One by one, the lockdown myths are crumbling

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The lockdowns made sense for about two months, and then they didn't. Covid was bad and unknown in March 2020, but by the end of May, it was clear that it was going to be like a very bad flu year, and not a plague. Those under 60 in reasonably good health had little to fear. Kids got a cold. At that point, a rational risk assessment would have been to reopen schools and businesses, and tell those at risk to stay somewhat isolated (voluntarily, which they were doing anyway) until the vaccine's arrival. However, irrationality had taken over. This was a combination of hysteria, politics, political correctness, virtue signaling, and poor ability to parse statistics. "Trust the science" became the ultimate post-modern oxymoron. Behind it all was Trump; not so much his actions, but the anti-Trump syndrome that still infects about half the country (he is bad, therefore I must be against anything he is for.) Because he was more liberal on reopening, it became virtuous to shut down. I firmly believe that if he had been rabidly pro-shutdown, the reaction would have been to do anything to reopen. The costs were stunning; the lockdowns resulted in a year-over-year 30% contraction in GDP without stimulus. The stimulus added $2T to our debt, which now costs us around $175M per day to finance. Monetary stimulus, in the form of 0% interest rates and bond buying, contributed to inflation. The damage to kids was staggering. Anyone denying the learning loss and psychological damage--particularly for girls--doesn't have or isn't around children. We made a bad mistake by not making rational decisions by the summer of 2020.

+100. although I think boys were hurt academically!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OMG--let it rest. People made the best decisions they could with the information they had.

Exactly.
Were perfect decisions made? of course not! Is it worth doing some after action/lessons learned analysis to improve actions for next time? Of course!
But this "gotcha" shit about myths crumbling is so offensive and stupid to people around the world who literally worked day and night doing their best to save lives.

+1

Fcking whiners.

why are we the whiners, and not the ones who insisted that 2 yr olds wear masks to make themselves feel better?

Nothing will ever top the whiners who screamed at their neighbors to wear a mask while walking outside, on the other side of the street. Now those same whiners are here crying "just forget about it, it's over!"

This didn’t happen troll.

Wow, you have amnesia already? How about the neighbors who called the cops on kids playing in the park? That didn't happen either, right? You are a fool. We remember. You don't want anyone to talk about this because you'd rather we all just forget.

Where on earth do you live?!

Not PP, but Arlington. Woodstock Park had police tape around the playground, swings tied up around the horizontal pole, and the tops of the basketball hoops were covered with wood so people couldn’t shoot hoops. The Arlington County Board at work, folks.

That’s not a school playground, idiot.

The vast majority of playgrounds in Arlington were open. Stop spreading misinformation.

they were closed in DC

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The lockdowns made sense for about two months, and then they didn't. Covid was bad and unknown in March 2020, but by the end of May, it was clear that it was going to be like a very bad flu year, and not a plague. Those under 60 in reasonably good health had little to fear. Kids got a cold. At that point, a rational risk assessment would have been to reopen schools and businesses, and tell those at risk to stay somewhat isolated (voluntarily, which they were doing anyway) until the vaccine's arrival. However, irrationality had taken over. This was a combination of hysteria, politics, political correctness, virtue signaling, and poor ability to parse statistics. "Trust the science" became the ultimate post-modern oxymoron. Behind it all was Trump; not so much his actions, but the anti-Trump syndrome that still infects about half the country (he is bad, therefore I must be against anything he is for.) Because he was more liberal on reopening, it became virtuous to shut down. I firmly believe that if he had been rabidly pro-shutdown, the reaction would have been to do anything to reopen. The costs were stunning; the lockdowns resulted in a year-over-year 30% contraction in GDP without stimulus. The stimulus added $2T to our debt, which now costs us around $175M per day to finance. Monetary stimulus, in the form of 0% interest rates and bond buying, contributed to inflation. The damage to kids was staggering. Anyone denying the learning loss and psychological damage--particularly for girls--doesn't have or isn't around children. We made a bad mistake by not making rational decisions by the summer of 2020.

