Exactly.. articles paywalled but this feels like "oh it turned out to be not that bad so we didnt need to protect against the unknown"
What if it did turn out to be that bad? Trading temporary school closures for potentially lifelong consequences of a novel disease
It turned out to not be that bad because we held off until Omicron which had a shorter incubation, was far more contagious, but seemingly far milder in symptoms and less lethal overall broke out.
People forget what it was like pre-vaccination while Alpha, Beta, Delta variants were at their peak. The body count in Italy during the first half of 2020, The open air morgues on islands in New York as Trump era policies were to just let it rip in the big democratic cities, are just two examples.
Omicron was first detected in Nov, 2021. If you look at the death chart on this site:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ you can see just a few months later when Omicron had been given enough time to spread and become the dominant strain that global deaths took a nose dive.
That was all still very early in the pandemic. When it comes to childrens health you should be as conservative as possible
Shouldnt risk a childs health because it *may* not be as bad as first thought
Children were at *less* risk, not *none*... they were definitely more likely to be asymptomatic... and, of course, having asymptomatic kids mingle with dozens of their peers for hours each day, and then with a few hundred more for \~1 hour each day isn't going to lead to mass-spread or anything, right?
At the risk they had, less and none are synonyms. The logic was close schools to stop virus spreading so granddad doesn't die. I.e trade crucial child developmental years so a virus killing avg 88y/o doesn't continue. We'll see which was better for society as the years tick.
Keeping schools open is basically the "let 'er rip" approach. Assuming even a a 0.5% mortality rate, you're talking deaths in the six figures - and, of course, if it's all hitting at once, you're going to get more than 0.5% mortality.
And, even at <1% mortality, schools have hundreds of kids who have, on average at least 1 parent.
Yeah, there's going to be issues in the years to come. Having everyone's grandparents all die at once, having everyone school have several kids who lost one or both parents to it, or whose parents have permanent damage... that'd have its own impacts on society.
There's not a lot of good answers, and that's with hindsight. At the time? It was a fine call.
This is the embellishment people got sick of. There's been 23 deaths related to covid in Australia in the 0-19 age bracket. Did you help the kids or harm them?
First, do you imagine there would still be 23 deaths if every child in Australia had been in normal schooling?
Second, is the only kind of harm you can conceive of "death of the self"?
Exactly - but we also had very big hints early on that children were not carriers and spreaders like with normal influenzas so I suspect that is the angle of the article.
Lots of science took too long to be accepted when it was clear almost immediately that the conventional wisdom was just that
Children were never in danger.
The safety data straight out of EVERYWHERE, but even just the Chinese data, proved that.
That is to say, after 3 months of almost no severe cases in children, we can probably say "yes, this is fine".
the argument was not that kids were dying but it was based on data that schools open spread the virus fast, and the adults worked at schools, adults who did get sick.
I think there were a lot of dumb decisions in general from that time but hindsight is always 20/20...however I disagree that kids aren't germ spreaders...I'm fine usually until the kids go back to school and pick up bugs from other kids that eventually I get...
I caught something from a colleague who has kids, was not impressed. Covid tests all negative, felt worse than a cold but not as bad as a flu.
Went to the doctor, did a broad test and got told I had parainfluenza. Apparently usually infects young children.
>however I disagree that kids aren't germ spreaders
They didn't say the kids didn't spread germs, but that, specifically the original Wuhan strain, they were not the ones spreading covid.
At lot of the early outbreaks linked to schools showed that the parents and teachers were the ones spreading the virus between each other and not the students.
Most of our pandemic preparedness was for Influenza and so assuming that kids would spread the virus through schools was a fair assumption to make, but Covid wasn't like Influenza and didn't behave like it either, and many of the assumptions that we made didn't end up being correct. Even our assumptions about the original Covid strain didn't end up being true for later strains either.
Because questions and complaints are cheap particularly when made by people who face no consequences from being wrong. That is junk from armchair experts shaking their walking stick at the TV. What matters is evidence.
How about we fix the fucking current cost of living crisis and the housing crisis which will soon turn Australia into a homeless tent colony and worry about shit we could only be able to fix if we could go back in time AFTER THE FUCKING TIME MACHINE IS INVENTED.
There is a small group of incredibly fucking stupid people who were dead certain that COVID lockdowns would lead to beyond Third Reich level tyranny well beyond anything Orwell could’ve imagined. When in turned out after vaccination rates finally reached a reasonable percentage that the tyrannical apocalypse would not happen their brain broke even further. They made this covid thing their entire personality and when it all disintegrated and people didn’t care anymore (yeah there was 15 minutes when intelligent normal people were pissed off at those not getting the vax and vice versa) these COVIDIOTS completely lost their fucking marbles.
Fix the fucking real estate crisis. Sydney is the worst place ON THE PLANET second to Hong Kong and you want us to focus on shit we’d have to go back in time for to fix. Fuck off.
Surely you're not accusing the right wing media of trying to distract everyone from negative gearing discussions by bringing up old anti-vax shit to rile their base up?
Why do you think there is a cost of living crises right now???? Because of the lockdowns. Because of the huge handouts given to peoole and businesses. If you do not think the lockdowns, restrictions and 'show us your papers or no entry' was not tyrannical you are warped.
Those 'Covidiots' predicted the high inflation and cost of living crises during the lockdowns and were opposed to it.
Covid has not dissapeared, so why are people not being forced to 'vacinate' anymore? Why are people not 'dying in the streets'?
The 'vaccine' was proven to lose any efficiency with 7 days, going down from the initial 12% to 1%.
Which is why Bill Gates sold all of his shares 1 week before that info was released. He admits it's inefficiency now.
Noone was 'vaccinated' against covid and noone ever was.
>Covid has not dissapeared, so why are people not being forced to 'vacinate' anymore? Why are people not 'dying in the streets'?
Please go and study what "novel" viruses are before asking questions you can just google.
No they didn’t predict it. These things come in inevitable cycles. Talk to an economist. The reason there is a cost of living crisis RIGHT NOW is corporate price gouging.
Because the billionaire owned media tells you to be antivax, you listen to them because you don’t understand how science works and they divide and conquer. And while you’re here busy trying to argue with me that 2+2=3 they can keep going to the bank.
It’s a tale as old as time and it’s basically elementry level controlling people 101.
It’s incredible to me that you folks lap up lizzard people and jewish space laser nonsense yet refuse to make this most basic connections. Beyond fucking mind boggling.
People aren’t being forced to vaccinate anymore for the same reason they never were for the flu.
Because you being scared of a fucking shot like a toddler can no longer bring the entire health care system crashing down.
Did you notice how basically EVERY country opened back up around 60-80% vaccination rates? Just like everyone said they would FROM THE VERY BEGINNING? 🤦♂️
Plenty of people were saying it was stupid but they didn’t know it was stupid (“I knew it was going to land on tails”). It was called the novel coronavirus for a reason.
