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I don't, because that isn't what happened. Certainly, we shouldn't have closed down schools; I think it was an extremely irrational thing to do which will prove to have had lasting negative repercussions on a generation of children. But the reason we did so wasn't because of a cynical desire to boost the economy at all costs, but rather because people were panicking about the virus and were desperate that Something Be Done. Many, many people were completely unwilling to consider any course of action except for the maximally safe one, and so we closed down the schools even though I don't think there was ever a significant risk to leaving them open.
I'm not sure when it should have been clear to the authorities that prepubescent children were very low risk, not only for serious illness but also for transmission. By the start of the new school year in autumn 2020, and probably earlier, it was obvious to intelligent onlookers that you could have reopened schools up to age ~14 with negligible additional transmission (and of course high schools should have reopened once the vaccine was available to teachers and pupils who wanted it). But my memory of the public conversation at the time was that people were incapable of grokking that virus spread is based on physiology and that teens are physiological adults, not 'children'. The logic of "15-year-olds can spread the virus (which they could, even if they were not going to get life-threatening symptoms), so 'children' can spread the virus, so we need to lock down 7-year-olds" was irrefutable in both policy-world and normie-world.
The US (though not other countries) did a particularly bizarre thing where many states kept the schools closed long after entertainment venues and suchlike had reopened. Education Realist had some excellent posts on the politics of this - the reason is that it wasn't establishment COVID panicans keeping the schools closed, it was a coalition between the teachers' unions and every parent demographic that didn't trust the government apart from the red tribe COVID minimizers.
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Eh, schools were most likely going to close regardless of what people wanted. Staffing shortages were happening nationwide during COVID. Without enough bus drivers, you can't get kids to school. Without the teachers, they just sit in the auditorium on their phones after being shuffled around from overpacked classrooms (real story I remember reading in like mid 2021). Without the cafeteria workers, they can't make enough lunch. Not enough maintenance workers means things breaking. Etc etc.
Staff shortages were so bad that some school districts were going back to remote learning at least as late as Jan 2022. And even in Mar 2022, multiple states were deploying the national guard to work as substitutes. Some areas were even taking police officers off the beat in order to work as substitutes.
It's easy to say in retrospect "we should have opened the schools" but it wasn't easy at the time. Even the schools and states that were trying to reopen kept having to fall back to remote or fail somehow else.
The things you identify would be a change in US culture. And particular blue state third-worldism. Florida reopened their schools in the fall. I agree closing the schools for the spring semester probably had to happen. Too many older teachers and figuring out how to give some people an out. The staff shortages are just the same issues blue states always have. They fail at providing public goods.
Nobody is saying in “retrospect”. Many states did reopen. Many people said as it was happening that we should open the schools. Or at a minimum some form of hybrid to accommodate some staff with immune issues.
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I’m reminded of when Covid hit Finland in early March 2020 and within a week everything shut down (except workplaces that couldn’t go remote, stores and so on of course).
That had nothing to do with any government decisions. You can’t exactly run eg. a restaurant when 95% of your customer base disappears overnight. Business owners were outright begging for official restrictions because then they could at least apply for some types of benefits.
One industrial equipment manufacturer was in the news for major furloughs right in the beginning. The catch: They did that two weeks before things shut down locally because their international customers had already canceled or delayed so many orders due to general disruption in the far east.
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Also to, beat a dead horse, closing schools is not confining kids to their rooms. At least in the US. It's not enough that people in Australia were under house arrest, we must pretend that was the case everywhere.
That's... not what happened in Australia.
During those lockdowns I remained able to go for walks, buy groceries, and so on. I think our covid response was over-enthusiastic and proved to be stronger than was necessary, but foreigners have a completely distorted picture of what happened here.
Jesus Christ, this is the bar? You know there are people serving actual prison sentences that have that same amount of freedoms, i.e. brief leaves on weekends and access to commissary?
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Australia is federal and used targetted lockdowns and external and internal border controls to (broadly successfully) maintain zero COVID in unaffected areas - my understanding is that @sarker's comments would be permissible exaggeration in the case of Melbourne but false as applied to almost anywhere else in Australia.
@OliveTapenade - where in Australia were you?
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Agreed. What most frustrates me about Covid talk on The Motte is the insistence that there were only ever two situations in the western countries: a full lockdown or the Swedish "let's do nothing"-approach. As if my country (you know, right next door to Sweden) with zero legally mandated "lockdowns" but a bunch of voluntary recommendations and public health response changes didn't exist.
I kept track of restrictions during the Covid era and the only government mandated ones were restrictions to large events, bars, restaurants and gyms. Everything else was voluntary (including bar / restaurant closures when the pandemic started) or just recommendations with no penalties. The officials outright recommended that "going out in the nature is a very good idea now".
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