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.

But then you link to a post that argues that we didn't need to lock down, because people would have taken costly (what costs? They don't say afaict) measures to lock themselves down anyway. I mean, take the passage you linked. What is this supposed to show? They have one model that is unreasonably bad, and then they refine it so that it is more reasonable, and then they show it better tracks the data.

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.

So basically lockdowns. But how does this avoid any of the damage you're talking about? How do schools and businesses stay open under these circumstances, where everyone has decided independently on their own volition to isolate?

> Young people should take priority over the old.

Yes, I'm a teacher so I'm not going to argue with you there. I spend a lot of time putting children first. But this line of reasoning always seems to forget the fact that there's a lot of old people involved in teaching children. 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.

There was also full buy in from participating faculty, and plenty of training and education. During the period of Aug-Oct 2020 in North Carolina, community spread in general was low. It's true that schools are safer than many places if the proper precautions are taken. But that goes out the window when community spread is high. This distinction has been lost on many. This is a far cry to the environment of 2021, when community spread was quite high and parents were demanding teachers back to school in front of mask-less, unvaccinated children.

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

https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/60-georgia-teachers...

The average age of the 42 teachers on this list who have died is 46 years old. The youngest was in their 20s. I don't know if this needs to be said, but dozens of young teachers do not usually die before the school year starts. There's a substitute teacher shortage [2], a bus driver shortage [3], school closures due to staffing shortages (not even COVID) [4], and yet people are out there demanding that this system be fully operational for their kids, immediately. That's not normal, and young people cannot expect normalcy given the above.

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? That's not a good learning environment either.

> My only comment was on the spike in deaths.

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. 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?

> 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?

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? Like you said, Florida is a gateway for that stuff, so what if it's just that supply and opportunity increased, it comes over the border and affects those states most, but then it's also distributed across the country so it'll have an effect everywhere. Where is the connection from loneliness to deaths? You just have not shown it conclusively.

> 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.

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.

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? How does that compare to someone being lonely and isolated? What about someone who is feeling isolated and then their family dies? Did they start drugs because they were lonely or grieving a loss? I just don't see any accounting for these nuances in your posts, and so I just have to wonder what makes you so sure of your position, that you speak in superlatives?

> 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.

I'm not arguing Covid didn't increase fentanyl related deaths of despair; I'm arguing that you didn't show causation. 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. Everyone around you voluntarily choosing to isolate themselves would have the same isolative effect on you as if the government told them to do it.

> 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.

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; he was the catalyst, but 2020 was in response to a long string of murders. If you're trying to insinuate that lockdowns caused those protests by proxy, no. Cops murdering black men well before lockdowns caused those protests.

[0] https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/least-50-georgia-te...

[1] https://www.ajc.com/education/get-schooled-blog/teacher-my-p...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/labor-shortage-georgia-schoo...

[3] https://thegeorgiavirtue.com/georgia-news/bus-driver-shortag...

[4] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/entire-south-ga-school-dis...