No, that’s not what was clear in May 2020.

Yes it was. It was always known.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OMG--let it rest. People made the best decisions they could with the information they had.

Exactly.
Were perfect decisions made? of course not! Is it worth doing some after action/lessons learned analysis to improve actions for next time? Of course!
But this "gotcha" shit about myths crumbling is so offensive and stupid to people around the world who literally worked day and night doing their best to save lives.

+1

Fcking whiners.

why are we the whiners, and not the ones who insisted that 2 yr olds wear masks to make themselves feel better?

Nothing will ever top the whiners who screamed at their neighbors to wear a mask while walking outside, on the other side of the street. Now those same whiners are here crying "just forget about it, it's over!"

This didn’t happen troll.

Wow, you have amnesia already? How about the neighbors who called the cops on kids playing in the park? That didn't happen either, right? You are a fool. We remember. You don't want anyone to talk about this because you'd rather we all just forget.

Where on earth do you live?!

Not PP, but Arlington. Woodstock Park had police tape around the playground, swings tied up around the horizontal pole, and the tops of the basketball hoops were covered with wood so people couldn’t shoot hoops. The Arlington County Board at work, folks.

Yeah that never made a lick of sense to me. Taping off outdoor areas like playgrounds and basketball hoops, but allowing indoor places like Walmart and Target to be packed shoulder to shoulder.

I read something that if the company was in the stock market, chances are that company did not close.

Don't forget, they shut down churches but kept liquor stores open too!

And gyms closed too. As if the healthy people who regularly work out were going to be the ones dropping like flies. There was no rhyme or reason to what was closed and what was open.

And buying gym equipment was nearly impossible because everything was sold out. They stayed closed until late fall 2020 which again didn’t make much sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The lockdowns made sense for about two months, and then they didn't. Covid was bad and unknown in March 2020, but by the end of May, it was clear that it was going to be like a very bad flu year, and not a plague. Those under 60 in reasonably good health had little to fear. Kids got a cold. At that point, a rational risk assessment would have been to reopen schools and businesses, and tell those at risk to stay somewhat isolated (voluntarily, which they were doing anyway) until the vaccine's arrival. However, irrationality had taken over. This was a combination of hysteria, politics, political correctness, virtue signaling, and poor ability to parse statistics. "Trust the science" became the ultimate post-modern oxymoron. Behind it all was Trump; not so much his actions, but the anti-Trump syndrome that still infects about half the country (he is bad, therefore I must be against anything he is for.) Because he was more liberal on reopening, it became virtuous to shut down. I firmly believe that if he had been rabidly pro-shutdown, the reaction would have been to do anything to reopen. The costs were stunning; the lockdowns resulted in a year-over-year 30% contraction in GDP without stimulus. The stimulus added $2T to our debt, which now costs us around $175M per day to finance. Monetary stimulus, in the form of 0% interest rates and bond buying, contributed to inflation. The damage to kids was staggering. Anyone denying the learning loss and psychological damage--particularly for girls--doesn't have or isn't around children. We made a bad mistake by not making rational decisions by the summer of 2020.

No, that’s not what was clear in May 2020.

We actually knew in early March of 2020 when Italian data started rolling in: https://www.businessinsider.com/italy-coronavirus-old-population-cases-death-rate-2020-3
"According to Italy's national health institute, the average age of those who have died was 81, and many of the deceased had preexisting health conditions. Only one in five coronavirus patients is between 19 and 50 years old, making the older population significantly more impacted by the virus in Italy. "

Many people choose to ignore these data and give into the media driven panic for the next 4+ years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Shutting schools down for an extended period was definitely harmful especially for younger kids for whom remote learning was a joke. In many states it was the teachers unions who did a real disservice. An early on shut down was understandable given the level of fear but soon it became know that the risk to children was much lower than adults. Yes, the teachers were adults but masks etc proved to be effective.

school was a super spreader site. these policies was never about protecting children from getting the disease and the notion that it was is some kind of weird revisionist history.

