> It seems reasonable to assume that most of these measures would not impose significant harm to children, and thus would be perfectly appropriate to institute.

And yet most of those measures are very expensive to implement, and in fact they are resisted by various groups. They don't want to do anything.

> While this is obviously tragic, it is an ancedote, so these numbers cannot be generalized to all school districts.

I mean, we're talking about an entire state here. It's more than an anecdote is an ever-growing list of obituaries. The shortages are not an anecdote, it's a systemic failure of which we can identify the cause. And the solution isn't "Let's just get back to school"

> Moreover, there are far more likely vectors of transmission than exposure to students in schools. This study suggests that the vast majority of transmission occurs at home:

Where the virus is contracted does not matter if the issue is that you don't have a teacher to teach the children. I don't know why this keeps getting lost. Let's pretend that everyone inside of a school is magically immune from covid. Schools have some special property that confers immunity while people are in the building. Even if that were true, if a teacher gets covid outside of school and can't come in to work, who is going to teach the class that day? Please just answer that question, keeping in mind there is a substitute and teacher shortage due to covid.

> how could it possibly be more damaging to children than 30-40% of minority students not learning during the lockdown?

The link you provided does not say that 30-40% of minorities students are not learning due lockdowns. That may be one aspect of it, but it also goes on to note that black and Hispanics were hit harder by the pandemic in terms of cases and deaths, which were due to not locking down certain industries (e.g. meat packing plants, where Hispanics are overrepresented and died at higher rates). I dunno about you, but if my mom died because her boss said she had to come in to work, I don't think I'd be able to learn no matter what the setting and access to technology.

This is again a very complicated and nuances topic you are laying entirely at the feet of the "lockdown" boogeyman.

> but we know mental illness and substance abuse increased in 2020, so "bad batches" cannot explain the entire spike in overdose deaths, and a portion of the spike needs to be attributed to the behavioral changes that emerged in 2020, the most likely cause of which is pandemic-related measures.

Thank you finally some nuance. So you now admit there are a number of factors, and the question before us is how much do they each impact the outcome. But then you again assert without evidence (the link you provided does not support your claim) that the "most likely cause" is pandemic-related measures (rather than the pandemic itself). I really think you need to start separating your opinions from evidence-based assertions.

> It's extremely obvious to me, based on what I have read and seen.

And it's not obvious to me. If you can't even provide me with proof of something that is "extremely" obvious to you, then I think it's incumbent upon you to question your foundational assumptions here. How is it that you have so easily dismissed the actual pandemic that his killed hundreds of thousands in the US and millions around the world as the cause of anu purported despair. Why do you think that restrictions (which your own links note were not even enforceable, and to the extent they changed behavior, the behavior actually would have changed regardless) are the thing that is causing all the problems in society?

> Given 2.8 million people died in the US in 2019, it wouldn't make sense that the 385,000 COVID deaths, which only amounts to 13.7 percent of the baseline number

One characteristic of covid is that while a majority of deaths are the elderly, it has caused some very untimely deaths, which are infinitely more tragic than a death after a life well-lived. Just take the Georgia teachers for instance. 40 seniors in nursing homes die all the time. That's not going to impact anyone aside from the immediate family, who honestly will largely carry on as normal the day after the funeral. 40 teachers from the same state dying in the span of weeks under the age of 50 just does not happen, ever, from any cause. This result causes extreme existential dread not just for the people who knew them personally but for millions in that profession around the country.

> Those arguing for mandatory behavioral modification have to prove it's safe.

> The onus is not on me to prove that the subsequent surge in mental illness, obesity, and substance abuse was caused by this mandatory behavioral modification.

Forget onus, how does one prove that something wasn't? Moreover, what you're asking for is inaction in the face of provable imminent danger. How do you prove an untested action will not harm people more than an unknown pathogen while the pathogen is rapidly spreading? How would that even work? It wouldn't, it would just lead to the pathogen doing whatever it wants while we try to prove our mitigation methods work.

So really the best we can do right now is to look back and see what harms mitigation measures caused, versus what harms the virus caused. And then we can use the magic of statistics to try and figure out what were the most important factors, and which ones were not so important. But nothing about this process is obvious to me at least, so I'm still mystified as to why this is so clear to you, yet you can't actually prove it to me. If you can intuitively see these things and know you are right in your heart, good for you, but that doesn't help the rest of us.

> For a person with substance abuse problems, the risk of social isolation that emerges from social distancing measures may outweigh the risk from COVID from not taking those measures

Okay, I agree, but you're still not addressing the fact that people social distanced on their own, as noted by your own supporting evidence. How do you imagine this playing out? What happens when customers at your work decide on their own they'd rather stay home than face the disease, business slows down so you get laid off, and you're stuck at home unemployed and lonely because your friends are all social distancing. Nothing about this scenario requires a mandated lockdown, it results in the same loneliness, the lonely person is still powerless to fix their situation, and none of it was caused by government intervention. This counterfactual is completely in line with all the evidence you have presented and it doesn't support your argument at all.

> They were triggered by the George Floyd video. The number of unarmed black people being killed by police is very small, and has decreased enormously over the last decade. More black people are killed in single days in Chicago by people other than police than the number of unarmed black people killed across the entire US over the course of a year by police.

I don't know what you're trying to say here. You're just minimizing people's stated reasons of grievance.