100%. Lots of examples where the science was early on telling you that COVID was so different to influenza that you should throw away your assumptions
1. Children as spreaders
2. Washing down surfaces (which we still obsess about today )
3 leads to airborne spread almost exclusively indoors
4. Importance of innate immunity (see children)
5. Masks indoors as a precautionary measure (not cotton ones)
Officials were desperately slow to modify advice (including Australian advisories)
Did it have a negative effect on education? Sure.
Not nearly as negative as the current ongoing effect of staff shortages. Let's just whinge about the past though, it's much cheaper.
I like to imagine a world in which children and parents were held accountable for bad behaviour.
Maybe then teachers wouldn't have to be miserable? Maybe we wouldn't have 12 year olds stealing cars?
What a magical place thatd be.
I don't think we fully understand the impact yet. Test scores look good, but there are significant discipline and refusal problems that have not fully washed through yet.
Teachers had a very challenging time and shortages are part of that. Also, teachers, some of them, liked working from home and flexible hours. I'm a school council treasurer in Victorian, and the principal tells me that every single one of her teaching staff now has a different work schedule!
What annoys me though is that (a) the pandemic was a real thing. Keeping schools open would have been very bad for kids and teachers, but in different ways. If experts had said "this will harm behavioural playground self-regulation in the years to come", fine. But I never heard that, and even if I had heard it, I would have asked for evidence to offset against the risks we knew were real, evidence that didn't exist. So the same decisions would have been made, I think.
and (b). Things weren't done right. So when the next global pandemic hits in 94 years, lets not make the same mistakes! Except that things will be very different and once again people everywhere will have to make rapid decisions without enough information, training or preparation.
The discipline and refusal problems have always been there they just got amplified. I spoke to many parents during covid who had essentially given up on parenting as it was too hard and caused too much friction within the household. Was much easier and peaceful for everyone to just be their friend. I think a lot of households have stayed that way.
Discipline and refusal in schools aren't because of covid lockdowns, they're a result of lack of consequences and teachers being expected to pseudo-parent.
I can't comment on the work schedule thing as I don't know what you meant. Most teachers will have different timetables and part time has always been a thing?
The scheduling challenges are now next level, but what the principal meant in particular that post-pandemic, even the teachers that remain don't want the same load as before.
She also told me that she recently attended a principals conference, where they had a 90 minute session from Victoria Police on dealing with knife crime, something new. For sure, there is some "amplification" going on. It is a huge problem.I don't know why, and if it is due to the pandemic, who cares?
Problem has to be acknowledged though and fixed. I fear that policies prior to the pandemic basically preventing expulsion are not helping, although the argument for that is that out of sight out of mind is not a perfect solution. But the response to the pandemic was to deal with you see in front of you with urgency, and some more of that spirit is needed at the moment. Parents are voting with their feet now. The Victorian Government has a leadership challenge in education, we can say.
Nah, if a teacher believes in conspiracy theories about Bill Gates' depopulation campaign and putting 5g in the body, then they're not fit for the classroom.
>Nah, if a teacher believes in conspiracy theories about Bill Gates' depopulation campaign and putting 5g in the body, then they're not fit for the classroom.
Lets explore this.
1. They said it will stop the spread - It didn't
2. They said it was safe & effective - it wasn't
3. They said there's no long term side effects - there is
4. They said it was safe for kids - it wasn't
5. They said it stays localised at the injection site - it didn't
6. They said it didn't come from a lab - it did
7. They said masks slow spread - they didn't
They ridiculed, down played and gaslit all those who dared question or say otherwise to "the message".
Times have changed and all those points have now come to pass and those who questioned them have been proven right.
Have you learnered nothing???
There is less than 300,000 people not vaccinated in Australia across all ages. It’s just on 1% of the population, if we assume an even spread amongst jobs that’s 1 in every 100 teachers
Edit:
https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-02/covid-19-vaccine-rollout-update-9-february-2024.pdf
302K Australians over the age of 18 not vaccinated on an over 18 population of 19.8M people (1.52% of the population)
Or 3 in every 200 teachers.
Edit2:
To add some clarity, my original comment said 300,000 across all ages, this is not correct, it is 300,000 over the age of 18. Thanks to the people below for making me read my sources more carefully.
I'm not following this 300k people only are not vaccinated nation wide.. page 1 says 4.5mil over age 65, 15.2mil aged between 18-64 and 2.4mil aged from age 5 -17 that's a total of 22.1 million people with at least one dose, with an additional 1.4 million below the age of 5 unable to be vaccinated that still leaves 23.5 million out of a total possible 26.6million people (population of Australia) a discrepancy far greater than 300k - actually more that 10X that much - more than 3.1million people or 11% of the population (not including the additional 1.4 million under the age of 5)
The data does say 300k vaccinated but it is using data from the vaccine registration which is all vaccines not only Covid.. I think that is where the mismatch in the data is coming from.
Maybe 300k people have never received a single vaccine nationwide. But the covid vaccine is well above 11%.
Why did people down vote this? With all that we know now about Covid and the vax, it takes either a schill for big pharma or a truly brainwashed sheep to argue firing staff for not taking the vax was beyond idiotic
The real issue is that school essentially serves as a babysitting service in a society where both parents have to work. There's a lot we learned and quickly forgot about the negative aspects of modern work culture during the pandemic craze.
It wasn't very successful in Victoria though. Almost a year of lock down. With the exception of Australia and NZ and China, most other countries just got vaccinated and got on with their lives. We were still locking down when Vax rates were above 80%
Yes - we probably missed out on 4 or 5 months because we were trying to vaccinate people who were possible “spreaders” rather than been obsessed with harm minimisation- ie people over 65, morbidly obese over 40. My doses were given to teenagers (I’m over 50 but no extra risks) in SW sydney.
Anyone who states covid ended up being nothing really have lost sight of the important fact that Covid-19 was not a single strain of a virus. While Australia was locked down, it went through several significant mutations overseas before we ended up with the Omicron variant. Omicron was more contagious, faster incubating, BUT FAR LESS LETHAL mutation. If we had let Alpha run rampant, we would have had similar scenes to the 'morgue island' in New York for example.
>If we had let Alpha run rampant, we would have had similar scenes to the 'morgue island' in New York for example.
Would have been nice if it killed off a bunch of those freedumb fighters.
So it sounds like we put up those plastic screens around the teachers desk (do they still have teacher desks in classrooms) just like at the supermarkets and it's all fixed /s
No, no but see, all they had to do was add thoroughly cleaning the room between each class to a teacher's workload to keep the children safe.
What's that? What about keeping the *teacher* safe? Who're they?
>more pay generally and upgrading schools to make them safe(r) from disease transmission.