Also, the children are fine.

Test scores and juvenile crime rates suggest that the children are not fine.

Yeah but if those are the metrics you go by, the children never have been fine.

Covid made those numbers much worse. Come on.

+1, it is so weird to me to hear progressives, including educators, refuse to acknowledge the link between school shut downs and the issues we are now seeing with learning loss, juvenile crime, and behavioral issues in school. Of course school shutdowns didn't create these problems, but especially in places (like DC) where shutdowns lasted for over a year, it's obvious they had a significant negative impact.

It's weird to me because as a progressive, I have long viewed public education as an essential service provided by government. When people argue that shutdowns had no impact, I get confused because how can removing an essential government service have no impact? This is like saying you really value Medicare as a government program but also if they just denied all claims for a year, it would have no impact on the well being of elderly people in this country. What?

And don't tell me "there was school, just the buildings were closed." That's only true for kids who had the kind of supports at home to make remote learning possible. Meaning it's not true for poor kids, kids with single parents, kids with certain learning disorders and special needs, homeless kids, etc. You know, the kids that usually progressives work hard to help and protect.

I'm not saying schools should never have shut down for any length of time. I think closing them was the obvious choice initially and there was an argument for keeping them closed for a certain length of time (not as long as they were closed in DC). But that's different from acknowledging that the shutdowns had a negative impact on kids. At a minimum it should be possible to say "I think shut downs were necessary to save lives but now we need to do everything in our power to address the negative impacts." Instead a lot of progressives will argue there simply were no negative impacts. It's baffling. It makes me feel like Alice at the Madhatter's Tea Party.

These things were happening before Covid. You just choose to ignore then. School was not closed. It was virtual.

You are delusional. Absolutely delusional. It must be because you need to be delusional in order to live with yourself.

What is wrong with you? Were you just blind to what was going on due to your charmed life?

I’m not the one pretending that millions of kids across the US, overwhelmingly the most vulnerable already, weren’t permanently harmed by useless school closures. What is wrong with you and your need to deny reality? Why do you despise the most vulnerable kids in the country?

Kids were not harmed. Parents attitudes were the problem and parents who could not handle or be responsible for their kids. Stop throwing vulnerable kids under the bus when they did fine. It was people like you who struggled as you never really spent much real time with your kids and now you were forced to and forced to see what was really going on.

Okay you are just trolling at this point. Or completely and totally crazy. Maybe both. But thanks for showing everyone how profoundly delusional and literally insane you are.

You need some serious therapy. Then maybe you can face facts, including the many, many piles of studies showing how vulnerable children were permanently harmed by the school closures. But really, you need an excellent therapist. Best of luck to you in your very-needed journey to a better mental place.

You are the one who needs therapy and is trolling. You are obsessed with the schools going virtual and using others as talking points when you are the one who struggled with it all. Kids aren't struggling because of covid. Kids are struggling due to their genetics/mental health, parenting, and the structure of schools today. How many "needed children have you worked with or helped'? I doubt any. I have worked with many.

I don't know how you can say this with a straight face. I work with kids, kids from Title I schools who have many obstacles in their way from the start and who rely on the supports provided by schools and before/after school programs to help them access intensive services they need to overcome their obstacles whether learning disability, mental health issues, etc. The worst off kids are doing much worse than they would have been if they'd not missed 1.5 years of in person instruction and access to supports.

Also some kids died in abusive situations during covid because nobody could access them to see the signs and makes the reports to CPS. Those kids are definitely not okay.

I don't see how we can have an honest conversation about the pandemic's impact on children without starting from a shared acknowledgment that the school closures impacted all kids negatively, with that negativity being on a spectrum depending on the supports they had at home.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OMG--let it rest. People made the best decisions they could with the information they had.

