Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Costly and Ineffective School Closures
The New York Times published a story yesterday titled “What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later.” The summary paragraph, toward the top, seems quite accurate to me:
A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.
The story has significant information about the extent of the learning loss for children, which was worse for poor and minority kids.
This is not new information. My general recollection is that we’ve known this for a couple of years. I wonder why the NY Times is doing an article on this issue at the present time.
My principal purpose in this post is not to report the general facts, but rather to comment upon the explanation put forth by the authors of the NYT article, essentially to exonerate those who made such a bad decision.
That was largely unknown in the spring of 2020, when schools first shut down. But several experts said that had changed by the fall of 2020, when there were initial signs that children were less likely to become seriously ill, and growing evidence from Europe and parts of the United States that opening schools, with safety measures, did not lead to significantly more transmission.
I don’t think that this is true. I think that it is contradicted by the very links appearing in the article, which are reproduced above.
If you follow the link for “that had changed,” you will find a NYT article dated June 12, 2020 on the issue. If you follow the link for “initial signs,” you will find a scientific paper at PubMed dated August 2020, but indicating “Epub 2020 Jun 16.”
I think that this is an example of how the NY Times subtly misleads us.
June 2020 is not “the fall of 2020.” June 12, and June 16, are actually in the spring, technically. For school purposes, I could understand calling it “summer.” But it ain’t “fall.”
The miniscule number of Covid deaths and hospitalizations for children was apparent well before June 2020. I did a post on April 2, 2020, here at Ricochet, showing this graphically, based on data from New York City. That was less than a month after the first shutdowns.
I guess that I feel a bit like Jeremiah.
Anyway, back to the question raised by the NY Times article published yesterday. Why now?
This month is the four-year anniversary of the shutdowns. It might be as simple as that.
Today — March 19, 2024 — is also the precise four-year anniversary of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order, requiring all non-essential businesses to close.
Coincidence?
Perhaps. Keep your eyes open, though. It seems possible to me that this NY Times article is being issued as political cover for Newsom. You can guess why the NYT might want to provide political support for him at the present time.
Published in General
Watch for continued signs of aging and “senior moments” of Donald Trump as a shiny, new, relatively young candidate is being groomed by the dems.
I think the Dems are interested in rewriting history (“we never said ‘safe and effective’ meant ‘safe’ and ‘effective'”) and are always looking for more money/power. Expect Dems to push budget deficits to 10% of GDP, which is crazy.
Be picky on which school your kid attends.
I think all public schools are wrecked. Certainly any that accept any federal or state taxes are. So – fund a way to homeschool or co-op school your kids or help do the same for grandkids.
Or even if they manage to stick with FJB – if he doesn’t just fall over dead sometime in the next few months – they’re still just trying to blame Trump for everything that happened.
It was pretty obvious from the beginning that children were at little risk from COVID – this information was available from the quarantined cruise ship, the Italy data and Sweden (in which children 15 and under stayed in school with no social distancing). Anyone, including medical people, who questioned the school closures, social distancing rules and the like were censored and harassed.
If the school closures only lasted a month or two before public health officials re-opened them, this decision could be written off as panicked response and an attempt to be extremely cautious about a new and potentially dangerous virus and excused as such. Instead, public health officials (and the teacher unions) kept up these closures years after their ineffectiveness and damage should have been well known to any rational person who was paying attention. I still don’t fully understand why this knowing evil action was taken by these people; but, I hope they (Fauci, public health officials, teacher union leaders) rot in hell for it.
It’s not just the union leaders. Many actual teachers refused to go back to the classroom.
The safest school is the one at home.
You’ll have to excuse the CDC. It only has 15,000 employees. With such a small population to choose from, there is no way that they could find people smart enough or experienced enough to Center their thoughts on a Disease long enough to Control the best response to it. How could anybody ask so much from the CDC in the middle of a pandemic?
Besides, who wouldn’t trade two years out of the lives of a hundred robust ten-year-olds to extend the life of one frail 85-year-old by a few more months?
Turns out that “flattening the curve” was about the education attainment curve of a generation of kids.
We have ton of YouTube of Randi Weingarten, corporate media and other “Nancy’s” brow beating politicians and bureaucrats to keep schools closed.