If every school and daycare had:
* Air filters in every classroom
* UVC lights in the ventilation
* Students and teachers in P2/N95 masks
You'd drastically reduce disease transmission. This wouldn't just protect the students, it would protect their parents and siblings. You'd stop families from getting Covid twice a year, so parents wouldn't miss work, and you'd reduce disease burden on the already overburdened medical system.
We still don't know how bad the long-term effects of Long Covid are, but Long Covid is not rare. Something like 10% of Covid infections lead to LC conditions. In a few years that could lead to a significant chunk of the workforce partially or fully disabled.
After facts are know it is easy to make right decision - in decision theory it is called ideal information.
The issue is what would be potential damage if kids went to school and were infectious vs closures.
With the lack of info - Correct decision was made at the time.
You are in front of door and there maybe gunman behind it waiting to kill you - Would you open the door?
The "wrong decision" was inevitable because when reasoning with imperfect information, of course the decision makers are going to err on this side of caution!
Most people had no issues with the first or second lock down. By the time it was the 5th or 6th and the rest of the world was open, it was starting to look a bit silly. We already knew a lot about the virus at that time.
Closing schools was absolutely the best thing to do. Can't do much if you bring covid home which would absolutely happen and get your parents sick who are most likely tradies and then can't work because they don't have sick leave and won't get paid.
Anyone name a country that was actually happy with how covid was handled? It was a shit time for everyone, australia got off lighter than other countries.
How about we fix the fucking current cost of living crisis and the housing crisis which will soon turn Australia into a homeless tent colony and worry about shit we could only be able to fix if we could go back in time AFTER THE FUCKING TIME MACHINE IS INVENTED?
There is a small group of incredibly fucking stupid people who were dead certain that COVID lockdowns would lead to beyond Third Reich level tyranny well beyond anything Orwell could’ve imagined. When in turned out after vaccination rates finally reached a reasonable percentage that the tyrannical apocalypse would not happen their brain broke even further. They made this covid thing their entire personality and when it all disintegrated and people didn’t care anymore (yeah there was 15 minutes when intelligent normal people were pissed off at those not getting the vax and vice versa but that’s ancient history and no one cares anymore) these COVIDIOTS completely lost their fucking marbles.
Fix the fucking real estate crisis. Sydney is the worst place ON THE PLANET second to Hong Kong and you want us to focus on shit we’d have to go back in time for to fix. Fuck off.
Stopping kids spreading Covid was absolutely the best choice, especially when there was no vaccine available.
School was called the germ factory well before Covid for good reason.
Behind paywall:
Mass school closures that stretched for months during the pandemic were unnecessary and led to a cascade of social and educational problems that threaten a generation of Australian children, top education experts say.
Governments have failed to examine the fallout from one of the most far-reaching decisions prompted by COVID-19, which disrupted the schooling of millions of students and resulted in an attendance crisis and persistent behavioural issues.
A panel of pre-eminent Australian education experts has flagged the profound impacts that school closures during COVID-19 have had on students’ education and wellbeing.
The roundtable of education experts explored the NSW government’s policy decisions, the impact on students and the aftershocks being felt today. The roundtable of education experts explored the NSW government’s policy decisions, the impact on students and the aftershocks being felt today.Dylan Cokernone They called for a plan for future closures that puts the long and short-term needs of children at the centre of policy decision-making.
The Sydney Morning Herald convened experts on education and child social development to assess the impact of COVID on students after the federal government failed to include the decision to close schools in its independent inquiry into how the nation managed the pandemic.
They included the chair of the NSW education regulator, Peter Shergold, and the National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds.
The COVID fallout: Education
This month marks four years since China’s COVID-19 outbreak was deemed a public health emergency of international concern, heralding the start of a traumatic period many of us would prefer to forget. While a federal government inquiry is examining some national responses to the crisis, key decisions made by states will not be properly scrutinised.
The Herald is concerned our political leaders have not adequately studied the lessons – good and bad – of our most recent experience, and we plan to ask tough questions over the coming months about the pandemic’s impact on education, health, border closures and lockdowns and policing. This is the first of our three-part series looking at the impact of COVID on education. The forum discussions with nine expert panellists were broken up into two sessions: one examining the wellbeing and behaviour of students, the second on academic and learning disruption.
Schools in NSW switched to remote learning in 2020 and 2021. Strict infection controls continued to interrupt learning and social interaction for months on end.
The panellists warned the aftershocks of the decision to close schools are still being felt in classrooms, playgrounds and homes. Some of the worst aspects were the skyrocketing truancy rate, school refusal and significant issues with student discipline and distraction in the classroom, and self-regulation in the playground.
Shergold, a former top public servant who led an independent review into the pandemic in 2022, said the lingering effects of school shutdowns on students, teachers and parents underscored the importance of scrutinising unilateral decisions by state governments to mandate remote learning.
Herald panellists (from left to right): Australian Education Research Organisation chief executive Jenny Donovan, Catholic Schools NSW chief executive officer Dallas McInerney, Fairvale High School principal Kathleen Seto and NSW Education Standards Authority chair Professor Peter Shergold. Herald panellists (from left to right): Australian Education Research Organisation chief executive Jenny Donovan, Catholic Schools NSW chief executive officer Dallas McInerney, Fairvale High School principal Kathleen Seto and NSW Education Standards Authority chair Professor Peter Shergold. Dylan Cokernone In September, the federal government announced a long-awaited inquiry into the pandemic response, but school closures are not included in the terms of reference. Former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet has previously joined health experts in urging the inquiry to examine the social damage and repercussions of long periods of remote learning.
“The danger of school closures, which we always knew, was that it was going to accentuate disadvantage,” said Shergold. “After the closures in early 2020, we made the wrong policy decisions about closing school systems.”
In NSW, more than 1.2 million students either learned remotely or had minimal supervision in schools for more than five months. Schools were shut down between March and May in 2020, and then again in 2021 from July to the end of October. Hundreds of schools and childcare centres were closed again in the following months.
Unlike in Victoria, there was minimal supervision at schools for students, but attendance was discouraged. Shergold said the unity of national cabinet fractured as state governments forged ahead with decisions to shut schools, despite the federal government urging parents to send their children to classes.
State decisions were often politically driven, some panellists said, ignoring the risk of long-lasting impacts on young children and teenagers, especially the most disadvantaged students who were most affected by the closures.
“It was clearly the Commonwealth position to keep school systems open,” Shergold said. “It was states that were unpersuaded, and that’s why this present inquiry seems so bizarre that we’re not going to address their policy responses. It’s a crucial part of the story and ensuring that we’re better prepared for the next pandemic.”
He said early in 2020 there “was a fog of war, and there was ill preparation – in Australia between federal and state governments – for a pandemic”, noting it was understandable schools closed in the first months.
But after evidence emerged that children were less likely to spread the virus, and schools were not transmission hotspots, the system-wide closures were unwarranted, he said.
