate, but I think this is something you already know, so I don't know why you're deflecting with this line of reasoning. Seems like you're trying to score a weird semantics point against me, right as I'm trying to help you smooth things over in the thread. You and I have disagreed on plenty of points in this thread, but that doesn't mean I enjoy watching conversations between you and other people constantly devolve into mudslinging.
Oof. Yes keeping schools closed helps reduced the spread. That's an obvious truth, you don't need to provide data on that. Just like keeping schools closed harmed the education and upbringing of children is an obvious truth.
They are competing interests/problems with keeping schools open vs closed.
The problem is that you seem to think that just showing that closing schools helps reduce the spread (obvious truth) is proof-pudding that your stance that schools should have been closed is the correct one but me showing that children's educations being harmed from closed schools (obvious truth) is not proof-pudding that schools should have opened sooner or remained open.
Essentially you are saying that schools being closed is the correct and necessary evil and I have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute this by showing that children's education was harmed more than the benefit in spread reduction.
But if I say the opposite - that schools should have opened sooner and worsening the spread is the necessary evil because the harm to students is too great otherwise and you have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute that, then I'm the heretic.
At the end of the day we're both guessing and neither of us are providing a cost-benefit analysis. According to Magic Powers source even the people in charge to make these decisions weren't really doing a cost-benefit analysis to make their decisions.
The difference is I'm not the one lecturing you to remain neutral while not remaining neutral myself.
A) Schools being closed reduces the spread B) Schools being closed harms children's education
DPB: A > B BJ: No, B > A because X
DPB: X does not prove B > A so next time remain neutral unless you have proper data BJ: But you didn't provide anything to support A > B other than saying that A is true.
Sorry, that "closing schools" is reducing the spread is NOT an obvious truth. For the flu, the spread has been equal or even worse when closing schools, as the youngsters will meet anyway, and in more fluctuating groups, less regulated. You need to close schools AND make sure they don't have any social life elsewhere either, which is an absolutely awful thing to force upon youngsters, and it is much worse for the ones who struggle already.
Then, you need to remember that the goal is really to reduce deaths and hospitalisations, not only a raw number number of cases. Proving that closing schools achieved this goal is not easy, but if you have some studies, bring them on!
This was an experiment, not based on science. Remember that there are powerful incentives to justify these decisions, so we might have to wait a bit to get solid unbiased proof. But, I know Norway and Denmark opened their schools late spring 2020, and still had some of the best covid numbers in the world.
Slydie, the sheer audacity of this ridiculous post, right after my response to you on the last page, is insane.
I'm hoping you just accidentally missed it, so here it is again:
On October 28 2022 22:24 BlackJack wrote: Yes, one would think that I wouldn't have to carefully add the same qualifiers to every single post here for the sake of eliminating wordiness, but obviously that's wrong and I'll take the blame for that since I should have known better by now
Wording things clearly and carefully is pretty important, but your entire approach was flawed from the start of that new set of posts (#12730 onward). Your argument was that the United States should have just kept their schools open, because covid doesn't severely affect children anyway, so all we were getting out of school closures were students failing math and a bunch of kids wanting to commit suicide. And your evidence was data from Sweden.
What you didn't say - which is a huge difference - was: Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Or, if you really wanted to talk about Sweden: Sweden's decision to not close down schools during the pandemic seemed risky, but appears to have paid off, at least academically. Did they just get lucky, or were they in a particularly favorable position to try out this approach (perhaps because of their medical infrastructure or school/community environments or something else)? And if there were indeed key, beneficial factors that helped Sweden persist through this crazy period, is it possible for other countries to learn from Sweden, so that we all may be better prepared for the next pandemic?
Do you see how those two approaches are more neutral, and probably would have been received a lot better?
This conversation started by me posting data that showed children's education was heavily impacted during the pandemic and opining that children paid the biggest sacrifice during the pandemic despite the fact that they are least affected by the disease itself.
The first person to make a claim of the necessity of school closures was you who immediately called it a "necessary evil" without providing any data to support this claim.
But go ahead and lecture me about my need to remain neutral and use better data while you get to make whatever claims you want while offering zero data yourself. That's some next-level hypocrisy.
You didn't post data first; you didn't even post a link to your source. You paraphrased a few results in three sentences, without accounting for a variety of influential factors, and then talked about other things. After that, several people (Artisreal, then me, then Gorsameth, etc.) asked you questions about different parts of your first post. When I responded to your #12730 with my #12733 post, I clearly outlined which parts I was fine with, and which were problematic for me. Then you said that we should have kept American schools open, and pivoted to Sweden, which several people rightly criticized.
Feel free to completely ignore my advice about wording things more productively, but there's a reason why people are not only disagreeing with your arguments, but also literally having a meta discussion about your sincerity and underlying agenda. I wrote out those two alternative paragraphs in an effort to lead you to water, but it's up to you to drink.
So are you going to acknowledge that you were the first one to make a claim on the necessity of schools being closed while providing zero data to support your claim?
Plenty of us have provided data showing that closing schools helped reduce the spread and helped communities/hospitals manage their cases, including me, throughout this thread. That's why businesses were also closed, and why social distancing was stressed. Remember that one of our main criticisms of your #12730 post is that you conveniently ignored that important benefit of closing schools, which was shocking to a lot of us because we already covered that, several times, and it had appeared (at least, to me) that that benefit was also worthy of recognition to you, in the past... yet your recent set of posts seems to no longer take that into consideration.
If you're pointing out that that specific post of mine didn't repeat the data that has already been established, then you're correct. If you don't think that closing schools reduced the spread of infection, then we can definitely post more data about the importance of social distancing and closing down areas where large groups congregate, but I think this is something you already know, so I don't know why you're deflecting with this line of reasoning. Seems like you're trying to score a weird semantics point against me, right as I'm trying to help you smooth things over in the thread. You and I have disagreed on plenty of points in this thread, but that doesn't mean I enjoy watching conversations between you and other people constantly devolve into mudslinging.
Closing schools was one of the most shocking mesures of the pandemic, nobody had any documentation it was effective. Regardless of its effectiveness, it did terrible mental, social and educational damage to a whole generation of youth.
Sweden never closed their schools, and Norway and Denmark opened theirs way earlier than Spain, for example.
You have to dig very deep to find solid data for supporting school closures, and countries not closing schools did remarkably well.
The spread of viruses is very well documented, and coronavirus is no exception. Coronavirus is a virus, and viruses can often spread from an infected individual to a new host by close contact, hence the importance of social distancing when someone is sick with covid:
"Current evidence suggests that the virus spreads mainly between people who are in close contact with each other, for example at a conversational distance. The virus can spread from an infected person’s mouth or nose in small liquid particles when they cough, sneeze, speak, sing or breathe. Another person can then contract the virus when infectious particles that pass through the air are inhaled at short range (this is often called short-range aerosol or short-range airborne transmission) or if infectious particles come into direct contact with the eyes, nose, or mouth (droplet transmission). The virus can also spread in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings, where people tend to spend longer periods of time. This is because aerosols can remain suspended in the air or travel farther than conversational distance (this is often called long-range aerosol or long-range airborne transmission)." https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/coronavirus-disease-covid-19-how-is-it-transmitted
A great way to reduce the spread of infection is to keep people further away from each other, by social distancing and temporarily closing certain locations where large groups of packed people tend to congregate:
When many stores, restaurants, and businesses reopened, they took other precautionary measures, such as requiring masks or vaccinations, or sitting groups of people further away from each other, or limiting the number of customers inside at a time. This is so that the chance of spreading an infection is lower, and it's precisely why schools temporarily shut down. I work in a school that has over two thousand students (and a few hundred adults); they can't spread covid between each other if they're all trapped in their own houses.
There is plenty of precedent for this approach of closing schools:
"Closing schools can make a big difference in flattening the curve, evidence from past epidemics shows. A study in Nature in 2006 that modeled an influenza outbreak found that closing school during the peak of a pandemic could reduce the peak attack rate, or speed of spread, by 40 percent. Another study in 2016 in BMC Infectious Diseases found that, based on the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, closing schools could reduce the attack rate up to 25 percent and the peak weekly incidence, or rate of new cases, by more than 50 percent. Even the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 provides some data. Comparing cities that took action with those that did not, researchers reported in a study in JAMA in 2007 that measures like school closings contributed to significant reductions in the peak death rate as well as overall deaths." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/upshot/coronavirus-school-closings.html
European data: "Methods We pursued our objectives by means of a quantitative panel analysis, building a longitudinal dataset with observations from countries in Europe, from 1 January to 30 September, and estimating the impact of school closure via feasible-generalised least-squares fixed effect and random effect estimators, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) mixed models. Results Our results show that having schools closed is effective in reducing the number of new cases. Countries that implement closure have fewer new COVID-19 cases than those that do not. This becomes a reality around 20 days after the implementation of the policy. Its efficacy continues to be detectable up to 100 days after implementation. The result is robust to controls for other forms of social distancing. Conclusion Results suggest that school closure is effective in reducing the number of people who are infected with COVID-19. Unlike what has been suggested in previous analyses or with regard to other diseases, its efficacy continues to be detectable up to 100 days after the introduction of the policy." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8660653/
And I sincerely agree with this final quote as well (as we've already covered this, so we shouldn't need to restate the data):
"Yes keeping schools closed helps reduced the spread. That's an obvious truth, you don't need to provide data on that." ~BlackJack
We're past the "is there data or precedent or good reason to think that separating people will decrease infection rates of viruses" stage, which is why I'm much more interested in the next part: How do we compare (quantify? qualify?) the benefits of school closure (or other protocols) to the drawbacks? Reducing infection rates and saving lives are some of the positives, but businesses shutting down and children struggling academically and socially and emotionally are some of the negatives. There's a lot to unpack with this, but it sounds like you'll need to join the rest of us with at least acknowledging that social distancing was able to reduce the spread of covid; if you disagree with that premise, then I'm not sure how you'll be able to effectively compare benefits and drawbacks (since you'll presumably see no benefits).