Exactly.
Were perfect decisions made? of course not! Is it worth doing some after action/lessons learned analysis to improve actions for next time? Of course!
But this "gotcha" shit about myths crumbling is so offensive and stupid to people around the world who literally worked day and night doing their best to save lives.

+1

Fcking whiners.

why are we the whiners, and not the ones who insisted that 2 yr olds wear masks to make themselves feel better?

Nothing will ever top the whiners who screamed at their neighbors to wear a mask while walking outside, on the other side of the street. Now those same whiners are here crying "just forget about it, it's over!"

This didn’t happen troll.

Wow, you have amnesia already? How about the neighbors who called the cops on kids playing in the park? That didn't happen either, right? You are a fool. We remember. You don't want anyone to talk about this because you'd rather we all just forget.

Where on earth do you live?!

Not PP, but Arlington. Woodstock Park had police tape around the playground, swings tied up around the horizontal pole, and the tops of the basketball hoops were covered with wood so people couldn’t shoot hoops. The Arlington County Board at work, folks.

That’s not a school playground, idiot.

The vast majority of playgrounds in Arlington were open. Stop spreading misinformation.

they were closed in DC

They were not. My kids went all the time to school playgrounds and parks (Lafayette and others). My entire neighborhood also spent a great deal of time hiking in RCP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:i think lockdown measures worked. who knows what would've happened if we didn't lockdown? why this sh*t again OP? got nothing to do?

Um, the article I linked was published within the last day. 13 hours ago.

You didn’t read it, did you.

dp. i read it. columnist erected a straw man.

Lockdowns were never about preventing COVID or eliminating it. The stated purpose was to slow down its spread. To that end, they were highly effective.

I don’t understand why this concept is so hard for people to grasp. As a hospital nurse who was working when the SHTF, it’s surreal how people downplay COVID. It was like nothing else we had seen—so many people dying left and right. So many people sick. It’s like having lived in a different reality than so many people
like the PP.

what you need to understand is that most of the covid “mitigations” were not based on “the science” and in fact had a lot of costs. I can simultaneously agree that covid was serious pre-vaccine and that a lot of the prevention measures were unnecessary and harmful. and of course many other places didn’t do them.

It was an emerging virus. There wasn’t much science!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Shutting schools down for an extended period was definitely harmful especially for younger kids for whom remote learning was a joke. In many states it was the teachers unions who did a real disservice. An early on shut down was understandable given the level of fear but soon it became know that the risk to children was much lower than adults. Yes, the teachers were adults but masks etc proved to be effective.

school was a super spreader site. these policies was never about protecting children from getting the disease and the notion that it was is some kind of weird revisionist history.

Also, the children are fine.

Test scores and juvenile crime rates suggest that the children are not fine.

Yeah but if those are the metrics you go by, the children never have been fine.

Covid made those numbers much worse. Come on.

+1, it is so weird to me to hear progressives, including educators, refuse to acknowledge the link between school shut downs and the issues we are now seeing with learning loss, juvenile crime, and behavioral issues in school. Of course school shutdowns didn't create these problems, but especially in places (like DC) where shutdowns lasted for over a year, it's obvious they had a significant negative impact.

It's weird to me because as a progressive, I have long viewed public education as an essential service provided by government. When people argue that shutdowns had no impact, I get confused because how can removing an essential government service have no impact? This is like saying you really value Medicare as a government program but also if they just denied all claims for a year, it would have no impact on the well being of elderly people in this country. What?

And don't tell me "there was school, just the buildings were closed." That's only true for kids who had the kind of supports at home to make remote learning possible. Meaning it's not true for poor kids, kids with single parents, kids with certain learning disorders and special needs, homeless kids, etc. You know, the kids that usually progressives work hard to help and protect.

I'm not saying schools should never have shut down for any length of time. I think closing them was the obvious choice initially and there was an argument for keeping them closed for a certain length of time (not as long as they were closed in DC). But that's different from acknowledging that the shutdowns had a negative impact on kids. At a minimum it should be possible to say "I think shut downs were necessary to save lives but now we need to do everything in our power to address the negative impacts." Instead a lot of progressives will argue there simply were no negative impacts. It's baffling. It makes me feel like Alice at the Madhatter's Tea Party.