The American Academy of Pediatrics explicitly stated in June 2020 that (a) kids are at less risk from COVID-19 than some previous flu viruses (b) they are lousy transmitters and (c) schools need to be open because closing would be harmful. They were immediately politically pounded into multiple revisions about adding precautions etc. but they never reversed their initial position. The Trump Administration made the ham-handed gesture of threatening to cut off funds to districts that did not re-open and that how-dare-yous were deafening and the Washington Post tried very hard to pretend that the AAP’s opposition to cutting funding meant that they did not really oppose school closings
All of the bullsh*t failed precautions such as putting masks on 5-year olds, ending all sports and school plays, mandating vaccinations and the sheer lunacy of believing that lockdowns or closures ever had any effect on transmission were all empirically groundless. And as the evidence proving the futility of that stuff became irrefutable, the perps doubled down.
Anyone who supported closing schools by the winter of 2020 was not following science but delighting in compulsion theater and pseudoscience kabuki. People died and kids were hurt. I am not a Democrat so I would not use lawfare to prosecute such persons for treason, monetary damages and/or manslaughter but I would bar such people forever from policy positions. I would also insist that journalists who served up that nonsense must for two years carry a banner above all articles they write to remind readers of how badly they got it wrong on COVID.
Good idea, maybe ALL “journalists” should have Gell-Mann Amnesia warnings on all of their “product” based on their past inaccuracy.
Well Bill Gates has already apologized, as he can afford to.
He pointed to the rather ridiculous contention that “we just didn’t have the data about school-aged children – we just didn’t know.” This was said with a rather sorrowful expression, an expression I didn’t know that he had inside his bag of tricks. (So if you just didn’t know, why the hell did you pass yourself off as a health expert, douche bag?)
He has full diplomatic immunity granted to him by the Swiss government for his involvement with The WHO.
The guy could probably stab Dr Peter McCullough in broad daylight and there is most likely nothing that we could do to him.
Besides, even without immunity, he invested 55 million bucks into the mRNA ventures during the summer of 2020, and then reaped 500 million dollars in profit. So unlike some petty criminal, he could afford the best “dream team” of lawyers.
That was true in mid-April 2020. Not in June. The first seasonality wave rose in March and fell in late April in the NE US and Western Europe and the numbers were there by May. The key question is not just if but when people finally got it right.
The problem was not the science but the ideological catnip of command and control and the gross dishonesty of defending the regime. Thank God for Sweden and Florida.
Long before there was an American Academy of Pediatrics (and thank God that they came about) there were acute observations about how medicine and health protocols were often pointless. Even back in Shakespeare’s time.
But as long as the “right group” of people is in charge of dispensing the advice or in charge of developing and administering the treatments, then nothing to hear, see or think about.
We can blame the journalists in the media all we care to, but what would have changed everything about COV protocols right off the bat is if the majority of doctors in the USA had been taught critical thinking while in med school.
But so few of them have been taught that. And since 2015, at least in Calif, drs in ER’s are no longer allowed to diagnose unless testing proves the condition is such and such. When a patient is admitted to a hospital in Calif, their own primary care physician is left out of the loop – only the hospital team of doctors oversees the patient. Most doctors will refuse a patient the simple request for B12 shots, using the excuse that this only results in “expensive urine.” If the patient points to their own experiences of health benefits from B12, those are pooh poohed.
Prior to COV, few doctors cared that we wait six weeks to get an appointment, and then are offered ten mins of our height being measured, our weight determined and BP taken. These protocols are followed and then an eight minute sales pitch for statins, psych meds or whatever the new drug flavor of the month happens to be. Often the patient is not even asked why they needed the appointment.
So if doctors accepted this nonsense as “health care” it is not surprising that none of them complained about the idiocy of schools closing down or the public having to be six feet apart.
Yes journalists may be at fault. But are they the ones with a science-based background and are they the the ones who took the oath of “First do no harm”?
I agree that it may have been true in April 2020 and not true but apparent in June 2020.
But Bill Gates apology did not come about until most recently. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear.
No it was clear. I was just setting the parameters for judging such “apologies.”