On October 28 2022 22:24 BlackJack wrote: Yes, one would think that I wouldn't have to carefully add the same qualifiers to every single post here for the sake of eliminating wordiness, but obviously that's wrong and I'll take the blame for that since I should have known better by now
Wording things clearly and carefully is pretty important, but your entire approach was flawed from the start of that new set of posts (#12730 onward). Your argument was that the United States should have just kept their schools open, because covid doesn't severely affect children anyway, so all we were getting out of school closures were students failing math and a bunch of kids wanting to commit suicide. And your evidence was data from Sweden.
What you didn't say - which is a huge difference - was: Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Or, if you really wanted to talk about Sweden: Sweden's decision to not close down schools during the pandemic seemed risky, but appears to have paid off, at least academically. Did they just get lucky, or were they in a particularly favorable position to try out this approach (perhaps because of their medical infrastructure or school/community environments or something else)? And if there were indeed key, beneficial factors that helped Sweden persist through this crazy period, is it possible for other countries to learn from Sweden, so that we all may be better prepared for the next pandemic?
Do you see how those two approaches are more neutral, and probably would have been received a lot better?
This conversation started by me posting data that showed children's education was heavily impacted during the pandemic and opining that children paid the biggest sacrifice during the pandemic despite the fact that they are least affected by the disease itself.
The first person to make a claim of the necessity of school closures was you who immediately called it a "necessary evil" without providing any data to support this claim.
But go ahead and lecture me about my need to remain neutral and use better data while you get to make whatever claims you want while offering zero data yourself. That's some next-level hypocrisy.
You didn't post data first; you didn't even post a link to your source. You paraphrased a few results in three sentences, without accounting for a variety of influential factors, and then talked about other things. After that, several people (Artisreal, then me, then Gorsameth, etc.) asked you questions about different parts of your first post. When I responded to your #12730 with my #12733 post, I clearly outlined which parts I was fine with, and which were problematic for me. Then you said that we should have kept American schools open, and pivoted to Sweden, which several people rightly criticized.
Feel free to completely ignore my advice about wording things more productively, but there's a reason why people are not only disagreeing with your arguments, but also literally having a meta discussion about your sincerity and underlying agenda. I wrote out those two alternative paragraphs in an effort to lead you to water, but it's up to you to drink.
So are you going to acknowledge that you were the first one to make a claim on the necessity of schools being closed while providing zero data to support your claim?
Plenty of us have provided data showing that closing schools helped reduce the spread and helped communities/hospitals manage their cases, including me, throughout this thread. That's why businesses were also closed, and why social distancing was stressed. Remember that one of our main criticisms of your #12730 post is that you conveniently ignored that important benefit of closing schools, which was shocking to a lot of us because we already covered that, several times, and it had appeared (at least, to me) that that benefit was also worthy of recognition to you, in the past... yet your recent set of posts seems to no longer take that into consideration.
If you're pointing out that that specific post of mine didn't repeat the data that has already been established, then you're correct. If you don't think that closing schools reduced the spread of infection, then we can definitely post more data about the importance of social distancing and closing down areas where large groups congregate, but I think this is something you already know, so I don't know why you're deflecting with this line of reasoning. Seems like you're trying to score a weird semantics point against me, right as I'm trying to help you smooth things over in the thread. You and I have disagreed on plenty of points in this thread, but that doesn't mean I enjoy watching conversations between you and other people constantly devolve into mudslinging.
Oof. Yes keeping schools closed helps reduced the spread. That's an obvious truth, you don't need to provide data on that. Just like keeping schools closed harmed the education and upbringing of children is an obvious truth.
They are competing interests/problems with keeping schools open vs closed.
The problem is that you seem to think that just showing that closing schools helps reduce the spread (obvious truth) is proof-pudding that your stance that schools should have been closed is the correct one but me showing that children's educations being harmed from closed schools (obvious truth) is not proof-pudding that schools should have opened sooner or remained open.
Essentially you are saying that schools being closed is the correct and necessary evil and I have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute this by showing that children's education was harmed more than the benefit in spread reduction.
But if I say the opposite - that schools should have opened sooner and worsening the spread is the necessary evil because the harm to students is too great otherwise and you have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute that, then I'm the heretic.
At the end of the day we're both guessing and neither of us are providing a cost-benefit analysis. According to Magic Powers source even the people in charge to make these decisions weren't really doing a cost-benefit analysis to make their decisions.
The difference is I'm not the one lecturing you to remain neutral while not remaining neutral myself.
A) Schools being closed reduces the spread B) Schools being closed harms children's education
DPB: A > B BJ: No, B > A because X
DPB: X does not prove B > A so next time remain neutral unless you have proper data BJ: But you didn't provide anything to support A > B other than saying that A is true.
Sorry, that "closing schools" is reducing the spread is NOT an obvious truth. For the flu, the spread has been equal or even worse when closing schools, as the youngsters will meet anyway, and in more fluctuating groups, less regulated. You need to close schools AND make sure they don't have any social life elsewhere either, which is an absolutely awful thing to force upon youngsters, and it is much worse for the ones who struggle already.
Then, you need to remember that the goal is really to reduce deaths and hospitalisations, not only a raw number number of cases. Proving that closing schools achieved this goal is not easy, but if you have some studies, bring them on!
This was an experiment, not based on science. Remember that there are powerful incentives to justify these decisions, so we might have to wait a bit to get solid unbiased proof. But, I know Norway and Denmark opened their schools late spring 2020, and still had some of the best covid numbers in the world.
Yeah but we did destroy their social lives too. There weren’t many play dates happening during the pandemic. That’s why my post introducing the topic was two-fold. Not just that student test scores are way down but also pediatric depression, anxiety, and suicidality is way up.
But yes I agree with you that it was an experiment not based on science. Magic Powers source says as much well - the decision to close schools was often not done on a rigorous cost-benefit analysis but more on a gut feel of the people making these decisions.
Also just want to remind everyone that in Spring and Summer of 2020 I was posting in real time in this thread about how hospitals across the country were becoming ghost towns. All elective surgeries were being cancelled. People were avoiding the Emergency Room like it was the plague. Hospitals were closing down entire wings and laying off workers because there were no patients. There was definitely plenty of room to ease some restrictions and keeping schools open should have been the obvious choice.
On October 28 2022 22:24 BlackJack wrote: Yes, one would think that I wouldn't have to carefully add the same qualifiers to every single post here for the sake of eliminating wordiness, but obviously that's wrong and I'll take the blame for that since I should have known better by now
Wording things clearly and carefully is pretty important, but your entire approach was flawed from the start of that new set of posts (#12730 onward). Your argument was that the United States should have just kept their schools open, because covid doesn't severely affect children anyway, so all we were getting out of school closures were students failing math and a bunch of kids wanting to commit suicide. And your evidence was data from Sweden.
What you didn't say - which is a huge difference - was: Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Or, if you really wanted to talk about Sweden: Sweden's decision to not close down schools during the pandemic seemed risky, but appears to have paid off, at least academically. Did they just get lucky, or were they in a particularly favorable position to try out this approach (perhaps because of their medical infrastructure or school/community environments or something else)? And if there were indeed key, beneficial factors that helped Sweden persist through this crazy period, is it possible for other countries to learn from Sweden, so that we all may be better prepared for the next pandemic?
Do you see how those two approaches are more neutral, and probably would have been received a lot better?
This conversation started by me posting data that showed children's education was heavily impacted during the pandemic and opining that children paid the biggest sacrifice during the pandemic despite the fact that they are least affected by the disease itself.
The first person to make a claim of the necessity of school closures was you who immediately called it a "necessary evil" without providing any data to support this claim.
But go ahead and lecture me about my need to remain neutral and use better data while you get to make whatever claims you want while offering zero data yourself. That's some next-level hypocrisy.
You didn't post data first; you didn't even post a link to your source. You paraphrased a few results in three sentences, without accounting for a variety of influential factors, and then talked about other things. After that, several people (Artisreal, then me, then Gorsameth, etc.) asked you questions about different parts of your first post. When I responded to your #12730 with my #12733 post, I clearly outlined which parts I was fine with, and which were problematic for me. Then you said that we should have kept American schools open, and pivoted to Sweden, which several people rightly criticized.
Feel free to completely ignore my advice about wording things more productively, but there's a reason why people are not only disagreeing with your arguments, but also literally having a meta discussion about your sincerity and underlying agenda. I wrote out those two alternative paragraphs in an effort to lead you to water, but it's up to you to drink.
So are you going to acknowledge that you were the first one to make a claim on the necessity of schools being closed while providing zero data to support your claim?
Plenty of us have provided data showing that closing schools helped reduce the spread and helped communities/hospitals manage their cases, including me, throughout this thread. That's why businesses were also closed, and why social distancing was stressed. Remember that one of our main criticisms of your #12730 post is that you conveniently ignored that important benefit of closing schools, which was shocking to a lot of us because we already covered that, several times, and it had appeared (at least, to me) that that benefit was also worthy of recognition to you, in the past... yet your recent set of posts seems to no longer take that into consideration.
If you're pointing out that that specific post of mine didn't repeat the data that has already been established, then you're correct. If you don't think that closing schools reduced the spread of infection, then we can definitely post more data about the importance of social distancing and closing down areas where large groups congregate, but I think this is something you already know, so I don't know why you're deflecting with this line of reasoning. Seems like you're trying to score a weird semantics point against me, right as I'm trying to help you smooth things over in the thread. You and I have disagreed on plenty of points in this thread, but that doesn't mean I enjoy watching conversations between you and other people constantly devolve into mudslinging.
