The Main Covid Lockdown Casualties: Children: Suicide and homicide rates for young people hit a 20-year high; Another Knockdown of Costly COVID-19 Lockdowns, and other C-Virus related stories
The Main Covid Lockdown Casualties: Children
Suicide and homicide rates for young people hit a 20-year high.
The evidence keeps piling up that children were the biggest casualties of the government’s response to Covid. The latest comes from a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that youth homicides and suicides hit a 20-year high in 2021 following lockdowns and the turn to progressive policing.
Suicides among adolescents and young adults have been increasing more or less steadily for two decades. But the new data show that, after a small decline between 2018 and 2019, youth suicides climbed in 2020 and 2021. The two-year increase among the college-aged (20 to 24) was the largest in at least two decades.
The rise in mental-health problems among young people during the pandemic has been widely chronicled. One CDC survey found about half of 18-to-24-year-olds experienced anxiety or depression during the summer of 2020. Lockdowns and college closures no doubt drove some into depressive funks and down social-media rabbit holes.
The spike in homicides has drawn less attention, though the numbers are even more striking. Between 2019 and 2021, the homicide rate among those age 10 to 24 increased 37% and even more in those 15 to 19 (44%) and 10 to 14 (56%). The CDC doesn’t attempt to diagnose the culprits, but they aren’t hard to identify.
Early in the pandemic, governments released scores of criminals from jail putatively to reduce the spread of Covid. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of people in custody of state, federal or privately operated prisons declined by 215,800 between February 2020 and February 2021. San Francisco reduced its jail population by 40%. —>READ MORE HERE
Terence Corcoran: Another knockdown of costly COVID-19 lockdowns:
As the global economic costs of the COVID-19 lockdowns continue to build, measurable in trillions of dollars in losses that burden people everywhere, mainstream political and economic opinion continues to dodge the big question: Have these calculable lockdown losses, imposed by such liberal authoritarians as Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, produced the benefits promised when the pandemic controls were introduced more than three years ago?
The official political and media silence on this question is mystifying, even as more evidence points to the COVID control measures as a drastic policy overreach. A new research paper this week adds fresh data and analysis that support the argument that the benefits of lockdowns were minor relative to their staggering costs.
The paper, Did Lockdowns Work? The Verdict on COVID Restrictions, published by the market-oriented Institute of Economic Affairs think-tank in London, concludes that the number of COVID deaths avoided by lockdown measures in Europe and the United States in the spring of 2020 were “negligible.” In all, the lockdowns may have saved 23,000 lives in Europe and 16,000 in the United States — numbers that are small when compared with the routine annual 72,000 flu deaths in Europe and 38,000 in the United States.
The authors of the study — Jonas Herby in Denmark, Lars Jonung in Sweden and Steve Hanke in the United States — ran a comprehensive analysis of 32 COVID mortality studies by other researchers. They do not toss off their conclusions lightly and admit to limitations, but their 200-page paper is sophisticated, detailed and leads to important questions that still need to be answered. Lockdown techniques — shelter in place orders, business closures, school closures, limiting gatherings, travel restrictions, mask mandates — are each found to have had a limited impact on mortality.
If the mortality impact of the measures — in other words, the key benefit of the lockdowns — is negligible, then the implication is that the costs of the lockdowns massively outweighed the benefits. Herby, Jonung and Hanke do not attempt to calculate the costs of the measures in dollar terms — massive GDP losses, major government debt accumulation, youth education declines, loss of freedom and other effects that impose immediate and ongoing burdens on society. These burdens, they add, “will linger for decades … (and) leave a long-lasting scar on the world economy.” —>READ MORE HERE
Follow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
Showing up to school was hard amid COVID. Why aren’t kids (or teachers) returning to class?
COVID-19 Vaccine Creators Take on Cancer in National Geographic Documentary
USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates
YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates
NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest
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