>>The pandemic also revealed that when left to their own devices, people make judgements based on their own individual circumstances without any consideration whatsoever given to the circumstances of others.

Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but generally people adjusted their behavior based on rational risk benefit assessments:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19...

>>Atkeson (February 2021) then used the same model with a simple behavioral
adjustment that allowed individuals to change behavior in light of the value of Rt

.

>>The new forecast of daily deaths is shown as the blue line in panel (b) of Figure 2.
Adding the single behavioral response completely changed the model’s predictive
power. The model now tracks the actual progression of the daily deaths very closely.
In correspondence with Atkeson he provided the reason for this result:
The intuition for this result is simple. If new infections and daily deaths from the
disease grow too high, people take costly efforts to avoid interaction and thus slow
disease spread. Likewise, if the prevalence of the disease falls toward zero, then
the demand for costly disease prevention efforts also falls towards zero, and so the

>>–

>>disease will come back unless the population has already achieved herd immunity
measured at pre-pandemic levels of behavior.

Regarding this:

>>The idea that we can let young people do whatever they want while isolating and protecting the old and vulnerable has always been false in our society. Many vulnerable people died as a result. It's created paradoxes where we send kids to school because they are not vulnerable; meanwhile their teachers are in fact vulnerable and have predictably died at a frequency that has created teacher and substitute shortages.

Young people should take priority over the old. This is not acceptable:

"Longitudinal Trends in Body Mass Index Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic Among Persons Aged 2–19 Years — United States, 2018–2020"

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...

Neither is this:

"Covid-19: Children born during the pandemic score lower on cognitive tests, study finds"

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2031

And for what? The lockdown proponents projected 96,000 COVID deaths by July 1st 2020 in Sweden without a lockdown. The real number was approximately 20 times lower, at 5,400, the vast majority the elderly.

Is robbing a million young people of a year of their development worth maybe reducing this 5,400 death toll? I think clearly it's not. You need to consider the damage done by lockdowns, not just by COVID.

Just this alone makes the whole exercise unacceptable:

"30-40 percent of minority and low-income students weren’t learning during lockdowns"

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...

And the premise of your argument - that young people being able to live normally was such an unacceptably high risk to those older than them that it should have been forbidden - is very tenuous, with some findings suggesting that there was very little COVID spread through schools:

"Incidence and Secondary Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Schools "

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/147/4/e20200...

>>Fentanyl has been a problem long before the pandemic

I never implied otherwise. My only comment was on the spike in deaths.

>>and many of the places that are most affected by increased fentanyl deaths over the last 2 years have imposed the least restrictive lockdown measures [0]:

Alaska had a stay-at-home order, and in any case would have been amongst the most affected by the lockdowns, as it severely impacted travel between Alaska and the continental US. I don't see anything in that list suggesting that less locked down states saw a bigger spike in fentanyl deaths. In your list, all had stay-at-home orders:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-stay...

And all of them had restrictions that persisted long after the stay-at-home order was lifted. Which of those states didn't shut down in person schooling?

>>Florida, a state which advertises itself as the state of freedom, and whose governor has positioned himself as an anti-lockdown champion, has the worst fentanyl deaths in the entire nation. So I don't know how much you can say about the causation between lockdowns and fentanyl overdoses.

Completely irrelevant to my point, which again, is about the spike in fentanyl deaths. Yes Florida has for a long time a massive drug problem, probably due to being the largest gateway for drugs entering the US.

Obviously this massive spike in fentanyl deaths is due to behavioral changes relating to the pandemic. And by far the behavioral change most likely to have contributed is social isolation, which is a known risk factor for drug use. You can't simultaneously argue that people are not risk averse enough to be left to their own devices, and thus we need lockdowns, while arguing that lockdowns did not contribute to the spike in fentanyl deaths through their impact on behavior.

>>One demographic that has seen the highest increase and absolute rates of fentanyl deaths has been African Americans, particularly young men and teens. If your contention is that fentanyl is a drug of despair, why are you assuming lockdowns are the source of that despair? During the summer of 2020, African Americans (and Americans of all backgrounds) highlighted one of the most pressing concerns in their community: police violence against black men and teens. Have you considered this despair as a possibility for the increase in overdose deaths (particularly considering many of the states hit hardest have very high black populations)?

The spike in fentanyl deaths was seen in all demographics. And to me it's common sense that being forced to stay home, and prevented from socially interacting, is going to be a far more likely source of despair, than some perception of police brutality stemming from the video of George Floyd's death.

I don't see how you are so easily dismissing the damage that lockdowns/social-isolation can do to people. People being negatively affected by social isolation and economic decline is completely predictable. Social isolation in particular is known to massively increase mortality risk:

"Social Isolation: A Predictor of Mortality Comparable to Traditional Clinical Risk Factors"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3871270/

Even George Floyd had lost his job as a bouncer at a club due to the lockdowns before his attempt to use a fake $20 bill led to the deadly police interaction that killed him.