Fantastic research and returns. Who knew preventing people from falling sick, suffering from more severe effects or even death, could prevent the global economy from collapsing, never mind save the lives of millions. It’s ridiculous that their importance was even questioned to begin with. These days I immediately close off when anyone raises unfounded doubts or conspiracy theories about the Pandemic. Immediate red flag.
Most people who suffered severe effects and death weren't exactly economically productive.
AFAIK, median COVID death age was around 80, and people under 50 y.o. made up only a few percent of hospitalizations and deaths. The study, however, directly uses GDP per capita in all their calculations — all prevented cases and deaths assume that that the person is working and the period of their absence from work ("days of absence" for cases, "friction period" for deaths) is directly multiplied by GDPpc to get the so-called "productivity costs averted".
That alone seems like very shoddy methodology.
I didn't even read the rest of the study, just went in to check how the potentially lost productivity was calculated and it was exactly as bullshit as I suspected it to be.
My roommate was in his early twenties, a fit and healthy dude training bjj regularly, dodn't smoke, dind't do drugs or alcohol and had a similar mindset to yours.
I had to call ambulance for him due to worsening covid symptoms in the end. He had to spend 5 days in the ICU due to early stage pneumonia.
Old people being vulnerable doesn't mean young people are guaranteed to be safe. An immunization vaccine is the closest you can get to that guarantee.
My coworker died at age 50 seemingly healthy before. There was a big shot director on Broadway aged like 30 or something lost a leg. I do t like to minimize how the young were fine, it o my affected ‘old people’.
Key Comparisons in Young People Mortality: While deaths from COVID-19 in healthy children were uncommon, analyses of public health data (such as CDC and Harvard Medical School studies) found that more U.S. children died from COVID-19 over a one-year period than typically died from seasonal influenza during a standard flu season. [1, 2]
Hospitalizations and Complications: Global pediatric studies demonstrated that children infected with SARS-CoV-2 experienced higher frequencies of pneumonia, hypoxemia (low blood oxygen), and other systemic symptoms compared to children with the flu. [1]
Long-Term Effects: Young people also faced risks unique to the coronavirus, including Multi-system Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) and Long COVID, which added a distinct clinical burden compared to seasonal influenza. [1, 2]
Overall Risk Profile: While the absolute risk of severe outcomes or death for a healthy child or young person was low for both viruses, medical research consistently concluded that COVID-19 was not "just the flu" and carried a elevated risk profile in pediatric populations. [1, 2, 3]
Yeah, sorry, I don’t have much sympathy for the people who grew up in the worlds most prosperous economy and then voted for Trump to ballon the debt and NIMBYism to shut the door on every subsequent generation.
Also, the children who died from Covid were overwhelmingly already seriously ill, and would’ve been at high risk from any regular cold and flu season.
The vast, vast majority of kids were at practically zero risk from Covid, which is why lockdowns and school closures and restrictions on kids were so utterly disgraceful, and why those people who supported those restrictions should be ashamed of themselves
I think the biggest risk of the schools being open was transmitting the disease from kid to kid to family, not to the kids themselves. Plus a lot of teachers would probably get it.
Then those people at actual high risk - aka, not the majority of working age adults in schools and especially not kids - should’ve taken their own precautions as they saw fit, and not pushed all of the disastrous secondary consequences of the insane overreaction to Covid onto everyone.
One of the first things to go out the window at the start of Covid was any sort of honest risk assessment, in favor of hysteria for everyone
Yes, influenza is a gravely serious illness that regularly hospitalizes the young and healthy who contract it.
COVID was even more dangerous with a longer incubation period, higher shedding, and longer duration of infection, all of which increase its R0. Additionally, due to its nature as a respiratory illness, it was particularly lethal to those with higher levels of aerobic fitness.
You're all over this thread denying objective reality and well-worn facts. I don't know what your agenda is, but it's both stupid and failing miserably.
No, that's false biologically speaking.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/flu-vs-covid19.html
>Influenza (flu) and COVID-19 are both contagious respiratory illnesses, but they are caused by different viruses. COVID-19 is caused by infection with a coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) first identified in 2019. Flu is caused by infection with an influenza virus.