Oof. Yes keeping schools closed helps reduced the spread. That's an obvious truth, you don't need to provide data on that. Just like keeping schools closed harmed the education and upbringing of children is an obvious truth.
They are competing interests/problems with keeping schools open vs closed.
The problem is that you seem to think that just showing that closing schools helps reduce the spread (obvious truth) is proof-pudding that your stance that schools should have been closed is the correct one but me showing that children's educations being harmed from closed schools (obvious truth) is not proof-pudding that schools should have opened sooner or remained open.
Essentially you are saying that schools being closed is the correct and necessary evil and I have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute this by showing that children's education was harmed more than the benefit in spread reduction.
But if I say the opposite - that schools should have opened sooner and worsening the spread is the necessary evil because the harm to students is too great otherwise and you have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute that, then I'm the heretic.
At the end of the day we're both guessing and neither of us are providing a cost-benefit analysis. According to Magic Powers source even the people in charge to make these decisions weren't really doing a cost-benefit analysis to make their decisions.
The difference is I'm not the one lecturing you to remain neutral while not remaining neutral myself.
A) Schools being closed reduces the spread B) Schools being closed harms children's education
DPB: A > B BJ: No, B > A because X
DPB: X does not prove B > A so next time remain neutral unless you have proper data BJ: But you didn't provide anything to support A > B other than saying that A is true.
I appreciate the clarification and the simplification, and we're in agreement that there are both benefits and drawbacks to the various protocols taken during the pandemic. I'm wondering if this just comes down to a subjective difference of opinion: that I may think that the benefits of closing schools down for longer outweighs the drawbacks, while you believe the reverse. I don't know if there's any way to come to a consensus on this (I'm open to suggestions), and it's why I was hoping that the conversation would have started with something like this (one of the two hypothetical paragraphs I had written a few posts ago):
Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Thoughts? Is it just an "agree to disagree" situation?
Depends what we're agreeing to disagree on. For example if you think it's okay to reopen schools if we can anticipate 10% more deaths/hospitalizations and I think it's okay to reopen schools if we can anticipate 30% more deaths/hospitalization (just an example) then sure we can agree to disagree.
But if you think we can't reopen schools because doing so would have caused a catastrophic strain on the healthcare system then no we can't agree to disagree unless you do as I asked before and show some examples of schools that reopened too early and caused such a catastrophic strain. If for example 1,000 schools opened up sometime in 2021 and none of them caused a catastrophe in their health systems then it is safe to assume that the schools that waited until 2022 to reopen could have reopened sooner. The "well those are different areas and proof that one place could do it isn't proof that another could" just doesn't fly. It's like if a basketball player took 1,000 shots and made all 1,000 and then you say there's no reason the believe he is going to make the next shot because the next shot is different than the previous 1,000. I'd say you can be quite confident he can make the next shot too.
I'm not sure if the basketball analogy is exactly accurate (the 1,001st school and 1,001st basketball shot may be under different circumstances than the previous ones), but I believe I understand your broader point. My mindset is definitely more in line with your first example (10% vs. 30%) than your second one (catastrophe vs. manageable). Figuring out where to draw the line (or what percent increase of hospitalizations/deaths would be acceptable, by reopening schools early) is definitely difficult, as we'd need to also establish (quantify?) the economic/academic/social/emotional benefits of opening up early (e.g., what's the trade-off if a school opens up a month early, or two months early, or six months early, etc., and is that trade-off generalizable or would it need to be done separately for each district or state or country, since different regions may have different factors to consider).
It would be interesting if realistic simulations could be constructed, but even if we were to engage in a hypothetical situation with completely fabricated (probably not accurate) numbers, I'm not sure how well I could justify a specific position. For example, would I be okay with opening up the schools in Random Town X, 6 months earlier than they actually did in real life, if that decision would lead to a 30% increase in covid cases in that town, a 20% increase in covid hospitalizations in that town, a 10% increase in covid deaths in that town, a 5-point median increase in those students' reading scores, a 7-point median increase in those students' math scores, a 15% decrease in students reporting depression and anxiety due to covid, and an 8% increase in the number of jobs retained in that town during the pandemic (since some parents could return to work sooner, with their kids back in school sooner)? I just made all those numbers up, but I have no idea how to even approach answering if I'd prefer (or not prefer) that trade-off. I'm not sure if the theorycrafting needs to go that in depth, but there are also benefits and drawbacks I'm probably forgetting anyway. What do you think?
On October 29 2022 23:08 Liquid`Drone wrote: When did they close schools because of flu?
They do it all the time. Whenever like a fifth of the school or more has the flu they close school for a day or two to stamp down on the outbreak. It happens every year in America here and there.
On October 28 2022 22:24 BlackJack wrote: Yes, one would think that I wouldn't have to carefully add the same qualifiers to every single post here for the sake of eliminating wordiness, but obviously that's wrong and I'll take the blame for that since I should have known better by now
Wording things clearly and carefully is pretty important, but your entire approach was flawed from the start of that new set of posts (#12730 onward). Your argument was that the United States should have just kept their schools open, because covid doesn't severely affect children anyway, so all we were getting out of school closures were students failing math and a bunch of kids wanting to commit suicide. And your evidence was data from Sweden.
What you didn't say - which is a huge difference - was: Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Or, if you really wanted to talk about Sweden: Sweden's decision to not close down schools during the pandemic seemed risky, but appears to have paid off, at least academically. Did they just get lucky, or were they in a particularly favorable position to try out this approach (perhaps because of their medical infrastructure or school/community environments or something else)? And if there were indeed key, beneficial factors that helped Sweden persist through this crazy period, is it possible for other countries to learn from Sweden, so that we all may be better prepared for the next pandemic?
Do you see how those two approaches are more neutral, and probably would have been received a lot better?
This conversation started by me posting data that showed children's education was heavily impacted during the pandemic and opining that children paid the biggest sacrifice during the pandemic despite the fact that they are least affected by the disease itself.
The first person to make a claim of the necessity of school closures was you who immediately called it a "necessary evil" without providing any data to support this claim.
But go ahead and lecture me about my need to remain neutral and use better data while you get to make whatever claims you want while offering zero data yourself. That's some next-level hypocrisy.
You didn't post data first; you didn't even post a link to your source. You paraphrased a few results in three sentences, without accounting for a variety of influential factors, and then talked about other things. After that, several people (Artisreal, then me, then Gorsameth, etc.) asked you questions about different parts of your first post. When I responded to your #12730 with my #12733 post, I clearly outlined which parts I was fine with, and which were problematic for me. Then you said that we should have kept American schools open, and pivoted to Sweden, which several people rightly criticized.
Feel free to completely ignore my advice about wording things more productively, but there's a reason why people are not only disagreeing with your arguments, but also literally having a meta discussion about your sincerity and underlying agenda. I wrote out those two alternative paragraphs in an effort to lead you to water, but it's up to you to drink.
So are you going to acknowledge that you were the first one to make a claim on the necessity of schools being closed while providing zero data to support your claim?
Plenty of us have provided data showing that closing schools helped reduce the spread and helped communities/hospitals manage their cases, including me, throughout this thread. That's why businesses were also closed, and why social distancing was stressed. Remember that one of our main criticisms of your #12730 post is that you conveniently ignored that important benefit of closing schools, which was shocking to a lot of us because we already covered that, several times, and it had appeared (at least, to me) that that benefit was also worthy of recognition to you, in the past... yet your recent set of posts seems to no longer take that into consideration.
If you're pointing out that that specific post of mine didn't repeat the data that has already been established, then you're correct. If you don't think that closing schools reduced the spread of infection, then we can definitely post more data about the importance of social distancing and closing down areas where large groups congregate, but I think this is something you already know, so I don't know why you're deflecting with this line of reasoning. Seems like you're trying to score a weird semantics point against me, right as I'm trying to help you smooth things over in the thread. You and I have disagreed on plenty of points in this thread, but that doesn't mean I enjoy watching conversations between you and other people constantly devolve into mudslinging.
Oof. Yes keeping schools closed helps reduced the spread. That's an obvious truth, you don't need to provide data on that. Just like keeping schools closed harmed the education and upbringing of children is an obvious truth.
They are competing interests/problems with keeping schools open vs closed.
The problem is that you seem to think that just showing that closing schools helps reduce the spread (obvious truth) is proof-pudding that your stance that schools should have been closed is the correct one but me showing that children's educations being harmed from closed schools (obvious truth) is not proof-pudding that schools should have opened sooner or remained open.
Essentially you are saying that schools being closed is the correct and necessary evil and I have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute this by showing that children's education was harmed more than the benefit in spread reduction.
But if I say the opposite - that schools should have opened sooner and worsening the spread is the necessary evil because the harm to students is too great otherwise and you have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute that, then I'm the heretic.
At the end of the day we're both guessing and neither of us are providing a cost-benefit analysis. According to Magic Powers source even the people in charge to make these decisions weren't really doing a cost-benefit analysis to make their decisions.
The difference is I'm not the one lecturing you to remain neutral while not remaining neutral myself.
A) Schools being closed reduces the spread B) Schools being closed harms children's education
DPB: A > B BJ: No, B > A because X
DPB: X does not prove B > A so next time remain neutral unless you have proper data BJ: But you didn't provide anything to support A > B other than saying that A is true.
