>>Your arguments are very confusing to me, because on the one hand you are arguing that lockdowns are not good and that they should not have been done because of the damage due to social isolation and other economic follow-on effects.

My argument is that people by and large make rational cost-benefit analyses, and pay the cost of sheltering-at-home/social-isolation if the benefit in COVID risk mitigation makes it worth it.

I alluded to that here:

>>A lockdown rule, being rigidly preset, can't know when a young person is facing drug abuse problems, and faces far greater risk from social isolation than from COVID. The US saw a massive spike in fentanyl overdose deaths in 2020, showing the steep cost of social isolation - which lockdowns exacerbate - for public health.

To summarize, maximizing COVID risk mitigation is not the appropriate strategy for every individual. Whether it is, depends on their situation/circumstances. Lock-downs are a cookie-cutter solution that cannot make these kinds of distinctions.

>>The people who demand to keep schools open usually seem to stop short of demanding that teachers are protected. Let's look at your linked study for instance. This study shows that they had a successful start of the Fall 2020 semester in North Carolina. How did they do it?

>>In weekly superintendent meetings, several key contributors to success were noted: daily screening of students and staff, high rates of mask wearing adherence for children and adults, transparency in publicly reporting confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections (eg, via Web site), efficient contact tracing, close collaboration with local health departments, regular updates with staff and principals to encourage adherence and report secondary transmission cases or any breaches in safety protocols, detailed schedule for all aspects of the school day to adhere to the 3W’s, definitive plans for the special needs community, and opening in the hybrid model of instruction. These refinements informed the 12 Principles for Safer Schools.

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. Mask-wearing could harm children, due to its obstruction of communication and potential inhibition of social gathering and physical activity, and this would need to be seriously examined before the measure is mandated.

But school closures as a whole, which is the biggest point of contention, will absolutely harm children, yet teachers unions pushed for this for over a year in many jurisdictions.

>>Look what happened in Georgia at the beginning of their school year:

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

https://research.unc.edu/2020/04/24/household-deemed-most-co...

>>Whatever aggregate statistics you have about this situation, what they will fail to note is that even a single teacher death can throw an entire school and even a district into disorder in this environment. Because there are no replacements. No one wants to sub. No one wants to be a teacher anymore so it's hard to hire. When one teacher goes down then you have to tap unqualified people to teach a subject they aren't used to, and everyone is already oversubscribed. I mean, you're so worried about student outcomes, what happens to outcomes when teachers die and they are replaced with clueless substitutes?

A teacher dying is obviously damaging to students, and of course to the teacher themselves along with their family, but how could it possibly be more damaging to children than 30-40% of minority students not learning during the lockdown?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/black-hispanic-students-disproport...

>>Right, but you immediately go to the idea that it's a spike due to despair from lockdowns. But if fentanyl has been a problem for a long time, maybe it's due to other reasons.

The spike, not the baseline, is due to despair. So fentanyl being a problem for a long time is not relevant to my argument.

>>For instance, the report you linked puts forth the notion that covid disrupted supply chains, leading to an increase in supply of tainted fentanyl batches, leading to a spike in deaths for people who potentially had already been using fentanyl before any lockdowns. So how would their deaths be due to despair at lockdowns?

This could also be another cause, 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.

https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/all-things-work/pages/cov...

Beyond an increase in drug use and a rise in the frequency of bad batches, there is the additional risk of isolation during drug use, which makes overdoses more likely to become fatal.

>>That's not the point, the point is that if loneliness due to lockdowns is causing fentanyl related deaths, then why are the states affected the most in the South or a border state?

One more time: I am not saying that loneliness is the sole cause of fentanyl use. I'm saying it's the cause of the spike in fentanyl use seen in 2020. You're not grasping my critique of your argument as you keep on referring to the higher levels of overdose deaths in the South/border-states.

>>Where is the connection from loneliness to deaths? You just have not shown it conclusively.

I can't prove anything definitively, but the correlation between fentanyl deaths and the pandemic makes it pretty obvious that there's a causative association. The effect of loneliness on the risk of substance abuse is also well documented:

https://recoverycentersofamerica.com/blogs/how-loneliness-fu...

Loneliness is risk factor for mortality in general:

https://journals.lww.com/psychosomaticmedicine/fulltext/2019...

>>No, not obviously, that's the whole point here. None of this is obvious. You say "by far" and "most likely" with such confidence, but I am not as confident as you, and I don't know where you get your confidence from because it's not reflected in the articles you've posted as evidence for your positions.

It's extremely obvious to me, based on what I have read and seen. A massive increase in social isolation, caused by COVID mitigation measures and efforts, is obviously going to cause enormous harm to mental health, and to normal healthy life habits, which will lead to exactly the results we've seen, with the spike in mental illness, substance abuse and obesity during the pandemic response era.

>>What about the other risk factors, and what's the interplay between those and the pandemic? Such as for instance, would someone's family member or friend dying due to COVID correlate to an increase in drug use?

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, would have that profound of an impact on mental health and prevalence of substance abuse. We've seen the share of adults reporting anxiety/depression increase from 11 percent in 2019 to 41 percent in 2021:

https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/the-imp...

That magnitude of a difference can't be reasonably explained by an increase in the death rate amounting to 0.1 percent of the US population.

>>I'm not arguing Covid didn't increase fentanyl related deaths of despair; I'm arguing that you didn't show causation.

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. The onus is on lockdown supporters to prove that it wasn't. You have to prove that a highly distressing/disruptive intervention, that is forced on millions of people, is not going to harm them, before instituting it. And there are plenty of indiciation that it was in fact harmful.

>>But while you mention it, you can't simultaneously argue that lockdowns are the result of despair related deaths, at the same time you argue that when left to their own devices, people will lock down on their own when confronted with COVID.

You're oversimplifying my argument. I'm saying that people will generally make rational cost-benefit analyses that will lead to them taking the appropriate measures that minimize all risks that face them. 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, and they may choose to not socially distance as a result. These kinds of individualized responses are not possible with lockdowns.

>>I assume you said this in response to my having brought up the BLM protests of 2020, but to be clear those protests were not in fact about George Floyd;

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.