> Who knew preventing people from falling sick, suffering from more severe effects or even death, could prevent the global economy from collapsing, never mind save the lives of millions. It’s ridiculous that their importance was even questioned to begin with.
Almost all of the money spent on covid relief went to old people.
I’m not saying for certain that the world would be better if several more million boomers died from covid, but I am saying they wouldn’t have been able to re-elect Trump, soak up TRILLIONS in Medicaid funding, spend another $500B on military boondoggles, abolish Florida property taxes, destroy the housing market, and all the other nonsense they’ve done since then.
The money went into healthcare infrastructure, durable medical equipment, and disposable medical supplies
Boomers broke closer to 50/50 than Zoomer men did. Boomers moved closer to the Democratic candidate between 2020 and 2024, while Black men and all Latinos moved to Trump over that same period.
Non sequiturs are dumb to start with, but you can at least be accurate.
> The money went into healthcare infrastructure, durable medical equipment, and disposable medical supplies
…to save old people from a cold…
> Boomers broke closer to 50/50 than Zoomer men did. Boomers moved closer to the Democratic candidate between 2020 and 2024, while Black men and all Latinos moved to Trump over that same period.
Weird irrelevant cherrypicking.
45+ voted for Trump over Biden by 8 points. And even more for senate and house republicans.
And they are by far the largest voting block.
The world would be SO MUCH better if a few million more of these people died, especially since the most vulnerable ones were also Trump-loving hicks.
Yeah it’s almost like letting nature’s method of handling a pandemic. Aka letting it run through the population and kill as many as needed for it to go away is a bad idea
all the findings are just suppositions and may be completely off base (or accurate) but they are just extrapolations from the researchers own assumptions. one of the less valuable studies ive seen, which is really saying something
Agreed, according to the analysis the vaccines saved us $6.43 trillion to $64.3 trillion. For reference the entire US GDP in 2021 was 20 trillion. Absolutely asinine assumptions
What a silly comment. If you're saying you can't rely on assumptions like what these researchers used, you're basically saying every single cost-benefit analysis is unfounded.
I've already mentioned it in the comment above, almost all of severe cases that caused hospitalizations and deaths happened to very old people or people with multiple pre-existing comorbidities, who are pretty much entirely unproductive. Yet the study completely ignored that in their calculation of "averted losses in productivity", and simply used the country's GDP per capita for the supposedly lost productivity per person. These are equations 8 and 9 in their study:
Saved productivity by avoiding infections = GDPpc × average number of hours lost per absent worker × estimation of averted cases (despite most cases being fully asymptomatic and ~97% of people hospitalized with COVID not working).
Saved productivity by avoiding deaths = GDPpc × average number of hours to replace a worker dying in a workplace × estimation of averted deaths (despite ~99% of people dying from COVID not working).
By assuming that everyone is a worker and net contributor to the economy, the authors of that study inflated that lost productivity by almost two orders of magnitude.
What was the economic benefit generated by lockdowns, school and business closures, and even the silliest nonsense like mask mandates, and how does it compare to the truly massive secondary costs for everyone, regardless of whether or not they were even at any meaningful risk from Covid?
It’s funny how governmental leaders and their pet public health people were pushing all sorts of these absurd and hysterical measures at the time (while ignoring their own rules themselves, but that’s another matter), and yet there’s so little that was ever put out to justify the massive costs of those vastly destructive and damaging measures after the fact.
If lockdowns and school closures and the rest of the insanity were indeed “worth it”, their value should be obvious and self-apparent, and clearly have been far beyond their massive costs… and they were nowhere close to “worth it”.
I don't think anybody is arguing that a global pandemic was somehow an economic boon, or that public health measures were taken primarily to improve economic productivity.
I think the point is that the vaccine was worth the investment. The dangerous part of the pandemic that called for lock downs and whatnot ended pretty quick once it was widely deployed.
No part of the pandemic ever called for lockdowns, because lockdowns and closures did far worse damage to everyone than they allegedly possibly theoretically were estimated to maybe have might have “helped” some vague and unproven made-up tiny amount
do the math along with the census data, and in a do nothing scenario it works out to about 3.5 Million American deaths in 2020.
This assumes that the hospitals can handle the spike in cases and so people don't die of other things while the hospitals are busy, and that everyone has a ventilator.