Sorry, that "closing schools" is reducing the spread is NOT an obvious truth. For the flu, the spread has been equal or even worse when closing schools, as the youngsters will meet anyway, and in more fluctuating groups, less regulated. You need to close schools AND make sure they don't have any social life elsewhere either, which is an absolutely awful thing to force upon youngsters, and it is much worse for the ones who struggle already.
Then, you need to remember that the goal is really to reduce deaths and hospitalisations, not only a raw number number of cases. Proving that closing schools achieved this goal is not easy, but if you have some studies, bring them on!
This was an experiment, not based on science. Remember that there are powerful incentives to justify these decisions, so we might have to wait a bit to get solid unbiased proof. But, I know Norway and Denmark opened their schools late spring 2020, and still had some of the best covid numbers in the world.
Yeah but we did destroy their social lives too. There weren’t many play dates happening during the pandemic. That’s why my post introducing the topic was two-fold. Not just that student test scores are way down but also pediatric depression, anxiety, and suicidality is way up.
But yes I agree with you that it was an experiment not based on science. Magic Powers source says as much well - the decision to close schools was often not done on a rigorous cost-benefit analysis but more on a gut feel of the people making these decisions.
Also just want to remind everyone that in Spring and Summer of 2020 I was posting in real time in this thread about how hospitals across the country were becoming ghost towns. All elective surgeries were being cancelled. People were avoiding the Emergency Room like it was the plague. Hospitals were closing down entire wings and laying off workers because there were no patients. There was definitely plenty of room to ease some restrictions and keeping schools open should have been the obvious choice.
Are you trying to play captain hindsight by using data from after the fact to make yourself seem like the smart one for making perfect decisions? You do realize that if decisions changed from when they were made it would have meant that different outcomes would have happened? Hospitals were at their breaking point for supplies and giving them breathing room so people can recover from the hell march and resupply to prepare for the next wave wasn't something that occurred to you being a possibility at all these past two years?
On October 29 2022 23:08 Liquid`Drone wrote: When did they close schools because of flu?
They do it all the time. Whenever like a fifth of the school or more has the flu they close school for a day or two to stamp down on the outbreak. It happens every year in America here and there.
I guess that works. Literally never heard of that happening in Norway. Googling it I'm seeing they were considering it during the swine flu in 2009 but it didn't happen.
On October 29 2022 23:08 Liquid`Drone wrote: When did they close schools because of flu?
They do it all the time. Whenever like a fifth of the school or more has the flu they close school for a day or two to stamp down on the outbreak. It happens every year in America here and there.
I guess that works. Literally never heard of that happening in Norway. Googling it I'm seeing they were considering it during the swine flu in 2009 but it didn't happen.
Yeah it happens a bunch of times every school year in the United States, especially when flu seasons get bad. Not the whole state or anything like that, but usually a school or whole district at a time.
"Figure 3: People who had their second or third vaccine 90 days or more previously were more likely to be reinfected than people who had their third vaccine 14 to 89 days previously"
Really should add at the end "or are unvaccinated" as if you are not in the 14-89 days period after vaccine you have higher chance of reinfection than unvaccinated.
On October 28 2022 22:24 BlackJack wrote: Yes, one would think that I wouldn't have to carefully add the same qualifiers to every single post here for the sake of eliminating wordiness, but obviously that's wrong and I'll take the blame for that since I should have known better by now
Wording things clearly and carefully is pretty important, but your entire approach was flawed from the start of that new set of posts (#12730 onward). Your argument was that the United States should have just kept their schools open, because covid doesn't severely affect children anyway, so all we were getting out of school closures were students failing math and a bunch of kids wanting to commit suicide. And your evidence was data from Sweden.
What you didn't say - which is a huge difference - was: Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Or, if you really wanted to talk about Sweden: Sweden's decision to not close down schools during the pandemic seemed risky, but appears to have paid off, at least academically. Did they just get lucky, or were they in a particularly favorable position to try out this approach (perhaps because of their medical infrastructure or school/community environments or something else)? And if there were indeed key, beneficial factors that helped Sweden persist through this crazy period, is it possible for other countries to learn from Sweden, so that we all may be better prepared for the next pandemic?
Do you see how those two approaches are more neutral, and probably would have been received a lot better?
This conversation started by me posting data that showed children's education was heavily impacted during the pandemic and opining that children paid the biggest sacrifice during the pandemic despite the fact that they are least affected by the disease itself.
The first person to make a claim of the necessity of school closures was you who immediately called it a "necessary evil" without providing any data to support this claim.
But go ahead and lecture me about my need to remain neutral and use better data while you get to make whatever claims you want while offering zero data yourself. That's some next-level hypocrisy.
You didn't post data first; you didn't even post a link to your source. You paraphrased a few results in three sentences, without accounting for a variety of influential factors, and then talked about other things. After that, several people (Artisreal, then me, then Gorsameth, etc.) asked you questions about different parts of your first post. When I responded to your #12730 with my #12733 post, I clearly outlined which parts I was fine with, and which were problematic for me. Then you said that we should have kept American schools open, and pivoted to Sweden, which several people rightly criticized.
Feel free to completely ignore my advice about wording things more productively, but there's a reason why people are not only disagreeing with your arguments, but also literally having a meta discussion about your sincerity and underlying agenda. I wrote out those two alternative paragraphs in an effort to lead you to water, but it's up to you to drink.
So are you going to acknowledge that you were the first one to make a claim on the necessity of schools being closed while providing zero data to support your claim?
Plenty of us have provided data showing that closing schools helped reduce the spread and helped communities/hospitals manage their cases, including me, throughout this thread. That's why businesses were also closed, and why social distancing was stressed. Remember that one of our main criticisms of your #12730 post is that you conveniently ignored that important benefit of closing schools, which was shocking to a lot of us because we already covered that, several times, and it had appeared (at least, to me) that that benefit was also worthy of recognition to you, in the past... yet your recent set of posts seems to no longer take that into consideration.
If you're pointing out that that specific post of mine didn't repeat the data that has already been established, then you're correct. If you don't think that closing schools reduced the spread of infection, then we can definitely post more data about the importance of social distancing and closing down areas where large groups congregate, but I think this is something you already know, so I don't know why you're deflecting with this line of reasoning. Seems like you're trying to score a weird semantics point against me, right as I'm trying to help you smooth things over in the thread. You and I have disagreed on plenty of points in this thread, but that doesn't mean I enjoy watching conversations between you and other people constantly devolve into mudslinging.
Oof. Yes keeping schools closed helps reduced the spread. That's an obvious truth, you don't need to provide data on that. Just like keeping schools closed harmed the education and upbringing of children is an obvious truth.
They are competing interests/problems with keeping schools open vs closed.
The problem is that you seem to think that just showing that closing schools helps reduce the spread (obvious truth) is proof-pudding that your stance that schools should have been closed is the correct one but me showing that children's educations being harmed from closed schools (obvious truth) is not proof-pudding that schools should have opened sooner or remained open.
Essentially you are saying that schools being closed is the correct and necessary evil and I have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute this by showing that children's education was harmed more than the benefit in spread reduction.
But if I say the opposite - that schools should have opened sooner and worsening the spread is the necessary evil because the harm to students is too great otherwise and you have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute that, then I'm the heretic.
At the end of the day we're both guessing and neither of us are providing a cost-benefit analysis. According to Magic Powers source even the people in charge to make these decisions weren't really doing a cost-benefit analysis to make their decisions.
The difference is I'm not the one lecturing you to remain neutral while not remaining neutral myself.
A) Schools being closed reduces the spread B) Schools being closed harms children's education
DPB: A > B BJ: No, B > A because X
DPB: X does not prove B > A so next time remain neutral unless you have proper data BJ: But you didn't provide anything to support A > B other than saying that A is true.
I appreciate the clarification and the simplification, and we're in agreement that there are both benefits and drawbacks to the various protocols taken during the pandemic. I'm wondering if this just comes down to a subjective difference of opinion: that I may think that the benefits of closing schools down for longer outweighs the drawbacks, while you believe the reverse. I don't know if there's any way to come to a consensus on this (I'm open to suggestions), and it's why I was hoping that the conversation would have started with something like this (one of the two hypothetical paragraphs I had written a few posts ago):
Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Thoughts? Is it just an "agree to disagree" situation?
Depends what we're agreeing to disagree on. For example if you think it's okay to reopen schools if we can anticipate 10% more deaths/hospitalizations and I think it's okay to reopen schools if we can anticipate 30% more deaths/hospitalization (just an example) then sure we can agree to disagree.
But if you think we can't reopen schools because doing so would have caused a catastrophic strain on the healthcare system then no we can't agree to disagree unless you do as I asked before and show some examples of schools that reopened too early and caused such a catastrophic strain. If for example 1,000 schools opened up sometime in 2021 and none of them caused a catastrophe in their health systems then it is safe to assume that the schools that waited until 2022 to reopen could have reopened sooner. The "well those are different areas and proof that one place could do it isn't proof that another could" just doesn't fly. It's like if a basketball player took 1,000 shots and made all 1,000 and then you say there's no reason the believe he is going to make the next shot because the next shot is different than the previous 1,000. I'd say you can be quite confident he can make the next shot too.
I'm not sure if the basketball analogy is exactly accurate (the 1,001st school and 1,001st basketball shot may be under different circumstances than the previous ones), but I believe I understand your broader point. My mindset is definitely more in line with your first example (10% vs. 30%) than your second one (catastrophe vs. manageable). Figuring out where to draw the line (or what percent increase of hospitalizations/deaths would be acceptable, by reopening schools early) is definitely difficult, as we'd need to also establish (quantify?) the economic/academic/social/emotional benefits of opening up early (e.g., what's the trade-off if a school opens up a month early, or two months early, or six months early, etc., and is that trade-off generalizable or would it need to be done separately for each district or state or country, since different regions may have different factors to consider).