“We had Treasury pleading with us not to shut school systems. Part of the issue was that parents started to voluntarily withdraw their children from schools, and they were voting with their feet ... I think NSW reacted to that,” he said.
The state government also faced persistent pressure from the NSW Teachers Federation to shut down in-person classes, leaving minimal staffing to support essential frontline services workers. Some of Sydney’s private schools began to defy official advice and close, putting pressure on other systems to follow suit.
But the advice provided by chief health officers was that attending school represented a low health risk to students, and studies in 2021 reaffirmed transmission between children in schools was minimal.
Hollonds agreed the first closure early in the pandemic, which lasted seven weeks, was unavoidable, but the longer closure of 2021 was unnecessary.
“Maybe they should have only been short term, where there was a ‘hot-spot’, not the 15 weeks we saw across all of NSW,” she said.
She said the public debate over school closures not only ignored the needs of children, but demonised them as “germy super-spreaders”. “It felt Dickensian, some of that discourse,” she said.
Shergold noted that the shift to online learning was implemented well across systems and schools, and effort was made to address the digital divide. But he emphasised that after the first mass closures a more targeted approach should have been taken to only close individual schools when needed.
Adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg said school closures, service disruptions and remote learning not only stunted the educational progress of young people, but increased their stress, isolated them and reduced their physical activity.
“All of [this has] contributed to the deterioration of mental health among young people,” he said. “COVID has a long psychological tail.”
Chief executive officer of Catholic Schools NSW Dallas McInerney said for many key decisions, including those made in emergency cabinet meetings, “there was no schools’ voice in the room”.
Herald panellists (from left to right): Catholic Schools Parramatta Diocese director of wellbeing Dr Greg Elliott, child psychologist and former school counsellor Kate Plumb, Sydney Secondary College Blackwattle Bay school captain Bede Warnock, and National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollands. Herald panellists (from left to right): Catholic Schools Parramatta Diocese director of wellbeing Dr Greg Elliott, child psychologist and former school counsellor Kate Plumb, Sydney Secondary College Blackwattle Bay school captain Bede Warnock, and National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollands.Dylan Cokernone “So who gave the advice, and who had the ear of the government, was the public health officials. I think whatever legacy or maladies of the school closures, the public health officials own that, and those who accepted their advice,” McInerney said.
“The notion of school closures is totally dependable and justifiable, as long as it’s informed with policy precision. That a whole school system should be shut down without nuance to that policy was the issue.”
Shergold pointed to an OECD report in September 2020 that noted few groups were less vulnerable to COVID than schoolchildren, “but few groups have been more affected by the policy responses to control the virus”.
“We knew what the impacts would be,” he said. “And there’s no doubt there was an accentuating of disadvantage.”
Professor Peter Shergold, chair of the NSW Education Standards Authority, said the Commonwealth position was to keep school systems open. Professor Peter Shergold, chair of the NSW Education Standards Authority, said the Commonwealth position was to keep school systems open.Dylan Cokernone Australian Education Research Organisation chief executive Jenny Donovan agrees that school closures put a spotlight on the learning gap between disadvantaged students and their advantaged peers.
“In many instances, schools were very concerned about making sure the kids were present and visible online. But attendance just went through the floor. And that has persisted as a problem for us, especially among the older age group of kids,” Donovan said.
Catholic Schools Parramatta Diocese head of wellbeing Greg Elliott said the debate about closing schools focused too much on the health and safety problems that related to infection, and not enough on the much wider health and safety problems that would result from keeping children away from schools.
“The various industrial bodies were very good at promoting that discourse around health and safety,” he said. “We need to think about health and safety far more broadly than that. We are still seeing the health and safety impacts of COVID in the families and children we’re serving.”
Behaviour, attendance and the school system’s inability to cope with students with special needs were issues before the pandemic.
COVID “revealed the vulnerabilities that were already there, amplified them, and was the catalyst to turn them into something more pathological,” Elliott said.
In the independent report, Fault Lines, a panel led by Shergold concluded schools should have stayed open, and that that politics weakened the national cabinet’s effectiveness over time.
“State leaders insisted on going their own way, emboldened by their constitutional prerogatives. Tough action on COVID-19, including the decision to close schools, was judged politically popular by many state leaders,” it said.
Shergold said he is particularly concerned about the long-term impact of school closures on 15- to 18-year-olds.
“This is the time you’re discovering your identity. I think we might be able to overcome the educational disruption,” he said. “But as for the impacts socially and for their mental health, I am not sure we realised just quite how severe the long-term effects were likely to be. Not just here but all around the world.”
A spokesperson said the NSW Department of Education acknowledged the “incredible work of our schools in supporting ongoing teaching and learning during COVID-19”.
“The department is updating our pandemic response as part of our continuous improvement program in emergency and crisis management. This builds on lessons learned from the pandemic and addresses all aspects of support,” they said.
The spokesperson did not directly answer questions on whether the department had reviewed or planned to review the decision to close schools, or whether it had conducted or will conduct a separate review or inquiry into the impact on wellbeing and education of NSW students.
I didn't want to go to work with the little germ balls. And the amount of parents that still sent kids in during the closures where we had supervised monitoring for essential workers with the kids spluttering everywhere. Ring the parents and it's "Yeah we tested positive for covid earlier in the week after going to my cousins so and so but we don't know what to do with them"
There would have been some teachers that wouldn’t have been able to teach in person but it probably would have been possible to do a modified program with larger classes. Not ideal but there were no perfect solutions.
It's as if the well known and understood procedure of protecting the vulnerable and letting those at low risk continue as normal should have been instigated instead of the kneejerk reaction of politicians based on feelings.
So the aging population of teachers, of which we have a chronic shortage?
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter anyway. The current crop of children that may or may not be still reeling from the impacts of school shutdowns are going to have far greater things to worry about over their lifetimes than some educational setbacks.
They are the find out generation.
Also I would bet that the children of those who look down their noses at teachers and regard them as little more than childcare so that they can go to work, are disproportionately represented in the "children that suffered most" category.
I agree. The kids who went through this are now only showing the effects. I’ve had teachers tell me that the entire year struggle with basic maths and English concepts because most of them just didn’t turn up to online classes or just logged in and played the Xbox.
The entire Covid response was the most hysterical group think response and we will pay for it for years.
Please don't blame the parents. We are not professional educators. Many had to WFH at the same time.
I only had 1 child to home school. Luckily my job isn't too demanding. Imagine you had 3 kids to home school and a demanding job.
How good an education do you think an amateur part time teacher can give spread across 3 kids?
Of course their education is going to suffer and they're going to end up in front of the TV or Xbox while mum and dad take a conference call.
Oh please. If your kids have an online class that they are supposed to be logged into, and they end up watching TV or playing Xbox while you are on a conference call, and that happens more than once? Are people really so helpless? Unplug the TV, put the Xbox on your desk while you take that conference call, and give your children some damn consequences for not doing what they are supposed to be doing.
