Just overheard a conversation from a teacher on school closings during the pandemic

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29. How many more people would have died??

School kids are notorious vectors for infectious diseases. Parents and relatives routinely get sick right a few weeks after a new school year starts.

Many school kids themselves handled Covid fine with minimal issues, but their relatives, not so much.

School performance is important, and it does seem like many did not adapt to remote learning well, and that is unfortunate.

But we can't evaluate this in isolation. There's no doubt that remote learning kept many more people alive and slowed the pandemic, allowing more time for the vaccine rollout and other advanced on treatment, as well as reducing the crush of patients at hospitals.

I think, had we kept kids in school, we would have looked back and wondered how many extra people died for maybe a slight academic performance benefit. Is hindsight really 20/20? Not when you're dealing with speculative alternative universes. I think there's always going to be a "grass is always greener" effect looking at the road not traveled, to mix metaphors and bit...