It would be interesting if realistic simulations could be constructed, but even if we were to engage in a hypothetical situation with completely fabricated (probably not accurate) numbers, I'm not sure how well I could justify a specific position. For example, would I be okay with opening up the schools in Random Town X, 6 months earlier than they actually did in real life, if that decision would lead to a 30% increase in covid cases in that town, a 20% increase in covid hospitalizations in that town, a 10% increase in covid deaths in that town, a 5-point median increase in those students' reading scores, a 7-point median increase in those students' math scores, a 15% decrease in students reporting depression and anxiety due to covid, and an 8% increase in the number of jobs retained in that town during the pandemic (since some parents could return to work sooner, with their kids back in school sooner)? I just made all those numbers up, but I have no idea how to even approach answering if I'd prefer (or not prefer) that trade-off. I'm not sure if the theorycrafting needs to go that in depth, but there are also benefits and drawbacks I'm probably forgetting anyway. What do you think?
Personally I draw the line at manageable vs crisis. Everyone thinks they know exactly where the line should be drawn. What annoys me is when they pretend they are more virtuous than me because they care more about “saving lives.” Maybe I’m more virtuous because I care more about making sure minority students don’t fall further behind.
On October 29 2022 00:14 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: [quote]
Wording things clearly and carefully is pretty important, but your entire approach was flawed from the start of that new set of posts (#12730 onward). Your argument was that the United States should have just kept their schools open, because covid doesn't severely affect children anyway, so all we were getting out of school closures were students failing math and a bunch of kids wanting to commit suicide. And your evidence was data from Sweden.
What you didn't say - which is a huge difference - was: Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Or, if you really wanted to talk about Sweden: Sweden's decision to not close down schools during the pandemic seemed risky, but appears to have paid off, at least academically. Did they just get lucky, or were they in a particularly favorable position to try out this approach (perhaps because of their medical infrastructure or school/community environments or something else)? And if there were indeed key, beneficial factors that helped Sweden persist through this crazy period, is it possible for other countries to learn from Sweden, so that we all may be better prepared for the next pandemic?
Do you see how those two approaches are more neutral, and probably would have been received a lot better?
This conversation started by me posting data that showed children's education was heavily impacted during the pandemic and opining that children paid the biggest sacrifice during the pandemic despite the fact that they are least affected by the disease itself.
The first person to make a claim of the necessity of school closures was you who immediately called it a "necessary evil" without providing any data to support this claim.
But go ahead and lecture me about my need to remain neutral and use better data while you get to make whatever claims you want while offering zero data yourself. That's some next-level hypocrisy.
You didn't post data first; you didn't even post a link to your source. You paraphrased a few results in three sentences, without accounting for a variety of influential factors, and then talked about other things. After that, several people (Artisreal, then me, then Gorsameth, etc.) asked you questions about different parts of your first post. When I responded to your #12730 with my #12733 post, I clearly outlined which parts I was fine with, and which were problematic for me. Then you said that we should have kept American schools open, and pivoted to Sweden, which several people rightly criticized.
Feel free to completely ignore my advice about wording things more productively, but there's a reason why people are not only disagreeing with your arguments, but also literally having a meta discussion about your sincerity and underlying agenda. I wrote out those two alternative paragraphs in an effort to lead you to water, but it's up to you to drink.
So are you going to acknowledge that you were the first one to make a claim on the necessity of schools being closed while providing zero data to support your claim?
Plenty of us have provided data showing that closing schools helped reduce the spread and helped communities/hospitals manage their cases, including me, throughout this thread. That's why businesses were also closed, and why social distancing was stressed. Remember that one of our main criticisms of your #12730 post is that you conveniently ignored that important benefit of closing schools, which was shocking to a lot of us because we already covered that, several times, and it had appeared (at least, to me) that that benefit was also worthy of recognition to you, in the past... yet your recent set of posts seems to no longer take that into consideration.
If you're pointing out that that specific post of mine didn't repeat the data that has already been established, then you're correct. If you don't think that closing schools reduced the spread of infection, then we can definitely post more data about the importance of social distancing and closing down areas where large groups congregate, but I think this is something you already know, so I don't know why you're deflecting with this line of reasoning. Seems like you're trying to score a weird semantics point against me, right as I'm trying to help you smooth things over in the thread. You and I have disagreed on plenty of points in this thread, but that doesn't mean I enjoy watching conversations between you and other people constantly devolve into mudslinging.
Oof. Yes keeping schools closed helps reduced the spread. That's an obvious truth, you don't need to provide data on that. Just like keeping schools closed harmed the education and upbringing of children is an obvious truth.
They are competing interests/problems with keeping schools open vs closed.
The problem is that you seem to think that just showing that closing schools helps reduce the spread (obvious truth) is proof-pudding that your stance that schools should have been closed is the correct one but me showing that children's educations being harmed from closed schools (obvious truth) is not proof-pudding that schools should have opened sooner or remained open.
Essentially you are saying that schools being closed is the correct and necessary evil and I have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute this by showing that children's education was harmed more than the benefit in spread reduction.
But if I say the opposite - that schools should have opened sooner and worsening the spread is the necessary evil because the harm to students is too great otherwise and you have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute that, then I'm the heretic.
At the end of the day we're both guessing and neither of us are providing a cost-benefit analysis. According to Magic Powers source even the people in charge to make these decisions weren't really doing a cost-benefit analysis to make their decisions.
The difference is I'm not the one lecturing you to remain neutral while not remaining neutral myself.
A) Schools being closed reduces the spread B) Schools being closed harms children's education
DPB: A > B BJ: No, B > A because X
DPB: X does not prove B > A so next time remain neutral unless you have proper data BJ: But you didn't provide anything to support A > B other than saying that A is true.
I appreciate the clarification and the simplification, and we're in agreement that there are both benefits and drawbacks to the various protocols taken during the pandemic. I'm wondering if this just comes down to a subjective difference of opinion: that I may think that the benefits of closing schools down for longer outweighs the drawbacks, while you believe the reverse. I don't know if there's any way to come to a consensus on this (I'm open to suggestions), and it's why I was hoping that the conversation would have started with something like this (one of the two hypothetical paragraphs I had written a few posts ago):
Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Thoughts? Is it just an "agree to disagree" situation?
Depends what we're agreeing to disagree on. For example if you think it's okay to reopen schools if we can anticipate 10% more deaths/hospitalizations and I think it's okay to reopen schools if we can anticipate 30% more deaths/hospitalization (just an example) then sure we can agree to disagree.
But if you think we can't reopen schools because doing so would have caused a catastrophic strain on the healthcare system then no we can't agree to disagree unless you do as I asked before and show some examples of schools that reopened too early and caused such a catastrophic strain. If for example 1,000 schools opened up sometime in 2021 and none of them caused a catastrophe in their health systems then it is safe to assume that the schools that waited until 2022 to reopen could have reopened sooner. The "well those are different areas and proof that one place could do it isn't proof that another could" just doesn't fly. It's like if a basketball player took 1,000 shots and made all 1,000 and then you say there's no reason the believe he is going to make the next shot because the next shot is different than the previous 1,000. I'd say you can be quite confident he can make the next shot too.
I'm not sure if the basketball analogy is exactly accurate (the 1,001st school and 1,001st basketball shot may be under different circumstances than the previous ones), but I believe I understand your broader point. My mindset is definitely more in line with your first example (10% vs. 30%) than your second one (catastrophe vs. manageable). Figuring out where to draw the line (or what percent increase of hospitalizations/deaths would be acceptable, by reopening schools early) is definitely difficult, as we'd need to also establish (quantify?) the economic/academic/social/emotional benefits of opening up early (e.g., what's the trade-off if a school opens up a month early, or two months early, or six months early, etc., and is that trade-off generalizable or would it need to be done separately for each district or state or country, since different regions may have different factors to consider).
It would be interesting if realistic simulations could be constructed, but even if we were to engage in a hypothetical situation with completely fabricated (probably not accurate) numbers, I'm not sure how well I could justify a specific position. For example, would I be okay with opening up the schools in Random Town X, 6 months earlier than they actually did in real life, if that decision would lead to a 30% increase in covid cases in that town, a 20% increase in covid hospitalizations in that town, a 10% increase in covid deaths in that town, a 5-point median increase in those students' reading scores, a 7-point median increase in those students' math scores, a 15% decrease in students reporting depression and anxiety due to covid, and an 8% increase in the number of jobs retained in that town during the pandemic (since some parents could return to work sooner, with their kids back in school sooner)? I just made all those numbers up, but I have no idea how to even approach answering if I'd prefer (or not prefer) that trade-off. I'm not sure if the theorycrafting needs to go that in depth, but there are also benefits and drawbacks I'm probably forgetting anyway. What do you think?
Personally I draw the line at manageable vs crisis. Everyone thinks they know exactly where the line should be drawn. What annoys me is when they pretend they are more virtuous than me because they care more about “saving lives.” Maybe I’m more virtuous because I care more about making sure minority students don’t fall further behind.
Can you please elaborate on what you mean by this being where you draw the line? I'm honestly not sure of what factors you use for assessing manageable vs. crisis. How do you evaluate where things switch from one to the other? Is it manageable as long as there's a hospital bed for everyone who shows up to the hospital (so it's okay if a hospital at 30% capacity rises to 99% capacity due to schools reopening, but that's where you draw the line because at 100% we've reached a crisis where we no longer have an open bed for the next patient)?
This conversation started by me posting data that showed children's education was heavily impacted during the pandemic and opining that children paid the biggest sacrifice during the pandemic despite the fact that they are least affected by the disease itself.
