Reply to COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In retrospect, it was appropriate to close schools in March, 2020. Covid was new. People were dying in Wuhan. The hospital system in Italy became totally overwhelmed. Then New York City. And so on and so forth. It was a new virus. No one knew anything. People were dying. The health care system didn't have the capacity or the knowledge to deal with this. Shutting things down at that moment in time was the right call.

Six months later when we knew a lot more - and particularly after we had effective vaccines - it was a disaster to close schools for another year. The learning loss was enormous. And so too was the basic socialization of children. Formative brains do not do well in isolation. Kids need school for lots of reasons. Anyone who has spent any time in public schools lately can attest that this is often a pretty damaged group of kids.

It was a mistake to keep schools closed. Blame the teachers union. Blame the political polarization at that time. If you recall, keeping schools closed made you a good liberal. Wanting them open made you a heartless MAGA. It was an ugly time and we made a mistake shutting things down for kids.  [/quote]

+1. Over a million Americans have died of COVID.  A million.  It was a real pandemic. And maybe you weren’t scared in March 2020.  But, I had a kid in a very overcrowded public HS and I was. I remember my daughter sewing over 200 cloth masks during initial school closures  for our neighbors on a  “no charge, but donate what you can to a food bank” basis.  At least half were  child sized, because there was no PPE.  We didn’t know how it was spread, we didn’t know the long term health consequences (and we still don’t)  and that surface transmission was not a big problem. We didn’t know how much safer we were outdoors.  We didn’t know how to effectively treat COVID. And, if you weren’t POTUS or a VIP, you weren’t getting the very fancy experimental drugs.  There were asymptomatic carriers. And we couldn’t test. Yes, it was bad in spring 2020.

I sent my oldest to a SLAC for his freshman year for in person classes and science labs in fall 2020. That was a very hard decision— not to gap year.  And I was terrified. Insult away, but I locked my self in the bathroom and just sobbed several times.  He signed a healthcare POA and living will before leaving. We didn’t know what would happen on college campuses until those first couple of months were past.   But, he was ready to leave home and a year in the basement would have also harmed him, just in a different way. Best of 2 bad choices. It ended up being fine. But, it could have gone badly.  It’s easy to forget what we didn’t have in those first months— information, enough healthcare providers, PPE, tests, vaccines.

Yes.  K-12 schools were way too slow to reopen in this area. And yes, I was furious for my HS aged kid that fall and winter.  And yes, we were lucky that I had time and resources and some creative thinking to throw at helping her cope.  As we got new information, we didn’t react fast enough. And we let teachers act like essential workers when it was time for things like vaccine priority. But then say they weren’t really essential when it came time to return to school. Teachers are essential. We need to respect them, pay them and treat them as such. And also expect them to behave like other essential workers.

And it was kids that paid a large part of the price.  But, that said,  you can’t act like 2023 (or even 2021), with vaccines and tests and good masks if needed, and a more mild variant and mostly information and March 2020 are the same set of circumstances. And you can’t act like disease numbers in a Nordic country where people are homogenous and socialize a lot more outdoors and are in overall better health directly translate to the US.

Plus it’s easy to say, let grandma die to reopen schools. Until it’s your parent who dies. [/quote]

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