These things were happening before Covid. You just choose to ignore then. School was not closed. It was virtual.

You are delusional. Absolutely delusional. It must be because you need to be delusional in order to live with yourself.

What is wrong with you? Were you just blind to what was going on due to your charmed life?

I’m not the one pretending that millions of kids across the US, overwhelmingly the most vulnerable already, weren’t permanently harmed by useless school closures. What is wrong with you and your need to deny reality? Why do you despise the most vulnerable kids in the country?

Kids were not harmed. Parents attitudes were the problem and parents who could not handle or be responsible for their kids. Stop throwing vulnerable kids under the bus when they did fine. It was people like you who struggled as you never really spent much real time with your kids and now you were forced to and forced to see what was really going on.

Okay you are just trolling at this point. Or completely and totally crazy. Maybe both. But thanks for showing everyone how profoundly delusional and literally insane you are.

You need some serious therapy. Then maybe you can face facts, including the many, many piles of studies showing how vulnerable children were permanently harmed by the school closures. But really, you need an excellent therapist. Best of luck to you in your very-needed journey to a better mental place.

You are the one who needs therapy and is trolling. You are obsessed with the schools going virtual and using others as talking points when you are the one who struggled with it all. Kids aren't struggling because of covid. Kids are struggling due to their genetics/mental health, parenting, and the structure of schools today. How many "needed children have you worked with or helped'? I doubt any. I have worked with many.

I don't know how you can say this with a straight face. I work with kids, kids from Title I schools who have many obstacles in their way from the start and who rely on the supports provided by schools and before/after school programs to help them access intensive services they need to overcome their obstacles whether learning disability, mental health issues, etc. The worst off kids are doing much worse than they would have been if they'd not missed 1.5 years of in person instruction and access to supports.

Also some kids died in abusive situations during covid because nobody could access them to see the signs and makes the reports to CPS. Those kids are definitely not okay.

I don't see how we can have an honest conversation about the pandemic's impact on children without starting from a shared acknowledgment that the school closures impacted all kids negatively, with that negativity being on a spectrum depending on the supports they had at home.

This is why they are trying to shut down the conversation. They can't face the horror of the damage they inflicted on others.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:i think lockdown measures worked. who knows what would've happened if we didn't lockdown? why this sh*t again OP? got nothing to do?

Um, the article I linked was published within the last day. 13 hours ago.

You didn’t read it, did you.

dp. i read it. columnist erected a straw man.

Lockdowns were never about preventing COVID or eliminating it. The stated purpose was to slow down its spread. To that end, they were highly effective.

I don’t understand why this concept is so hard for people to grasp. As a hospital nurse who was working when the SHTF, it’s surreal how people downplay COVID. It was like nothing else we had seen—so many people dying left and right. So many people sick. It’s like having lived in a different reality than so many people
like the PP.

what you need to understand is that most of the covid “mitigations” were not based on “the science” and in fact had a lot of costs. I can simultaneously agree that covid was serious pre-vaccine and that a lot of the prevention measures were unnecessary and harmful. and of course many other places didn’t do them.

It was an emerging virus. There wasn’t much science!

None that you wanted to consider, you were busy screaming about science, while actually ignoring the science.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This article from the UK seems to acknowledge what many of us have come to realize: many of the protocols imposed in response to Covid were simply wrong:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/31/one-by-one-the-lockdown-myths-are-crumbling/

What Covid measure do you feel was the most harmful to society, and are we doomed to repeat it next time?

The most harmful COVID measure was former president Trump’s anti science denialism … his reckless disregard for facts, science and evidence continues to undermine society.

I am no fan of Trump, but he actually initiated Operation Warpspeed to get a viable vaccine out to the general public. Lest we forget.