The first person to make a claim of the necessity of school closures was you who immediately called it a "necessary evil" without providing any data to support this claim.
But go ahead and lecture me about my need to remain neutral and use better data while you get to make whatever claims you want while offering zero data yourself. That's some next-level hypocrisy.
You didn't post data first; you didn't even post a link to your source. You paraphrased a few results in three sentences, without accounting for a variety of influential factors, and then talked about other things. After that, several people (Artisreal, then me, then Gorsameth, etc.) asked you questions about different parts of your first post. When I responded to your #12730 with my #12733 post, I clearly outlined which parts I was fine with, and which were problematic for me. Then you said that we should have kept American schools open, and pivoted to Sweden, which several people rightly criticized.
Feel free to completely ignore my advice about wording things more productively, but there's a reason why people are not only disagreeing with your arguments, but also literally having a meta discussion about your sincerity and underlying agenda. I wrote out those two alternative paragraphs in an effort to lead you to water, but it's up to you to drink.
So are you going to acknowledge that you were the first one to make a claim on the necessity of schools being closed while providing zero data to support your claim?
Plenty of us have provided data showing that closing schools helped reduce the spread and helped communities/hospitals manage their cases, including me, throughout this thread. That's why businesses were also closed, and why social distancing was stressed. Remember that one of our main criticisms of your #12730 post is that you conveniently ignored that important benefit of closing schools, which was shocking to a lot of us because we already covered that, several times, and it had appeared (at least, to me) that that benefit was also worthy of recognition to you, in the past... yet your recent set of posts seems to no longer take that into consideration.
If you're pointing out that that specific post of mine didn't repeat the data that has already been established, then you're correct. If you don't think that closing schools reduced the spread of infection, then we can definitely post more data about the importance of social distancing and closing down areas where large groups congregate, but I think this is something you already know, so I don't know why you're deflecting with this line of reasoning. Seems like you're trying to score a weird semantics point against me, right as I'm trying to help you smooth things over in the thread. You and I have disagreed on plenty of points in this thread, but that doesn't mean I enjoy watching conversations between you and other people constantly devolve into mudslinging.
Oof. Yes keeping schools closed helps reduced the spread. That's an obvious truth, you don't need to provide data on that. Just like keeping schools closed harmed the education and upbringing of children is an obvious truth.
They are competing interests/problems with keeping schools open vs closed.
The problem is that you seem to think that just showing that closing schools helps reduce the spread (obvious truth) is proof-pudding that your stance that schools should have been closed is the correct one but me showing that children's educations being harmed from closed schools (obvious truth) is not proof-pudding that schools should have opened sooner or remained open.
Essentially you are saying that schools being closed is the correct and necessary evil and I have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute this by showing that children's education was harmed more than the benefit in spread reduction.
But if I say the opposite - that schools should have opened sooner and worsening the spread is the necessary evil because the harm to students is too great otherwise and you have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute that, then I'm the heretic.
At the end of the day we're both guessing and neither of us are providing a cost-benefit analysis. According to Magic Powers source even the people in charge to make these decisions weren't really doing a cost-benefit analysis to make their decisions.
The difference is I'm not the one lecturing you to remain neutral while not remaining neutral myself.
A) Schools being closed reduces the spread B) Schools being closed harms children's education
DPB: A > B BJ: No, B > A because X
DPB: X does not prove B > A so next time remain neutral unless you have proper data BJ: But you didn't provide anything to support A > B other than saying that A is true.
I appreciate the clarification and the simplification, and we're in agreement that there are both benefits and drawbacks to the various protocols taken during the pandemic. I'm wondering if this just comes down to a subjective difference of opinion: that I may think that the benefits of closing schools down for longer outweighs the drawbacks, while you believe the reverse. I don't know if there's any way to come to a consensus on this (I'm open to suggestions), and it's why I was hoping that the conversation would have started with something like this (one of the two hypothetical paragraphs I had written a few posts ago):
Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Thoughts? Is it just an "agree to disagree" situation?
Depends what we're agreeing to disagree on. For example if you think it's okay to reopen schools if we can anticipate 10% more deaths/hospitalizations and I think it's okay to reopen schools if we can anticipate 30% more deaths/hospitalization (just an example) then sure we can agree to disagree.
But if you think we can't reopen schools because doing so would have caused a catastrophic strain on the healthcare system then no we can't agree to disagree unless you do as I asked before and show some examples of schools that reopened too early and caused such a catastrophic strain. If for example 1,000 schools opened up sometime in 2021 and none of them caused a catastrophe in their health systems then it is safe to assume that the schools that waited until 2022 to reopen could have reopened sooner. The "well those are different areas and proof that one place could do it isn't proof that another could" just doesn't fly. It's like if a basketball player took 1,000 shots and made all 1,000 and then you say there's no reason the believe he is going to make the next shot because the next shot is different than the previous 1,000. I'd say you can be quite confident he can make the next shot too.
I'm not sure if the basketball analogy is exactly accurate (the 1,001st school and 1,001st basketball shot may be under different circumstances than the previous ones), but I believe I understand your broader point. My mindset is definitely more in line with your first example (10% vs. 30%) than your second one (catastrophe vs. manageable). Figuring out where to draw the line (or what percent increase of hospitalizations/deaths would be acceptable, by reopening schools early) is definitely difficult, as we'd need to also establish (quantify?) the economic/academic/social/emotional benefits of opening up early (e.g., what's the trade-off if a school opens up a month early, or two months early, or six months early, etc., and is that trade-off generalizable or would it need to be done separately for each district or state or country, since different regions may have different factors to consider).
It would be interesting if realistic simulations could be constructed, but even if we were to engage in a hypothetical situation with completely fabricated (probably not accurate) numbers, I'm not sure how well I could justify a specific position. For example, would I be okay with opening up the schools in Random Town X, 6 months earlier than they actually did in real life, if that decision would lead to a 30% increase in covid cases in that town, a 20% increase in covid hospitalizations in that town, a 10% increase in covid deaths in that town, a 5-point median increase in those students' reading scores, a 7-point median increase in those students' math scores, a 15% decrease in students reporting depression and anxiety due to covid, and an 8% increase in the number of jobs retained in that town during the pandemic (since some parents could return to work sooner, with their kids back in school sooner)? I just made all those numbers up, but I have no idea how to even approach answering if I'd prefer (or not prefer) that trade-off. I'm not sure if the theorycrafting needs to go that in depth, but there are also benefits and drawbacks I'm probably forgetting anyway. What do you think?
Personally I draw the line at manageable vs crisis. Everyone thinks they know exactly where the line should be drawn. What annoys me is when they pretend they are more virtuous than me because they care more about “saving lives.” Maybe I’m more virtuous because I care more about making sure minority students don’t fall further behind.
Can you please elaborate on what you mean by this being where you draw the line? I'm honestly not sure of what factors you use for assessing manageable vs. crisis. How do you evaluate where things switch from one to the other? Is it manageable as long as there's a hospital bed for everyone who shows up to the hospital (so it's okay if a hospital at 30% capacity rises to 99% capacity due to schools reopening, but that's where you draw the line because at 100% we've reached a crisis where we no longer have an open bed for the next patient)?
There's often not a hospital bed for every patient that shows up at the hospital even before COVID. Ironically most of 2020 is the only time you can go to a hospital and be sure there would be a bed available for you. I've said many times in this thread that hospitals were basically ghost towns in this thread. This is sourced not only by my firsthand experience but by a slue of data. For example the NYTimes article "Where have all the Hospital Patients Gone?"
But more than seven months into the pandemic, there are still no lines of patients in the halls. While my colleagues and I are busier than we were in March, there has been no pent-up overflow of people with crushing chest pain, debilitating shortness of breath or fevers and wet, rattling coughs.
“It’s so weird,” a colleague remarked recently. “It’s like those people have vanished.”
Researchers from Sound Physicians, a national medical group of almost 4,000 doctors specializing in hospital medicine, critical care and emergency medicine, and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice gathered admissions data from more than 200 hospitals in 36 states and compared differences in patient characteristics, diagnoses and mortality rates between February and July of this year with the same time period last year. The researchers found that by mid-April, non-Covid admissions to hospitals had dropped by almost half.
But surprisingly, even months later, as coronavirus infection rates began falling and hospitals were again offering elective surgery and in-person visits to doctor’s offices, hospital admissions remained almost 20 percent lower than normal.
My main criticism is not that we shut down in March 2020, because we really didn't know what we were dealing with and we were desperately short on PPE. My main criticism is that we took hella long to start easing restrictions even when it was obvious that there was cushion in the system to absorb more patients and we were caught up on securing PPE. I was making these criticisms in real time in this thread in 2020, not after the fact.
The previous times I have posted this in this thread people here would explain to me that I'm wrong and that hospitals across the US were indeed overwhelmed during these months. To say it clearly - they weren't arguing that hospitals would be overwhelmed if we eased restrictions but simply that hospitals were overwhelmed and that's why we couldn't ease restrictions. Of course they offered no data to support this and I was offering multiple stories like the one above and showing that ED volumes were down 50%, hospitals were closing down wings, 1.4 MILLION healthcare workers were laid off in April 2020, etc. just in case they didn't want to take my word for it as someone that personally new several laid off healthcare workers. Didn't matter, their feelings that hospitals were overwhelmed during those months were unchanged. No data, no firsthand experience. Just unflinching faith that they were right. That's when I realized that there's a lot of people scared shitless of COVID sitting at home and not really knowing what's going on but convinced they are the ones following the data while dismissing all the data they don't agree with.