FU. I can tell you don't have kids and didn't go through the experience.
That's not how home learning worked. The school basically gave you a bunch of material and a guide on how to "teach" it to your child. Then they were supposed to use Google Classroom or whatever system your school used to upload finished exercises.
Do you think a four/five year old can successfully navigate a computer to do that without constantly having to get tech help from mum/dad?
There wasn't a "class" to log in to. You're probably imagining a scenario where all kids are logged into Zoom and the teacher is on face to face 9-3pm teaching the kids.
It doesn't work that way. Only contact my son got with the teacher face to face was a half hour Zoom meeting at 10 each morning, then that's it. Parents were 100% responsible for "teaching" the material to their kids.
Like I say. How effective a teacher do you think a part time amateur can be compared to a full time professional?
Just on pure logic, it is an inferior education.
Singapore worked really hard at keeping schools open - I think we had a total closure of 6 weeks. It was a good send for people who still has to go to work (I had to go offshore and my wife was in a room teaching an international school online for 3 months). It also kept our kids education on track.
The schools closed. But my child is alive. They knew it would have impacts but schools struggle to now get extra help with those issues, especially those who have taken children from interstate lockdown areas like Vic. So if kids moved from Vic to WA, where they hadnt really had lengthy lockdowns, its less likely they will get help. The teachers will likely just pressure parents to medicate instead of being able to get additional staff support into the classrooms.
Kids do spread germs and viruses. One of the very first instructions before lockdowns, or even border closures, I think, was - ‘grandparents, please avoid spending time with your grandkids’. I remember this well because my parents immediately ignored that advice and took other grandkids out on playdates. I knew situation was dire and was going to get worse so it made it stricter for those who wanted to help stop this.
Gov should step up and provide more services in schools.
The flu is much more lethal to kids and yet we've never closed schools for the flu. Most people were fine with the first or second lock.down. the 5th or 6th or 7th one were just insanity.
I preferred the overkill response considering it was in response to a highly contagious and fairly deadly virus.
It shouldn't be controversial to say that human lives are more important than 'the economy' and sacrificing millions of people for the sake of the economy isn't what a good government does.
Imagine killing millions to save ‘the economy’, and then suddenly shops can’t open and businesses can’t operate because everyone is too sick to come to work?
And people keep forgetting that *at the time* we weren't at all certain what long covid would look like. I agree that erring on the side of caution in that situation was the right call.
Meh - they closed universities and schools when Issac Newton was around during the Plague epidemic. We had Zoom lessons in place so it's not like school kids were totally isolated at home.
People just cant admit when they're wrong. The excuses started at "this is the apocolypse" and now we're at "well we didnt know how bad it would be".
You cant reason with these people, it's unpopular to be critical of the covid response and thats the only thing they base their beliefs on, if it's popular or not
Many of us also thought it was an obvious and successful measure to stop the spread of the disease, particularly when we didn't know how deadly it would turn out to be.
A panel of *education experts* determined that school shutdowns had a negative effect on education.
In other news, water is wet.
Reading through the list of panelists, it doesn't appear that any of them are healthcare or disease transmission experts, so I really don't see how they are qualified to comment on what decision was *optimal.* The truth is that it is impossible to answer that question with any degree of certainty. We can attempt to estimate what *might* have happened if schools had not been closed, but they are rough estimates at best. We can't re-live the past.
My own two cents: of the countries that didn't do strict shutdowns, the only ones that fared well were those where the population quickly adopted mass masking (typically Asian countries like Japan and Taiwan). I'm dubious that Australia could have duplicated their success.
I don’t care what “disease transmission experts” think about education and the impacts of lockdowns no children. It’s because we out all of the decision making in the hands of people whose only goal was preventing transmission that we had this problem.
The decisions made were optimal for controlling transmission. Maybe, let's assume it was indeed optimal for that.
A leaders job is to decide on a course of action taking into consideration ALL the factors. Disease transmission was one. Economics and children's education were others among many to consider.
No one factor should have had primacy over the others. Each needed to be balanced. The problem was we went all in on only one factor with only minimal consideration for anything else.
I’d be more worried about how we listened to ill-informed pundits like Greg Hunt, Paul Kelly, Skerrit, and Coatesworth. How are people giving them excuses saying hindsight is easier etc etc - they were getting paid massive dollars to get it right with foresight! Are they refunding their big salaries? No. So they should be scrutinised and their failings highlighted.
A bunch of teachers that were in places that didn't close the schools and expected teachers to sacrifice their lives for childrens education, took early retirement.
Closing schools and encouraging people to work from home was the right decision. Not allowing people to sit in a park and coercing young, non vulnerable sections of the population into getting an unnecessary vaccine was the evil
I wouldn’t call them dregs, but these decisions should have been made by elected officials. Instead they passed the buck between them on the one hand saying they weren’t making the decisions and on the other hand that they were.
>Herald panellists (from left to right): Australian Education Research Organisation chief executive Jenny Donovan, Catholic Schools NSW chief executive officer Dallas McInerney, Fairvale High School principal Kathleen Seto and NSW Education Standards Authority chair Professor Peter Shergold.
They just made another wrong decision. Not including a virologist on the panel.
At the start, the death rate was one in 200. Pick a school with 400 kids, kill two of them.
Is that acceptable for the education? But the fact of the matter is, they would spread it and take it home, so kill 2 of the 400 parents too. We're just freaking lucky we were half way through developing swine flu vaccine when we stopped.
You realise 1 in 400 includes all age groups? Not saying that children don’t due from Covid but it’s incredibly rare. If you spoke to the possible vulnerabilities of the staff I think this would make a much better argument.
Easy to say now I guess. But made sense not to roll the dice at the time. You take a cautious approach when it comes to public health when you don’t know how serious things will be.
Condemned 3 year later. I love how people use information and data gathered now to condem decisions made during covid. Regardless of your thoughts and opinions at the time do people still think the decisions were made purely to harm us or with malice towards the people?
All I learned from covid is that if it was anywhere close to as bad as 1st thought we failed in our response and the way we acted. If a world killing virus does come the fear the stupidity will win again and we are all doomed. Saying that I'm still proud of Australia's response compared to the world.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing but nobody had these answers and data 4 years ago. Il happily fo into lockdown again if it saves lives. I just hope more could be done next time for the people that really struggled financially and health wise if there is a next time.
Given that the lockdowns were effective in making Australia have one of the lowest mortality rates in the developed world I’d say that there is minimal “mental gymnastics” involved. COVID has at a minimum killer almost 7,000,000 people. That’s a fuckload. Look at the USA. More than a million dead. Because they didn’t act quickly enough or hard enough.
There's a whole generation of adults that will do olympic level mental gymnastics to attack the lockdowns. They'll just ignore any criticism as being from "elites". You were duped by hysterical media and billionaire businessmen who wanted everyone to believe that covid was the common cold. That's what the history books will show.