He signed something other people put together for him - nothing to be proud of whatsoever.

He refused to be publicly vaccinated and refused to push vaccination to his followers, while peddling oodles of anti-science the whole way through the pandemic. And we all know now that he knew from the start how very, very bad the impacts were likly to be.

Trump gets zero positive credit for anything covid pandemic related.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OMG--let it rest. People made the best decisions they could with the information they had.

Exactly.
Were perfect decisions made? of course not! Is it worth doing some after action/lessons learned analysis to improve actions for next time? Of course!
But this "gotcha" shit about myths crumbling is so offensive and stupid to people around the world who literally worked day and night doing their best to save lives.

+1

Fcking whiners.

why are we the whiners, and not the ones who insisted that 2 yr olds wear masks to make themselves feel better?

Nothing will ever top the whiners who screamed at their neighbors to wear a mask while walking outside, on the other side of the street. Now those same whiners are here crying "just forget about it, it's over!"

This didn’t happen troll.

Wow, you have amnesia already? How about the neighbors who called the cops on kids playing in the park? That didn't happen either, right? You are a fool. We remember. You don't want anyone to talk about this because you'd rather we all just forget.

Where on earth do you live?!

Not PP, but Arlington. Woodstock Park had police tape around the playground, swings tied up around the horizontal pole, and the tops of the basketball hoops were covered with wood so people couldn’t shoot hoops. The Arlington County Board at work, folks.

That’s not a school playground, idiot.

The vast majority of playgrounds in Arlington were open. Stop spreading misinformation.

they were closed in DC

They were not. My kids went all the time to school playgrounds and parks (Lafayette and others). My entire neighborhood also spent a great deal of time hiking in RCP.

Well maybe they didn't enforce the closures in rich neighborhoods? I'm a DP and the playground across the street from us was locked until late May 2020. I remember parks without fences would often have a patrol car stationed near them to shoo people away if they tried to go there.

Even after playgrounds opened, people were insane about masking even very young kids there. On outdoor playgrounds! I saw a woman confront a man with two kids who were, at the oldest, 2 years old, asking him why they weren't wearing masks. These kids were in diapers, one of them looked like she'd recently learned to walk. It was INSANE.

DC really messed up the approach to Covid when it came to kids and families. People used fear and coercion to keep children out of schools, at home, away from other kids. There were too few people in positions of power who were argue on behalf of what children needed, and as a result a lot of kids didn't get even basic needs met -- school, physical exercise, socialization. It really bothers me how unwilling people are to acknowledge that was a mistake.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Shutting schools down for an extended period was definitely harmful especially for younger kids for whom remote learning was a joke. In many states it was the teachers unions who did a real disservice. An early on shut down was understandable given the level of fear but soon it became know that the risk to children was much lower than adults. Yes, the teachers were adults but masks etc proved to be effective.

school was a super spreader site. these policies was never about protecting children from getting the disease and the notion that it was is some kind of weird revisionist history.

Also, the children are fine.

Test scores and juvenile crime rates suggest that the children are not fine.

Yeah but if those are the metrics you go by, the children never have been fine.

Covid made those numbers much worse. Come on.

+1, it is so weird to me to hear progressives, including educators, refuse to acknowledge the link between school shut downs and the issues we are now seeing with learning loss, juvenile crime, and behavioral issues in school. Of course school shutdowns didn't create these problems, but especially in places (like DC) where shutdowns lasted for over a year, it's obvious they had a significant negative impact.

It's weird to me because as a progressive, I have long viewed public education as an essential service provided by government. When people argue that shutdowns had no impact, I get confused because how can removing an essential government service have no impact? This is like saying you really value Medicare as a government program but also if they just denied all claims for a year, it would have no impact on the well being of elderly people in this country. What?

And don't tell me "there was school, just the buildings were closed." That's only true for kids who had the kind of supports at home to make remote learning possible. Meaning it's not true for poor kids, kids with single parents, kids with certain learning disorders and special needs, homeless kids, etc. You know, the kids that usually progressives work hard to help and protect.