Oh I see you really are trying to play captain hindsight. You almost made a fact-based argument there until you reverted to how you really think with appealing to feelings there at the end. You're so filled with grievance that you really don't understand how cruel and hateful you come off. We should have totally respected the capitalist healthcare system before the lives of people and the systems capability to react to, again, the plauge. The idea that people would rather stay home than risk contracting the plauge being a rational decision is just something you can't grasp.
You think people will like you more if you shame people for how they acted during a fucking plauge? Do you think you will convince anyone by saying that you would have made different decisions based off of data collected after the fact? Are you so disconnected with how any sort of decision making is made by people who don't base their world view on their feelings?
You don't even have coherent arguments to work with. You acknowledge that hospitals were getting caught up on securing PPE and keeping a cushion in the system in case there was another surge coming. You acknowledge that the hospital system opened up after they had a stockpile of PPE and were capable of reacting to a surge if another one came. I genuinely don't think you read your own posts and are just searching for words that you can use to seem credible before vering off to grind your axe at people you disagree with.
On November 02 2022 06:34 Sermokala wrote: Oh I see you really are trying to play captain hindsight. You almost made a fact-based argument there until you reverted to how you really think with appealing to feelings there at the end. You're so filled with grievance that you really don't understand how cruel and hateful you come off. We should have totally respected the capitalist healthcare system before the lives of people and the systems capability to react to, again, the plauge. The idea that people would rather stay home than risk contracting the plauge being a rational decision is just something you can't grasp.
You think people will like you more if you shame people for how they acted during a fucking plauge? Do you think you will convince anyone by saying that you would have made different decisions based off of data collected after the fact? Are you so disconnected with how any sort of decision making is made by people who don't base their world view on their feelings?
You don't even have coherent arguments to work with. You acknowledge that hospitals were getting caught up on securing PPE and keeping a cushion in the system in case there was another surge coming. You acknowledge that the hospital system opened up after they had a stockpile of PPE and were capable of reacting to a surge if another one came. I genuinely don't think you read your own posts and are just searching for words that you can use to seem credible before vering off to grind your axe at people you disagree with.
Once again, I was posting in this thread in real time in Spring of 2020 about hospitals being well below normal census and arguing that restrictions should be eased. The fact that you can't grasp this and continually accuse me of using "data after the fact" to make my arguments doesn't really surprise me because I'm fairly confident you don't even know what the word hindsight means.
Also unsurprising is that after my post where I offer actual data like hospital admissions being down, or ED visits being down, or 1.4 million healthcare workers being laid off in April 2020, your response is the usual one - to call me hateful and cruel while offering no data yourself. In fact for as long as this thread has been around I don't recall you linking to any scientific studies or news sources or anything of value. Literally every argument you have ever made in this thread has been an emotional plea "I care more about saving lives than you." I'm basing my world view on observations and evidence and data, the one basing their world view on their feelings is you.
I wish you would go back to ripping off Twitter for your posts.
"You think people will like you more if you shame people for how they acted during a fucking plauge?"
This little nugget of projection really says it all. If you stopped formulating your posts based on what you think will get people to "like you" maybe you can offer something cogent.
On November 02 2022 06:34 Sermokala wrote: Oh I see you really are trying to play captain hindsight. You almost made a fact-based argument there until you reverted to how you really think with appealing to feelings there at the end. You're so filled with grievance that you really don't understand how cruel and hateful you come off. We should have totally respected the capitalist healthcare system before the lives of people and the systems capability to react to, again, the plauge. The idea that people would rather stay home than risk contracting the plauge being a rational decision is just something you can't grasp.
You think people will like you more if you shame people for how they acted during a fucking plauge?Do you think you will convince anyone by saying that you would have made different decisions based off of data collected after the fact? Are you so disconnected with how any sort of decision making is made by people who don't base their world view on their feelings?
You don't even have coherent arguments to work with. You acknowledge that hospitals were getting caught up on securing PPE and keeping a cushion in the system in case there was another surge coming. You acknowledge that the hospital system opened up after they had a stockpile of PPE and were capable of reacting to a surge if another one came. I genuinely don't think you read your own posts and are just searching for words that you can use to seem credible before vering off to grind your axe at people you disagree with.
Now I recently learned how to skip annoying login message to browse Twitter and must say responses are not great...
What was the phrase you used? "how cruel and hateful you come off"?
Italic: After the fact? Posts have dates on them you can check them. While you will be checking Blackjack's post you may also notice that most of my concerns turned out to be spot on.
Covid-19 spreads very fast in hospitals, while also holding the highest rate of people who are vulnerable to infectious diseases. Some hospitals had to be nearly emptied to protect current and would-be patients, and to protect hospital capacity for emergencies. We had this discussion long ago, but I remember it as if it was yesterday. The claim that hospitals stood nearly empty is meaningless without this context. In part it was necessary and in part it was people's choice to stay away.
On October 28 2022 22:24 BlackJack wrote: Yes, one would think that I wouldn't have to carefully add the same qualifiers to every single post here for the sake of eliminating wordiness, but obviously that's wrong and I'll take the blame for that since I should have known better by now
Wording things clearly and carefully is pretty important, but your entire approach was flawed from the start of that new set of posts (#12730 onward). Your argument was that the United States should have just kept their schools open, because covid doesn't severely affect children anyway, so all we were getting out of school closures were students failing math and a bunch of kids wanting to commit suicide. And your evidence was data from Sweden.
What you didn't say - which is a huge difference - was: Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Or, if you really wanted to talk about Sweden: Sweden's decision to not close down schools during the pandemic seemed risky, but appears to have paid off, at least academically. Did they just get lucky, or were they in a particularly favorable position to try out this approach (perhaps because of their medical infrastructure or school/community environments or something else)? And if there were indeed key, beneficial factors that helped Sweden persist through this crazy period, is it possible for other countries to learn from Sweden, so that we all may be better prepared for the next pandemic?
Do you see how those two approaches are more neutral, and probably would have been received a lot better?
This conversation started by me posting data that showed children's education was heavily impacted during the pandemic and opining that children paid the biggest sacrifice during the pandemic despite the fact that they are least affected by the disease itself.
The first person to make a claim of the necessity of school closures was you who immediately called it a "necessary evil" without providing any data to support this claim.
But go ahead and lecture me about my need to remain neutral and use better data while you get to make whatever claims you want while offering zero data yourself. That's some next-level hypocrisy.
You didn't post data first; you didn't even post a link to your source. You paraphrased a few results in three sentences, without accounting for a variety of influential factors, and then talked about other things. After that, several people (Artisreal, then me, then Gorsameth, etc.) asked you questions about different parts of your first post. When I responded to your #12730 with my #12733 post, I clearly outlined which parts I was fine with, and which were problematic for me. Then you said that we should have kept American schools open, and pivoted to Sweden, which several people rightly criticized.
Feel free to completely ignore my advice about wording things more productively, but there's a reason why people are not only disagreeing with your arguments, but also literally having a meta discussion about your sincerity and underlying agenda. I wrote out those two alternative paragraphs in an effort to lead you to water, but it's up to you to drink.
So are you going to acknowledge that you were the first one to make a claim on the necessity of schools being closed while providing zero data to support your claim?
Plenty of us have provided data showing that closing schools helped reduce the spread and helped communities/hospitals manage their cases, including me, throughout this thread. That's why businesses were also closed, and why social distancing was stressed. Remember that one of our main criticisms of your #12730 post is that you conveniently ignored that important benefit of closing schools, which was shocking to a lot of us because we already covered that, several times, and it had appeared (at least, to me) that that benefit was also worthy of recognition to you, in the past... yet your recent set of posts seems to no longer take that into consideration.
If you're pointing out that that specific post of mine didn't repeat the data that has already been established, then you're correct. If you don't think that closing schools reduced the spread of infection, then we can definitely post more data about the importance of social distancing and closing down areas where large groups congregate, but I think this is something you already know, so I don't know why you're deflecting with this line of reasoning. Seems like you're trying to score a weird semantics point against me, right as I'm trying to help you smooth things over in the thread. You and I have disagreed on plenty of points in this thread, but that doesn't mean I enjoy watching conversations between you and other people constantly devolve into mudslinging.
Oof. Yes keeping schools closed helps reduced the spread. That's an obvious truth, you don't need to provide data on that. Just like keeping schools closed harmed the education and upbringing of children is an obvious truth.
They are competing interests/problems with keeping schools open vs closed.
The problem is that you seem to think that just showing that closing schools helps reduce the spread (obvious truth) is proof-pudding that your stance that schools should have been closed is the correct one but me showing that children's educations being harmed from closed schools (obvious truth) is not proof-pudding that schools should have opened sooner or remained open.
Essentially you are saying that schools being closed is the correct and necessary evil and I have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute this by showing that children's education was harmed more than the benefit in spread reduction.
But if I say the opposite - that schools should have opened sooner and worsening the spread is the necessary evil because the harm to students is too great otherwise and you have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute that, then I'm the heretic.
At the end of the day we're both guessing and neither of us are providing a cost-benefit analysis. According to Magic Powers source even the people in charge to make these decisions weren't really doing a cost-benefit analysis to make their decisions.
The difference is I'm not the one lecturing you to remain neutral while not remaining neutral myself.
A) Schools being closed reduces the spread B) Schools being closed harms children's education
DPB: A > B BJ: No, B > A because X
DPB: X does not prove B > A so next time remain neutral unless you have proper data BJ: But you didn't provide anything to support A > B other than saying that A is true.
Sorry, that "closing schools" is reducing the spread is NOT an obvious truth. For the flu, the spread has been equal or even worse when closing schools, as the youngsters will meet anyway, and in more fluctuating groups, less regulated. You need to close schools AND make sure they don't have any social life elsewhere either, which is an absolutely awful thing to force upon youngsters, and it is much worse for the ones who struggle already.
