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Originally Posted by PeteMoss
There should be a review of actions taken during covid and review what worked/what didn't - and the cost/benefit of these actions.
A lot of people take 'their' side on an issue like closing schools and don't consider both sides. The pro-closing school people say it saved lives and it did - but how many lives. The anti-closing school people say it hurt kids and it did - but how much did it cost kids. Once you have at least a reasonable estimate for both sides - you can use that to decide how to react if this happens again. But you need to have both the costs and benefits identified to make that decision.
You'd also hope the government will permanently restrict our rights people if we allow mask mandates or close business people would reassess their priors so we don't have to have that argument again - but that's wishful thinking.
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While there is no question that a thorough review should be done with intention of identifying actions that are taken now to prevent as many preventable issues as possible, I don’t know if a review could capture what you’re asking it to capture.
How many lives did school closures save? Well, schools were either closed or they weren’t. It was a variable without a control to test it against. There were also countless other changing variables at any given time.
More recent studies have shown that kids were the most common cause of spread in a household despite most infections of children being asymptomatic (which led to symptomatic infections in adults) and that schools were one of if not the most significant sources of exposure.
Knowing that allows us to make a determination on whether schools should be closed based on other variables at play. How deadly is the virus? How easily is it spread? That alone can tell us whether closing schools is necessary. We don’t close schools for the flu, but if something deadlier and just as transmissible as COVID comes up? Absolutely schools need to be one of the first things to close.