What happened to one opinion writer at NYT’s in the wake of the Times insisting that its writers only present the CDC/Fauci/Gates version of reality:
Mid Summer 2020, Bari weiss, opinion writer, sends in her resignation to The Times.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9669525/Bari-Weiss-says-bullied-New-York-Times-editors-live-fear-internet-mob.html
Bullet Points of the Above “Mail” article:
Bari Weiss says NY Times editors live in ‘total’ fear of an internet mob’ in first episode of the anti-cancel culture podcast she launched after quitting the paper
Bari Weiss quit The New York Times last year after growing tired of its liberal bias
She launched her podcast Honestly on Wednesday – it will look at cancel culture and the dangerous effect it is having on America
Weiss, during an interval in the podcast, spoke briefly about leaving the Times
She said ‘tragically, editors live in total fear of an internet mob’
She also said publishers ‘know what’s right but can’t find the courage to do it’
Weiss said their leadership ‘ferments polarization, rage and distrust’ and made it ‘impossible to tell the truth as a journalist’
Five months later, Weiss is on Bill Maher’s show:
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/bari-weiss-tells-bill-maher-pandemic-policy-will-be-remembered-as-a-catastrophic-moral-crime/
Some time after leaving The NY Times, Weiss went on Bill Maher to state:
Bari Weiss Tells Bill Maher Pandemic Policy Will Be Remembered as a ‘Catastrophic Moral Crime’
####
We’re in broad agreement, but I don’t agree that we didn’t know in mid-April 2020. You can follow the link in the OP to my post of April 2, 2020. The essential invulnerability of the kids was apparent at that time.
Here’s one of the graphs from my post, showing the raw counts of reported deaths in NYC:
There are a couple of other graphs in the post showing that the rates of both death and hospitalization followed the same general pattern, except that after adjusting for population, the death rate in the 65-75 group is quite a bit higher than the death rate in the 45-64 group.
Personally, I don’t think that there was any excuse for closing the schools beyond the beginning of April 2020. I do agree that there was even less excuse after June 2020.
By March 2020, Jay Bhattacharya had warned about the adverse effects of school closures on children and the very, very low rate of covid deaths, among children, before Newsom ordered lockdowns. His seroprevalence study in Santa Clara in March/April 2020 clearly demonstrated the very high infectivity of the virus and the very low death rate (more than an order of magnitude below the death rate cited by the “experts”), most particularly among children. He had the data to back up his recommendations that early. He was screaming bloody murder (Batacharya is so well spoken that this is a relative term, but for Jay Batacharya, he was screaming bloody murder) the moment lockdowns for schools were ordered in California.
The physical reason that children were little affected (and that women were less affected than men) was also known by March 2020, eg, that activated androgen receptors in the cell cytoplasm (very low in prepubertal children) are involved in the process of the virus breaching the cell wall and enter the cell after the spike protein attaches to the ACE2 receptor.
Of course Bhattacharya was being shadow banned by that time, so one would expect the Times to have the timing wrong. The Times also didn’t know the science. Never did, never will. They are the proverbial “science deniers.” Even though they accuse you of that egregious sin.
It was also abundantly clear by March 2020 that the virus was a lab creation. That is still being treated as something of an uncertainty today.
We are still being gas lighted about all of this. As elucidated in this post, the NYT is still perpetrating that gas lighting.
I would encourage every one to read the article by Martin Kuldorf in City Journal, and the podcast with him, to get even more of an idea of the vast gaslighting that occurred.
The entire Medical and Scientific and public health establishment had Bhattacharya’s data, and did exactly the opposite of what the data indicated had to be done. It was abundantly clear by March 2020 that the lockdowns and school closures were the opposite of what needed to be done.
So much for “following the science” or “flattening the curve.” That was gaslighting from the get go. Bhattacharya’s data demonstrated that. He had shown that the curve could not be flattened. Only delayed, to rise later if initially suppressed. Our scientific establishment was lying to us with malice aforethought from the beginning. The damage was intentional. Our elites are hostile to the human population of the planet. Repeat: The damage inflicted was done intentionally, against the data, most likely simply to see if it could be perpetrated. Sort of like Dr. Mengele induced pain in his experimental subjects until they died to see how much pain humans can endure and how they responded to it. The perpetrators in the case of COVID, like Mengele, did not expect to ever be held accountable for their actions. And, by continued gaslighting, are largely avoiding accountability
Anyone who tells you otherwise is gaslighting you.
I would advise that everyone keep all of this in mind when listening to any expert pronouncements from our “elites.”