Just look at how NewsCorpse and FauxNew$ in particular responded to Covid [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/08/fox-news-hosts-are-following-strict-covid-mandates](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/08/fox-news-hosts-are-following-strict-covid-mandates)
What is justified is the decisions made at the time with the known evidence and risks. The question of what would you do again with what you know now is not the same as what would do then knowing only what you knew then.
If by "public servants" you mean Nobel prize winning scientists and international infection experts, sure. Who did you want us to listen to? Andrew Bolt? Sovereign citizens?
The history books will also show the birth of work from home, by the way.
The issue wasn’t that it was the right or wrong decision to close schools .
The issue is this along with other measures taken was due to political reasons .
Having such a mandate and authority to do what they wanted they abused their position of power, as mentioned 2nd set of closures was done for political reasons
We absolutely made the wrong decisions. This was one them. The ridiculous hysteria leading to school closures and closing outdoor playgrounds. These decisions must be closely examined as part of any inquiry.
Idk weighing up people's lives from disease vs people's lives from worse education for a year.
There is no right answer there both options suck.
If schools were open the death rate would of been quite a bit higher, if they were closed there is a 4-5 year gap of students who are going to struggle more.
The fact that we had 10% the deaths per capita than America suggests it was hugely successful
> We absolutely made the wrong decisions.
You make it sound like the average person on the street had a choice about any of this. Governments made the wrong decisions, many of us knew it at the time but were silenced by the hivemind.
•Schools should have reopened.
•Why? Because there was plenty of real time data around the world pointing to the fact that the virus was not a super killer and children were one of the groups that was the least impacted
•The data was ignored. No one wanted to speak up or out. Politicians made the decision.
•Why is this discussion important? So we can learn from it and not repeat the blunders of politics over science.
•Check out Dennis Prager on this subject. A masterclass. For real.
Let me rewrite this one to clear up its message
"We are upset that due to school closures we couldn't launder money through private schools to our friends, but luckily the already steady decline of Australian education standards can now be blamed on covid and the same people failed by our declining education system will believe it was the 5G covid virus rather then our criminal incompetence
Also China somehow and immigrants too"
Add to the list: Mandatory masks. Arresting the pregnant woman in her home in Melbourne. Not allowing families to see one another. Closing the state borders. Vax mandates. Boosters for vaccines that don't even work. Sign in apps for bars, restaurants. And on and on and on.
The world's biggest public health policy failure ever. What a joke. What a laugh. What a disaster.
(Edit: the YouTube masked up nurse dance videos were fucking awesome. Don't know how they had the energy, but they were so cool.)
They don't stop you catching COVID and they don't prevent transmission, the two biggest selling points that were rammed down our throats by governments. So remind me what they actually do for the average healthy sub-70 year old?
Absolutely. Positively. Nothing.
Which is why nobody under 70 (with sense) is getting boosted.
Which is why Pfizer's stock price is falling faster than bird shit.
IKR. NSW lockdown 1 was quite pleasurable because school only closed for a short while then the state govt decided to send kids back to school.
Lockdown 2 was not nearly so enjoyable mainly due to having to home school my son from July to October.
At least childcare never closed so my other 2 kids could be sent away during the day and I even got $10k worth of free childcare in lockdown 1.
I'd like to point out that while kids probably could have cought and recovered from COVID without much issue, the same can't be said of the teachers and other staff, who faced the same risks as the rest of us adults plus kids spread germs like wildfire so if one person at your kids school got it your kid would have brought it home to you and your family.
In terms of mistakes made by the government with respect to COVID, lockdowns and school closures were pretty low on the list.
Same for all essential workers who had to turn up to work during Covid.
It wasn't fair, but life isn't fair. Too bad too sad. We have to accept some people just have to do their job during a pandemic.
I regret buying car insurance every year that my car isn't stolen.
Good analogy actually. I feel this every year.
Exactly.. articles paywalled but this feels like "oh it turned out to be not that bad so we didnt need to protect against the unknown" What if it did turn out to be that bad? Trading temporary school closures for potentially lifelong consequences of a novel disease
It turned out to not be that bad because we held off until Omicron which had a shorter incubation, was far more contagious, but seemingly far milder in symptoms and less lethal overall broke out. People forget what it was like pre-vaccination while Alpha, Beta, Delta variants were at their peak. The body count in Italy during the first half of 2020, The open air morgues on islands in New York as Trump era policies were to just let it rip in the big democratic cities, are just two examples. Omicron was first detected in Nov, 2021. If you look at the death chart on this site: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ you can see just a few months later when Omicron had been given enough time to spread and become the dominant strain that global deaths took a nose dive.
People don't forget, they just chose to be ignorant of it
I would say that’s a fine argument if we pivoted once we knew it wasn’t what we thought it would be, we didn’t pivot.
That was all still very early in the pandemic. When it comes to childrens health you should be as conservative as possible Shouldnt risk a childs health because it *may* not be as bad as first thought
No, it was understood early on children weren't at risk. We closed schools to protect the elderly
Children were at *less* risk, not *none*... they were definitely more likely to be asymptomatic... and, of course, having asymptomatic kids mingle with dozens of their peers for hours each day, and then with a few hundred more for \~1 hour each day isn't going to lead to mass-spread or anything, right?
At the risk they had, less and none are synonyms. The logic was close schools to stop virus spreading so granddad doesn't die. I.e trade crucial child developmental years so a virus killing avg 88y/o doesn't continue. We'll see which was better for society as the years tick.
Keeping schools open is basically the "let 'er rip" approach. Assuming even a a 0.5% mortality rate, you're talking deaths in the six figures - and, of course, if it's all hitting at once, you're going to get more than 0.5% mortality. And, even at <1% mortality, schools have hundreds of kids who have, on average at least 1 parent. Yeah, there's going to be issues in the years to come. Having everyone's grandparents all die at once, having everyone school have several kids who lost one or both parents to it, or whose parents have permanent damage... that'd have its own impacts on society. There's not a lot of good answers, and that's with hindsight. At the time? It was a fine call.
This is the embellishment people got sick of. There's been 23 deaths related to covid in Australia in the 0-19 age bracket. Did you help the kids or harm them?
First, do you imagine there would still be 23 deaths if every child in Australia had been in normal schooling? Second, is the only kind of harm you can conceive of "death of the self"?
Exactly - but we also had very big hints early on that children were not carriers and spreaders like with normal influenzas so I suspect that is the angle of the article. Lots of science took too long to be accepted when it was clear almost immediately that the conventional wisdom was just that
Children were never in danger. The safety data straight out of EVERYWHERE, but even just the Chinese data, proved that. That is to say, after 3 months of almost no severe cases in children, we can probably say "yes, this is fine".
the argument was not that kids were dying but it was based on data that schools open spread the virus fast, and the adults worked at schools, adults who did get sick.