Then, you need to remember that the goal is really to reduce deaths and hospitalisations, not only a raw number number of cases. Proving that closing schools achieved this goal is not easy, but if you have some studies, bring them on!
This was an experiment, not based on science. Remember that there are powerful incentives to justify these decisions, so we might have to wait a bit to get solid unbiased proof. But, I know Norway and Denmark opened their schools late spring 2020, and still had some of the best covid numbers in the world.
Yeah but we did destroy their social lives too. There weren’t many play dates happening during the pandemic. That’s why my post introducing the topic was two-fold. Not just that student test scores are way down but also pediatric depression, anxiety, and suicidality is way up.
But yes I agree with you that it was an experiment not based on science. Magic Powers source says as much well - the decision to close schools was often not done on a rigorous cost-benefit analysis but more on a gut feel of the people making these decisions.
Also just want to remind everyone that in Spring and Summer of 2020 I was posting in real time in this thread about how hospitals across the country were becoming ghost towns. All elective surgeries were being cancelled. People were avoiding the Emergency Room like it was the plague. Hospitals were closing down entire wings and laying off workers because there were no patients. There was definitely plenty of room to ease some restrictions and keeping schools open should have been the obvious choice.
Are you trying to play captain hindsight by using data from after the fact to make yourself seem like the smart one for making perfect decisions? You do realize that if decisions changed from when they were made it would have meant that different outcomes would have happened? Hospitals were at their breaking point for supplies and giving them breathing room so people can recover from the hell march and resupply to prepare for the next wave wasn't something that occurred to you being a possibility at all these past two years?
BlackJack's description of the cost benefit analysis of school closure is at least exactly the one communicated to us in Sweden by our authorities during the epidemic, i.e.: we don't believe children are spreading the disease to an extent that would justify closing schools; it is not particularly dangerous for the children themselves to get the disease; it could have potentially very harming consequences to stop young children from going to school. All of this has turned out to be true as far as I can tell. I remember thinking at the time that the calls for closing schools was a dangerous mixture of virtue signalling and hysteria, and it seems to have been an accurate impression.
On October 29 2022 00:14 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: [quote]
Wording things clearly and carefully is pretty important, but your entire approach was flawed from the start of that new set of posts (#12730 onward). Your argument was that the United States should have just kept their schools open, because covid doesn't severely affect children anyway, so all we were getting out of school closures were students failing math and a bunch of kids wanting to commit suicide. And your evidence was data from Sweden.
What you didn't say - which is a huge difference - was: Within the United States, different states and districts had different policies regarding when (and for how long) schools needed to close and switch to remote learning, during the covid pandemic. I found a few studies that compared student test scores / covid cases between American schools that were closed for a short amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by short closing periods) and American schools that were closed for a much longer amount of time (how changes in test scores / covid cases may be influenced by long closing periods). The studies account for some other important, potentially-confounding factors, such as the fact that schools from both groups were near each other and/or generally share similar amounts of funding and socioeconomic status and demographics and whatnot. The data seems to show that blah blah blah blah blah.
Or, if you really wanted to talk about Sweden: Sweden's decision to not close down schools during the pandemic seemed risky, but appears to have paid off, at least academically. Did they just get lucky, or were they in a particularly favorable position to try out this approach (perhaps because of their medical infrastructure or school/community environments or something else)? And if there were indeed key, beneficial factors that helped Sweden persist through this crazy period, is it possible for other countries to learn from Sweden, so that we all may be better prepared for the next pandemic?
Do you see how those two approaches are more neutral, and probably would have been received a lot better?
This conversation started by me posting data that showed children's education was heavily impacted during the pandemic and opining that children paid the biggest sacrifice during the pandemic despite the fact that they are least affected by the disease itself.
The first person to make a claim of the necessity of school closures was you who immediately called it a "necessary evil" without providing any data to support this claim.
But go ahead and lecture me about my need to remain neutral and use better data while you get to make whatever claims you want while offering zero data yourself. That's some next-level hypocrisy.
You didn't post data first; you didn't even post a link to your source. You paraphrased a few results in three sentences, without accounting for a variety of influential factors, and then talked about other things. After that, several people (Artisreal, then me, then Gorsameth, etc.) asked you questions about different parts of your first post. When I responded to your #12730 with my #12733 post, I clearly outlined which parts I was fine with, and which were problematic for me. Then you said that we should have kept American schools open, and pivoted to Sweden, which several people rightly criticized.
Feel free to completely ignore my advice about wording things more productively, but there's a reason why people are not only disagreeing with your arguments, but also literally having a meta discussion about your sincerity and underlying agenda. I wrote out those two alternative paragraphs in an effort to lead you to water, but it's up to you to drink.
So are you going to acknowledge that you were the first one to make a claim on the necessity of schools being closed while providing zero data to support your claim?
Plenty of us have provided data showing that closing schools helped reduce the spread and helped communities/hospitals manage their cases, including me, throughout this thread. That's why businesses were also closed, and why social distancing was stressed. Remember that one of our main criticisms of your #12730 post is that you conveniently ignored that important benefit of closing schools, which was shocking to a lot of us because we already covered that, several times, and it had appeared (at least, to me) that that benefit was also worthy of recognition to you, in the past... yet your recent set of posts seems to no longer take that into consideration.
If you're pointing out that that specific post of mine didn't repeat the data that has already been established, then you're correct. If you don't think that closing schools reduced the spread of infection, then we can definitely post more data about the importance of social distancing and closing down areas where large groups congregate, but I think this is something you already know, so I don't know why you're deflecting with this line of reasoning. Seems like you're trying to score a weird semantics point against me, right as I'm trying to help you smooth things over in the thread. You and I have disagreed on plenty of points in this thread, but that doesn't mean I enjoy watching conversations between you and other people constantly devolve into mudslinging.
Oof. Yes keeping schools closed helps reduced the spread. That's an obvious truth, you don't need to provide data on that. Just like keeping schools closed harmed the education and upbringing of children is an obvious truth.
They are competing interests/problems with keeping schools open vs closed.
The problem is that you seem to think that just showing that closing schools helps reduce the spread (obvious truth) is proof-pudding that your stance that schools should have been closed is the correct one but me showing that children's educations being harmed from closed schools (obvious truth) is not proof-pudding that schools should have opened sooner or remained open.
Essentially you are saying that schools being closed is the correct and necessary evil and I have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute this by showing that children's education was harmed more than the benefit in spread reduction.
But if I say the opposite - that schools should have opened sooner and worsening the spread is the necessary evil because the harm to students is too great otherwise and you have to provide the cost-benefit analysis to refute that, then I'm the heretic.
At the end of the day we're both guessing and neither of us are providing a cost-benefit analysis. According to Magic Powers source even the people in charge to make these decisions weren't really doing a cost-benefit analysis to make their decisions.
The difference is I'm not the one lecturing you to remain neutral while not remaining neutral myself.
A) Schools being closed reduces the spread B) Schools being closed harms children's education
DPB: A > B BJ: No, B > A because X
DPB: X does not prove B > A so next time remain neutral unless you have proper data BJ: But you didn't provide anything to support A > B other than saying that A is true.
Sorry, that "closing schools" is reducing the spread is NOT an obvious truth. For the flu, the spread has been equal or even worse when closing schools, as the youngsters will meet anyway, and in more fluctuating groups, less regulated. You need to close schools AND make sure they don't have any social life elsewhere either, which is an absolutely awful thing to force upon youngsters, and it is much worse for the ones who struggle already.
Then, you need to remember that the goal is really to reduce deaths and hospitalisations, not only a raw number number of cases. Proving that closing schools achieved this goal is not easy, but if you have some studies, bring them on!
This was an experiment, not based on science. Remember that there are powerful incentives to justify these decisions, so we might have to wait a bit to get solid unbiased proof. But, I know Norway and Denmark opened their schools late spring 2020, and still had some of the best covid numbers in the world.
Yeah but we did destroy their social lives too. There weren’t many play dates happening during the pandemic. That’s why my post introducing the topic was two-fold. Not just that student test scores are way down but also pediatric depression, anxiety, and suicidality is way up.
But yes I agree with you that it was an experiment not based on science. Magic Powers source says as much well - the decision to close schools was often not done on a rigorous cost-benefit analysis but more on a gut feel of the people making these decisions.
Also just want to remind everyone that in Spring and Summer of 2020 I was posting in real time in this thread about how hospitals across the country were becoming ghost towns. All elective surgeries were being cancelled. People were avoiding the Emergency Room like it was the plague. Hospitals were closing down entire wings and laying off workers because there were no patients. There was definitely plenty of room to ease some restrictions and keeping schools open should have been the obvious choice.
Are you trying to play captain hindsight by using data from after the fact to make yourself seem like the smart one for making perfect decisions? You do realize that if decisions changed from when they were made it would have meant that different outcomes would have happened? Hospitals were at their breaking point for supplies and giving them breathing room so people can recover from the hell march and resupply to prepare for the next wave wasn't something that occurred to you being a possibility at all these past two years?
BlackJack's description of the cost benefit analysis of school closure is at least exactly the one communicated to us in Sweden by our authorities during the epidemic, i.e.: we don't believe children are spreading the disease to an extent that would justify closing schools; it is not particularly dangerous for the children themselves to get the disease; it could have potentially very harming consequences to stop young children from going to school. All of this has turned out to be true as far as I can tell. I remember thinking at the time that the calls for closing schools was a dangerous mixture of virtue signalling and hysteria, and it seems to have been an accurate impression.
This seems to have been true for Sweden.
What was true for Sweden wasn't necessarily true for Norway, or Belgium, or the US, or China.
EPT
.