This is not true, so the death toll is a lot higher
Also, we know that Covid's natural immunity wears off with a median time of 16 months, so getting reinfected is a thing that will happen in about 1-2 years. So then that's another surge of millions dead.
It’s funny how The Science^tm seems uninterested in accounting for the vast secondary educational, economic, developmental, and social damage caused by utterly asinine broad lockdowns and restrictions, especially in absurdly damaging examples like closing schools and the associated damage done to kids via Covid restrictions (for a virus that was basically zero risk to them).
EconomistStreet5295 | 8 hours ago
Fantastic research and returns. Who knew preventing people from falling sick, suffering from more severe effects or even death, could prevent the global economy from collapsing, never mind save the lives of millions. It’s ridiculous that their importance was even questioned to begin with. These days I immediately close off when anyone raises unfounded doubts or conspiracy theories about the Pandemic. Immediate red flag.
Dr-No- | 2 hours ago
Agreed. It's why I left the libertarian party.
kirime | 6 hours ago
Most people who suffered severe effects and death weren't exactly economically productive.
AFAIK, median COVID death age was around 80, and people under 50 y.o. made up only a few percent of hospitalizations and deaths. The study, however, directly uses GDP per capita in all their calculations — all prevented cases and deaths assume that that the person is working and the period of their absence from work ("days of absence" for cases, "friction period" for deaths) is directly multiplied by GDPpc to get the so-called "productivity costs averted".
That alone seems like very shoddy methodology.
I didn't even read the rest of the study, just went in to check how the potentially lost productivity was calculated and it was exactly as bullshit as I suspected it to be.
odaklanan_insan | 6 hours ago
In my facility, covid did get many young and middle age employees sick, causing them to call in sick for 5 days in a row.
Death rate isn't the only way a pandemic can cost the economy. Downtime is a factor too.
m0neybags | 3 hours ago
> median COVID death age was around 80
That's bullshit
SunriseInLot42 | 3 hours ago
Depends on the country and group, but no, it isn’t
MakavelliRo | an hour ago
Can you cite your sources for the age information?
kirime | 38 minutes ago
UK - https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/averageageofthosewhohaddiedwithcovid19
Median age in years - Due to COVID-19 - 83 years
US - https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku
Largest group is "85 years or older", more than half of total deaths are in the 75-84 and 85+ years old categories.
Australia - https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/covid-19-mortality-australia-deaths-registered-until-31-october-2022
>The median age for those who died from COVID-19 was 85.5 years (83.7 years for males, 87.5 years for females).
Overtons_Window | 6 hours ago
Saving the lives of millions of old people, ensuring the leaders of our country going forward are increasingly chosen by people with dementia...
odaklanan_insan | 6 hours ago
My roommate was in his early twenties, a fit and healthy dude training bjj regularly, dodn't smoke, dind't do drugs or alcohol and had a similar mindset to yours.
I had to call ambulance for him due to worsening covid symptoms in the end. He had to spend 5 days in the ICU due to early stage pneumonia.
Old people being vulnerable doesn't mean young people are guaranteed to be safe. An immunization vaccine is the closest you can get to that guarantee.
unurbane | 5 hours ago
My coworker died at age 50 seemingly healthy before. There was a big shot director on Broadway aged like 30 or something lost a leg. I do t like to minimize how the young were fine, it o my affected ‘old people’.
coke_and_coffee | 5 hours ago
Cherrypicking one example doesn’t prove your point. Covid was no more dangerous for young people than the flu.
unurbane | 5 hours ago
Key Comparisons in Young People
Mortality: While deaths from COVID-19 in healthy children were uncommon, analyses of public health data (such as CDC and Harvard Medical School studies) found that more U.S. children died from COVID-19 over a one-year period than typically died from seasonal influenza during a standard flu season. [1, 2]
Hospitalizations and Complications: Global pediatric studies demonstrated that children infected with SARS-CoV-2 experienced higher frequencies of pneumonia, hypoxemia (low blood oxygen), and other systemic symptoms compared to children with the flu. [1]
Long-Term Effects: Young people also faced risks unique to the coronavirus, including Multi-system Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) and Long COVID, which added a distinct clinical burden compared to seasonal influenza. [1, 2]
Overall Risk Profile: While the absolute risk of severe outcomes or death for a healthy child or young person was low for both viruses, medical research consistently concluded that COVID-19 was not "just the flu" and carried a elevated risk profile in pediatric populations. [1, 2, 3]
coke_and_coffee | 5 hours ago
> found that more U.S. children died from COVID-19 over a one-year period than typically died from seasonal influenza during a standard flu season
I love how you don’t put numbers on this hilariously qualified statement because it destroys your argument.