I'm not saying schools should never have shut down for any length of time. I think closing them was the obvious choice initially and there was an argument for keeping them closed for a certain length of time (not as long as they were closed in DC). But that's different from acknowledging that the shutdowns had a negative impact on kids. At a minimum it should be possible to say "I think shut downs were necessary to save lives but now we need to do everything in our power to address the negative impacts." Instead a lot of progressives will argue there simply were no negative impacts. It's baffling. It makes me feel like Alice at the Madhatter's Tea Party.

These things were happening before Covid. You just choose to ignore then. School was not closed. It was virtual.

You are delusional. Absolutely delusional. It must be because you need to be delusional in order to live with yourself.

What is wrong with you? Were you just blind to what was going on due to your charmed life?

I’m not the one pretending that millions of kids across the US, overwhelmingly the most vulnerable already, weren’t permanently harmed by useless school closures. What is wrong with you and your need to deny reality? Why do you despise the most vulnerable kids in the country?

Kids were not harmed. Parents attitudes were the problem and parents who could not handle or be responsible for their kids. Stop throwing vulnerable kids under the bus when they did fine. It was people like you who struggled as you never really spent much real time with your kids and now you were forced to and forced to see what was really going on.

Okay you are just trolling at this point. Or completely and totally crazy. Maybe both. But thanks for showing everyone how profoundly delusional and literally insane you are.

You need some serious therapy. Then maybe you can face facts, including the many, many piles of studies showing how vulnerable children were permanently harmed by the school closures. But really, you need an excellent therapist. Best of luck to you in your very-needed journey to a better mental place.

You are the one who needs therapy and is trolling. You are obsessed with the schools going virtual and using others as talking points when you are the one who struggled with it all. Kids aren't struggling because of covid. Kids are struggling due to their genetics/mental health, parenting, and the structure of schools today. How many "needed children have you worked with or helped'? I doubt any. I have worked with many.

I don't know how you can say this with a straight face. I work with kids, kids from Title I schools who have many obstacles in their way from the start and who rely on the supports provided by schools and before/after school programs to help them access intensive services they need to overcome their obstacles whether learning disability, mental health issues, etc. The worst off kids are doing much worse than they would have been if they'd not missed 1.5 years of in person instruction and access to supports.

Also some kids died in abusive situations during covid because nobody could access them to see the signs and makes the reports to CPS. Those kids are definitely not okay.

I don't see how we can have an honest conversation about the pandemic's impact on children without starting from a shared acknowledgment that the school closures impacted all kids negatively, with that negativity being on a spectrum depending on the supports they had at home.

Kids also died because their parents (often single moms) had minimum wage or low-pay jobs, and the parent was threatened with firing if they didn’t abandon their kids at home and show up to work on time.

There are laws against leaving kids unattended, of course, but we all know that was suspended during the pandemic.

My own .gov agency doesn’t allow a work-from-home employee to spend their day on childcare, but:

- how many of us spent significant parts of our work hours on child care during the pandemic?

We all did it. Let’s not pretend that never happened.

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Anonymous wrote:Shutting schools down for an extended period was definitely harmful especially for younger kids for whom remote learning was a joke. In many states it was the teachers unions who did a real disservice. An early on shut down was understandable given the level of fear but soon it became know that the risk to children was much lower than adults. Yes, the teachers were adults but masks etc proved to be effective.

school was a super spreader site. these policies was never about protecting children from getting the disease and the notion that it was is some kind of weird revisionist history.

Also, the children are fine.

Test scores and juvenile crime rates suggest that the children are not fine.

Yeah but if those are the metrics you go by, the children never have been fine.

Covid made those numbers much worse. Come on.

+1, it is so weird to me to hear progressives, including educators, refuse to acknowledge the link between school shut downs and the issues we are now seeing with learning loss, juvenile crime, and behavioral issues in school. Of course school shutdowns didn't create these problems, but especially in places (like DC) where shutdowns lasted for over a year, it's obvious they had a significant negative impact.