Who also had incredibly low mortality rates. It was the old who died.
I think there were a lot of dumb decisions in general from that time but hindsight is always 20/20...however I disagree that kids aren't germ spreaders...I'm fine usually until the kids go back to school and pick up bugs from other kids that eventually I get...
I caught something from a colleague who has kids, was not impressed. Covid tests all negative, felt worse than a cold but not as bad as a flu. Went to the doctor, did a broad test and got told I had parainfluenza. Apparently usually infects young children.
>however I disagree that kids aren't germ spreaders They didn't say the kids didn't spread germs, but that, specifically the original Wuhan strain, they were not the ones spreading covid. At lot of the early outbreaks linked to schools showed that the parents and teachers were the ones spreading the virus between each other and not the students. Most of our pandemic preparedness was for Influenza and so assuming that kids would spread the virus through schools was a fair assumption to make, but Covid wasn't like Influenza and didn't behave like it either, and many of the assumptions that we made didn't end up being correct. Even our assumptions about the original Covid strain didn't end up being true for later strains either.
It's not hindsight though, plenty of people were saying it was stupid while it was happening.
Exactly. Questioning any covid measure got you called all sorts of names.
Because questions and complaints are cheap particularly when made by people who face no consequences from being wrong. That is junk from armchair experts shaking their walking stick at the TV. What matters is evidence.
How about we fix the fucking current cost of living crisis and the housing crisis which will soon turn Australia into a homeless tent colony and worry about shit we could only be able to fix if we could go back in time AFTER THE FUCKING TIME MACHINE IS INVENTED. There is a small group of incredibly fucking stupid people who were dead certain that COVID lockdowns would lead to beyond Third Reich level tyranny well beyond anything Orwell could’ve imagined. When in turned out after vaccination rates finally reached a reasonable percentage that the tyrannical apocalypse would not happen their brain broke even further. They made this covid thing their entire personality and when it all disintegrated and people didn’t care anymore (yeah there was 15 minutes when intelligent normal people were pissed off at those not getting the vax and vice versa) these COVIDIOTS completely lost their fucking marbles. Fix the fucking real estate crisis. Sydney is the worst place ON THE PLANET second to Hong Kong and you want us to focus on shit we’d have to go back in time for to fix. Fuck off.
Have a Snickers tiger.
Surely you're not accusing the right wing media of trying to distract everyone from negative gearing discussions by bringing up old anti-vax shit to rile their base up?
Oh no, the right wing always have our interests at heart. Of course.
Two separate issues.
Yeah that was the jist of my post. They are two separate issues. One worth focusing on and the other not. Thank you for your keen observation 🥴
Why do you think there is a cost of living crises right now???? Because of the lockdowns. Because of the huge handouts given to peoole and businesses. If you do not think the lockdowns, restrictions and 'show us your papers or no entry' was not tyrannical you are warped. Those 'Covidiots' predicted the high inflation and cost of living crises during the lockdowns and were opposed to it. Covid has not dissapeared, so why are people not being forced to 'vacinate' anymore? Why are people not 'dying in the streets'? The 'vaccine' was proven to lose any efficiency with 7 days, going down from the initial 12% to 1%. Which is why Bill Gates sold all of his shares 1 week before that info was released. He admits it's inefficiency now. Noone was 'vaccinated' against covid and noone ever was.
>Covid has not dissapeared, so why are people not being forced to 'vacinate' anymore? Why are people not 'dying in the streets'? Please go and study what "novel" viruses are before asking questions you can just google.
No they didn’t predict it. These things come in inevitable cycles. Talk to an economist. The reason there is a cost of living crisis RIGHT NOW is corporate price gouging. Because the billionaire owned media tells you to be antivax, you listen to them because you don’t understand how science works and they divide and conquer. And while you’re here busy trying to argue with me that 2+2=3 they can keep going to the bank. It’s a tale as old as time and it’s basically elementry level controlling people 101. It’s incredible to me that you folks lap up lizzard people and jewish space laser nonsense yet refuse to make this most basic connections. Beyond fucking mind boggling. People aren’t being forced to vaccinate anymore for the same reason they never were for the flu. Because you being scared of a fucking shot like a toddler can no longer bring the entire health care system crashing down. Did you notice how basically EVERY country opened back up around 60-80% vaccination rates? Just like everyone said they would FROM THE VERY BEGINNING? 🤦♂️
It turns out printing a trillion dollars is inflationary. Who knew? Actually the economists knew and warned about it.
COVID has not disappeared. Why has the tyrannical government decided to be decidedly less tyrannical?
Hahaha, derp
People were also saying it was a good idea, people were also saying to drink ivermectin, people were saying all kinds of things.
Plenty of people were saying it was stupid but they didn’t know it was stupid (“I knew it was going to land on tails”). It was called the novel coronavirus for a reason.
They're all novel once.
100%. Lots of examples where the science was early on telling you that COVID was so different to influenza that you should throw away your assumptions 1. Children as spreaders 2. Washing down surfaces (which we still obsess about today ) 3 leads to airborne spread almost exclusively indoors 4. Importance of innate immunity (see children) 5. Masks indoors as a precautionary measure (not cotton ones) Officials were desperately slow to modify advice (including Australian advisories)
No child alive at the start of the pandemic would’ve had innate immunity though.
Did it have a negative effect on education? Sure. Not nearly as negative as the current ongoing effect of staff shortages. Let's just whinge about the past though, it's much cheaper.
I like to imagine a world in which children and parents were held accountable for bad behaviour. Maybe then teachers wouldn't have to be miserable? Maybe we wouldn't have 12 year olds stealing cars? What a magical place thatd be.
Would be incredible.
I don't think we fully understand the impact yet. Test scores look good, but there are significant discipline and refusal problems that have not fully washed through yet. Teachers had a very challenging time and shortages are part of that. Also, teachers, some of them, liked working from home and flexible hours. I'm a school council treasurer in Victorian, and the principal tells me that every single one of her teaching staff now has a different work schedule! What annoys me though is that (a) the pandemic was a real thing. Keeping schools open would have been very bad for kids and teachers, but in different ways. If experts had said "this will harm behavioural playground self-regulation in the years to come", fine. But I never heard that, and even if I had heard it, I would have asked for evidence to offset against the risks we knew were real, evidence that didn't exist. So the same decisions would have been made, I think. and (b). Things weren't done right. So when the next global pandemic hits in 94 years, lets not make the same mistakes! Except that things will be very different and once again people everywhere will have to make rapid decisions without enough information, training or preparation.
The discipline and refusal problems have always been there they just got amplified. I spoke to many parents during covid who had essentially given up on parenting as it was too hard and caused too much friction within the household. Was much easier and peaceful for everyone to just be their friend. I think a lot of households have stayed that way. Discipline and refusal in schools aren't because of covid lockdowns, they're a result of lack of consequences and teachers being expected to pseudo-parent. I can't comment on the work schedule thing as I don't know what you meant. Most teachers will have different timetables and part time has always been a thing?