No more than about 2000 children died of COVID over the entire time it has existed.
> While the absolute risk of severe outcomes or death for a healthy child or young person was low for both viruses
THIS IS THE WHOLE POINT. IT MAKES NO SENSE TO STOP EDUCATING CHILDREN AND SHUT DOWN THE ENTIRE ECONOMY FOR A LOW RISK COLD.
Let the old people die. I don’t care about them.
Sorry, not sorry.
Qeltar_ | an hour ago
> Let the old people die. I don’t care about them.
Well, you may be completely empathy-deficient, but at least you're honest.
coke_and_coffee | an hour ago
Yeah, sorry, I don’t have much sympathy for the people who grew up in the worlds most prosperous economy and then voted for Trump to ballon the debt and NIMBYism to shut the door on every subsequent generation.
Qeltar_ | an hour ago
Yes, I got it the first time. Be sure you ignore the actual data though, or it may interfere with your narrative.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/05/27/how-young-voters-helped-to-put-trump-in-the-white-house
SunriseInLot42 | 5 hours ago
Also, the children who died from Covid were overwhelmingly already seriously ill, and would’ve been at high risk from any regular cold and flu season.
The vast, vast majority of kids were at practically zero risk from Covid, which is why lockdowns and school closures and restrictions on kids were so utterly disgraceful, and why those people who supported those restrictions should be ashamed of themselves
OoglieBooglie93 | 4 hours ago
I think the biggest risk of the schools being open was transmitting the disease from kid to kid to family, not to the kids themselves. Plus a lot of teachers would probably get it.
SunriseInLot42 | 3 hours ago
Then those people at actual high risk - aka, not the majority of working age adults in schools and especially not kids - should’ve taken their own precautions as they saw fit, and not pushed all of the disastrous secondary consequences of the insane overreaction to Covid onto everyone.
One of the first things to go out the window at the start of Covid was any sort of honest risk assessment, in favor of hysteria for everyone
theriskybusinesscar | 4 hours ago
Yeah, and influenza is a very serious illness.
coke_and_coffee | 4 hours ago
No it isn’t
theriskybusinesscar | 4 hours ago
The fuck it's not.
coke_and_coffee | 3 hours ago
Maybe for old backwards-ass Trump-loving hicks.
But not for young people who make the economy run.
theriskybusinesscar | 3 hours ago
Yes, influenza is a gravely serious illness that regularly hospitalizes the young and healthy who contract it.
COVID was even more dangerous with a longer incubation period, higher shedding, and longer duration of infection, all of which increase its R0. Additionally, due to its nature as a respiratory illness, it was particularly lethal to those with higher levels of aerobic fitness.
You're all over this thread denying objective reality and well-worn facts. I don't know what your agenda is, but it's both stupid and failing miserably.
coke_and_coffee | 5 hours ago
Cherrypicking one example doesn’t prove your point. Covid was no more dangerous for young people than the flu.
odaklanan_insan | 3 hours ago
Covid is a type of flu. Flu is not a light disease for many people and can be deadly. You're probably conflating it with the common cold.
Taranfeeto36 | 2 hours ago
> Covid is a type of flu.
No, that's false biologically speaking. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/flu-vs-covid19.html
>Influenza (flu) and COVID-19 are both contagious respiratory illnesses, but they are caused by different viruses. COVID-19 is caused by infection with a coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) first identified in 2019. Flu is caused by infection with an influenza virus.
coke_and_coffee | 3 hours ago
This doesn’t contradict my point
coke_and_coffee | 5 hours ago
> Who knew preventing people from falling sick, suffering from more severe effects or even death, could prevent the global economy from collapsing, never mind save the lives of millions. It’s ridiculous that their importance was even questioned to begin with.
Almost all of the money spent on covid relief went to old people.