It's weird to me because as a progressive, I have long viewed public education as an essential service provided by government. When people argue that shutdowns had no impact, I get confused because how can removing an essential government service have no impact? This is like saying you really value Medicare as a government program but also if they just denied all claims for a year, it would have no impact on the well being of elderly people in this country. What?

And don't tell me "there was school, just the buildings were closed." That's only true for kids who had the kind of supports at home to make remote learning possible. Meaning it's not true for poor kids, kids with single parents, kids with certain learning disorders and special needs, homeless kids, etc. You know, the kids that usually progressives work hard to help and protect.

I'm not saying schools should never have shut down for any length of time. I think closing them was the obvious choice initially and there was an argument for keeping them closed for a certain length of time (not as long as they were closed in DC). But that's different from acknowledging that the shutdowns had a negative impact on kids. At a minimum it should be possible to say "I think shut downs were necessary to save lives but now we need to do everything in our power to address the negative impacts." Instead a lot of progressives will argue there simply were no negative impacts. It's baffling. It makes me feel like Alice at the Madhatter's Tea Party.

These things were happening before Covid. You just choose to ignore then. School was not closed. It was virtual.

You are delusional. Absolutely delusional. It must be because you need to be delusional in order to live with yourself.

What is wrong with you? Were you just blind to what was going on due to your charmed life?

I’m not the one pretending that millions of kids across the US, overwhelmingly the most vulnerable already, weren’t permanently harmed by useless school closures. What is wrong with you and your need to deny reality? Why do you despise the most vulnerable kids in the country?

Kids were not harmed. Parents attitudes were the problem and parents who could not handle or be responsible for their kids. Stop throwing vulnerable kids under the bus when they did fine. It was people like you who struggled as you never really spent much real time with your kids and now you were forced to and forced to see what was really going on.

Vulnerable kids did not do fine. They are still struggling.

Also, among the parents who could not "handle" school closures were working parents who could not afford childcare for school age kids, which is an enormous number of families.

We are working parents with two kids. Our kids did fine during the pandemic. We had to make an extra effort to organize things for our kids but that’s life. And let’s face it, pandemic or not, our society doesn’t make being a parent easy. It’s expensive and no social safety net. I don’t understand a lot of the whining on this thread. You chose to have kids and as a parent you need to step up sometimes. No one is going to do it for you.

Rephrased: “I hate poor people, especially poor kids.”

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Anonymous wrote:OMG--let it rest. People made the best decisions they could with the information they had.

Exactly.
Were perfect decisions made? of course not! Is it worth doing some after action/lessons learned analysis to improve actions for next time? Of course!
But this "gotcha" shit about myths crumbling is so offensive and stupid to people around the world who literally worked day and night doing their best to save lives.

+1

Fcking whiners.

why are we the whiners, and not the ones who insisted that 2 yr olds wear masks to make themselves feel better?

Nothing will ever top the whiners who screamed at their neighbors to wear a mask while walking outside, on the other side of the street. Now those same whiners are here crying "just forget about it, it's over!"

This didn’t happen troll.

Wow, you have amnesia already? How about the neighbors who called the cops on kids playing in the park? That didn't happen either, right? You are a fool. We remember. You don't want anyone to talk about this because you'd rather we all just forget.

Where on earth do you live?!

Not PP, but Arlington. Woodstock Park had police tape around the playground, swings tied up around the horizontal pole, and the tops of the basketball hoops were covered with wood so people couldn’t shoot hoops. The Arlington County Board at work, folks.

That’s not a school playground, idiot.

The vast majority of playgrounds in Arlington were open. Stop spreading misinformation.

they were closed in DC

They were not. My kids went all the time to school playgrounds and parks (Lafayette and others). My entire neighborhood also spent a great deal of time hiking in RCP.

the DC “stay at home” order lasted two months…