I’m not saying for certain that the world would be better if several more million boomers died from covid, but I am saying they wouldn’t have been able to re-elect Trump, soak up TRILLIONS in Medicaid funding, spend another $500B on military boondoggles, abolish Florida property taxes, destroy the housing market, and all the other nonsense they’ve done since then.
theriskybusinesscar | 4 hours ago
The money went into healthcare infrastructure, durable medical equipment, and disposable medical supplies
Boomers broke closer to 50/50 than Zoomer men did. Boomers moved closer to the Democratic candidate between 2020 and 2024, while Black men and all Latinos moved to Trump over that same period.
Non sequiturs are dumb to start with, but you can at least be accurate.
coke_and_coffee | 4 hours ago
> The money went into healthcare infrastructure, durable medical equipment, and disposable medical supplies
…to save old people from a cold…
> Boomers broke closer to 50/50 than Zoomer men did. Boomers moved closer to the Democratic candidate between 2020 and 2024, while Black men and all Latinos moved to Trump over that same period.
Weird irrelevant cherrypicking.
45+ voted for Trump over Biden by 8 points. And even more for senate and house republicans.
And they are by far the largest voting block.
The world would be SO MUCH better if a few million more of these people died, especially since the most vulnerable ones were also Trump-loving hicks.
HawaiiNintendo815 | 6 hours ago
The economy didn’t crash for all the covid period before the vaccine though did it?
TechnicianMany1193 | 5 hours ago
bruh.
coke_and_coffee | 5 hours ago
lol yes it did
SunriseInLot42 | 3 hours ago
It crashed because of the insane lockdowns and the rest of the overreaction to and hysteria around Covid, not because of Covid itself
bloodU23 | 3 hours ago
Yeah it’s almost like letting nature’s method of handling a pandemic. Aka letting it run through the population and kill as many as needed for it to go away is a bad idea
MundaneExtension3195 | 7 hours ago
all the findings are just suppositions and may be completely off base (or accurate) but they are just extrapolations from the researchers own assumptions. one of the less valuable studies ive seen, which is really saying something
ObjectiveAce | an hour ago
Agreed, according to the analysis the vaccines saved us $6.43 trillion to $64.3 trillion. For reference the entire US GDP in 2021 was 20 trillion. Absolutely asinine assumptions
odaklanan_insan | 6 hours ago
How can a dollar spent on a vaccine save $809 by someone not getting sick and being able to go to work and contribute to the economy? Mind blowing!
solomons-mom | 37 minutes ago
Agreed. I wish studies like these would be called out for their absurd extrapolations each and every time
Suitable-Economy-346 | 6 hours ago
What a silly comment. If you're saying you can't rely on assumptions like what these researchers used, you're basically saying every single cost-benefit analysis is unfounded.
kirime | 3 hours ago
You can call their assumptions bullshit though.
I've already mentioned it in the comment above, almost all of severe cases that caused hospitalizations and deaths happened to very old people or people with multiple pre-existing comorbidities, who are pretty much entirely unproductive. Yet the study completely ignored that in their calculation of "averted losses in productivity", and simply used the country's GDP per capita for the supposedly lost productivity per person. These are equations 8 and 9 in their study:
Saved productivity by avoiding infections = GDPpc × average number of hours lost per absent worker × estimation of averted cases (despite most cases being fully asymptomatic and ~97% of people hospitalized with COVID not working).
Saved productivity by avoiding deaths = GDPpc × average number of hours to replace a worker dying in a workplace × estimation of averted deaths (despite ~99% of people dying from COVID not working).
By assuming that everyone is a worker and net contributor to the economy, the authors of that study inflated that lost productivity by almost two orders of magnitude.
theriskybusinesscar | 4 hours ago
If you can't rely on assumptions, there is not a single observation that can be made on any topic at any time in any place.
ObjectiveAce | an hour ago
An observation doesnt require an assumption though..?
XA36 | 4 hours ago
This is certainly a "Find these results" type of study.
SunriseInLot42 | 3 hours ago
What was the economic benefit generated by lockdowns, school and business closures, and even the silliest nonsense like mask mandates, and how does it compare to the truly massive secondary costs for everyone, regardless of whether or not they were even at any meaningful risk from Covid?
It’s funny how governmental leaders and their pet public health people were pushing all sorts of these absurd and hysterical measures at the time (while ignoring their own rules themselves, but that’s another matter), and yet there’s so little that was ever put out to justify the massive costs of those vastly destructive and damaging measures after the fact.
If lockdowns and school closures and the rest of the insanity were indeed “worth it”, their value should be obvious and self-apparent, and clearly have been far beyond their massive costs… and they were nowhere close to “worth it”.
sessamekesh | 3 hours ago
I don't think anybody is arguing that a global pandemic was somehow an economic boon, or that public health measures were taken primarily to improve economic productivity.
I think the point is that the vaccine was worth the investment. The dangerous part of the pandemic that called for lock downs and whatnot ended pretty quick once it was widely deployed.
ObjectiveAce | an hour ago
Theres a huge difference between the vaccine being worth the investment and returning 80900%.
SunriseInLot42 | an hour ago
No part of the pandemic ever called for lockdowns, because lockdowns and closures did far worse damage to everyone than they allegedly possibly theoretically were estimated to maybe have might have “helped” some vague and unproven made-up tiny amount
WeekendAtMadoffs | 7 hours ago
*which translates to a return on investment of $59.7 to $809 per dollar spent.
let's index that for
paying the boomers out, who survived total herd immunity for every single variant by being locked in.
debt creation to lock down, stimulate and keep the young out of work by closing businesses.
total interest on said debt.
pretty sure we are way behind where we would be financially if we just let it rip through the population.
USSMarauder | 6 hours ago
Well, let's see
So this is the Infection-fatality rate of Covid. Basically the "if i catch it what are my odds of dying"
1% chance at age 60
5% chance at age 75
10% chance at age 82
20% chance at age 90
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02867-1/fulltext
do the math along with the census data, and in a do nothing scenario it works out to about 3.5 Million American deaths in 2020.
This assumes that the hospitals can handle the spike in cases and so people don't die of other things while the hospitals are busy, and that everyone has a ventilator.
This is not true, so the death toll is a lot higher
Also, we know that Covid's natural immunity wears off with a median time of 16 months, so getting reinfected is a thing that will happen in about 1-2 years. So then that's another surge of millions dead.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(21)00219-6/fulltext
Without the vaccines, we'd probably be over 10 million dead Americans at this point
WorldClassScumbag | 7 hours ago
I want to highly encourage everyone in the world to not interact with this account.
SlowkayCoomer | 7 hours ago
Good thing that's not the only metric.
We only had about 1.5m excess deaths during covid (2x the comparables with other countries) with what little we did do.
But sure, let's say we should have just let it rip
WeekendAtMadoffs | 7 hours ago
only 1.5M ?
Spanish Flu did 50 million.
The UNSUSTAINABLE promises in Medicare and Social Security are built on a real pandemic, not a made for an election year pandemic.
WorldClassScumbag | 7 hours ago
You're comparing US COVID deaths to worldwide Spanish Flu deaths, which is either purposefully misleading or incredibly poor reasoning skills.
There's no way you are a genuine person. This reads like Alex Jones' reddit account.
🤡
12-34 | 7 hours ago
Well, if you're "pretty sure", I'm sold.
Now where is my gallon o' 'Mection?
WeekendAtMadoffs | 7 hours ago
I want to see it indexed for the losses this caused our real economy of young people starting their careers.
Show us
12-34 | 7 hours ago
You're sounding even more sure now. Count me in more than ever.
Bertha, get me another 'Mectin gallon on that internet thang!
WeekendAtMadoffs | 6 hours ago
"We made $809 bucks by loading our national debt with $10,000+"
that's boomer math
totally expected from the generation that liked the first gulf war so much they did 2 more for 20 years for $8 trillion.
12-34 | 6 hours ago
Excellent, we're expanding the scope. We've been patiently waiting for generational claptrap!
Keep going. Maybe now work in some eugenics and we're sure to capture the MAGA demo! If you're feeling frisky, add some racial speculation too!
SunriseInLot42 | 4 hours ago
It’s funny how The Science^tm seems uninterested in accounting for the vast secondary educational, economic, developmental, and social damage caused by utterly asinine broad lockdowns and restrictions, especially in absurdly damaging examples like closing schools and the associated damage done to kids via Covid restrictions (for a virus that was basically zero risk to them).