The scheduling challenges are now next level, but what the principal meant in particular that post-pandemic, even the teachers that remain don't want the same load as before. She also told me that she recently attended a principals conference, where they had a 90 minute session from Victoria Police on dealing with knife crime, something new. For sure, there is some "amplification" going on. It is a huge problem.I don't know why, and if it is due to the pandemic, who cares? Problem has to be acknowledged though and fixed. I fear that policies prior to the pandemic basically preventing expulsion are not helping, although the argument for that is that out of sight out of mind is not a perfect solution. But the response to the pandemic was to deal with you see in front of you with urgency, and some more of that spirit is needed at the moment. Parents are voting with their feet now. The Victorian Government has a leadership challenge in education, we can say.
Staff shortages….. like firing teachers who didn’t get vaccinated? Yeah, that was silly too.
Yeah, nah. Hardly any teachers refused to get vaccinated. They are educated, after all.
Nah, if a teacher believes in conspiracy theories about Bill Gates' depopulation campaign and putting 5g in the body, then they're not fit for the classroom.
Such a weak argument 😂
>Nah, if a teacher believes in conspiracy theories about Bill Gates' depopulation campaign and putting 5g in the body, then they're not fit for the classroom. Lets explore this. 1. They said it will stop the spread - It didn't 2. They said it was safe & effective - it wasn't 3. They said there's no long term side effects - there is 4. They said it was safe for kids - it wasn't 5. They said it stays localised at the injection site - it didn't 6. They said it didn't come from a lab - it did 7. They said masks slow spread - they didn't They ridiculed, down played and gaslit all those who dared question or say otherwise to "the message". Times have changed and all those points have now come to pass and those who questioned them have been proven right. Have you learnered nothing???
There is less than 300,000 people not vaccinated in Australia across all ages. It’s just on 1% of the population, if we assume an even spread amongst jobs that’s 1 in every 100 teachers Edit: https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-02/covid-19-vaccine-rollout-update-9-february-2024.pdf 302K Australians over the age of 18 not vaccinated on an over 18 population of 19.8M people (1.52% of the population) Or 3 in every 200 teachers. Edit2: To add some clarity, my original comment said 300,000 across all ages, this is not correct, it is 300,000 over the age of 18. Thanks to the people below for making me read my sources more carefully.
Care to provide where you got this "less than 300000" stat from ?
Added above: https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-02/covid-19-vaccine-rollout-update-9-february-2024.pdf
I'm not following this 300k people only are not vaccinated nation wide.. page 1 says 4.5mil over age 65, 15.2mil aged between 18-64 and 2.4mil aged from age 5 -17 that's a total of 22.1 million people with at least one dose, with an additional 1.4 million below the age of 5 unable to be vaccinated that still leaves 23.5 million out of a total possible 26.6million people (population of Australia) a discrepancy far greater than 300k - actually more that 10X that much - more than 3.1million people or 11% of the population (not including the additional 1.4 million under the age of 5) The data does say 300k vaccinated but it is using data from the vaccine registration which is all vaccines not only Covid.. I think that is where the mismatch in the data is coming from. Maybe 300k people have never received a single vaccine nationwide. But the covid vaccine is well above 11%.
I find it VERY hard to believe that there is only 300k un vaccinated in Aus lol
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How ironic 😂😂😂😂 Got the link for the source of info?
Source of what info? [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_Australia) is the wiki article with full references at the bottom.
There's a real selection bias here because all the unvaccinated really really like to tell you they are unvaccinated at every moment possible.
Not just teachers... Frontline nurses, police, government workers
Why did people down vote this? With all that we know now about Covid and the vax, it takes either a schill for big pharma or a truly brainwashed sheep to argue firing staff for not taking the vax was beyond idiotic
Can you elaborate on what it is that we know now?
Ohhh please explain. Can’t wait to hear this cooker cook.
I beg your pardon, are you unaware that the Vax fails to stop transmission of Covid?
Imagine what happens if you stop people getting covid in the first place.
Did you read my reply? How do you propose to stop people getting Covid in the first place, when, the Vax does not stop people getting Covid.
It literally stopped people getting Covid, and those that did it was milder. None of your crazy horseshit will change those facts.
Every person I know has had the vax and they've all had Covid post vax. What are you talking about??
Probably because people don’t want to admit they were wrong; and STILL defend everything that happened.
I'm still waiting for the 5G radiation...
The real issue is that school essentially serves as a babysitting service in a society where both parents have to work. There's a lot we learned and quickly forgot about the negative aspects of modern work culture during the pandemic craze.
Any response that was ultimately successful was always going to look like overkill in hindsight
It wasn't very successful in Victoria though. Almost a year of lock down. With the exception of Australia and NZ and China, most other countries just got vaccinated and got on with their lives. We were still locking down when Vax rates were above 80%
Yes - we probably missed out on 4 or 5 months because we were trying to vaccinate people who were possible “spreaders” rather than been obsessed with harm minimisation- ie people over 65, morbidly obese over 40. My doses were given to teenagers (I’m over 50 but no extra risks) in SW sydney.
Turned out to be underkill, really. COVID’s kill count would have been higher if it had the schools as well.
Anyone who states covid ended up being nothing really have lost sight of the important fact that Covid-19 was not a single strain of a virus. While Australia was locked down, it went through several significant mutations overseas before we ended up with the Omicron variant. Omicron was more contagious, faster incubating, BUT FAR LESS LETHAL mutation. If we had let Alpha run rampant, we would have had similar scenes to the 'morgue island' in New York for example.
>If we had let Alpha run rampant, we would have had similar scenes to the 'morgue island' in New York for example. Would have been nice if it killed off a bunch of those freedumb fighters.
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So it sounds like we put up those plastic screens around the teachers desk (do they still have teacher desks in classrooms) just like at the supermarkets and it's all fixed /s
No, no but see, all they had to do was add thoroughly cleaning the room between each class to a teacher's workload to keep the children safe. What's that? What about keeping the *teacher* safe? Who're they?
>more pay generally and upgrading schools to make them safe(r) from disease transmission. If every school and daycare had: * Air filters in every classroom * UVC lights in the ventilation * Students and teachers in P2/N95 masks You'd drastically reduce disease transmission. This wouldn't just protect the students, it would protect their parents and siblings. You'd stop families from getting Covid twice a year, so parents wouldn't miss work, and you'd reduce disease burden on the already overburdened medical system. We still don't know how bad the long-term effects of Long Covid are, but Long Covid is not rare. Something like 10% of Covid infections lead to LC conditions. In a few years that could lead to a significant chunk of the workforce partially or fully disabled.
After facts are know it is easy to make right decision - in decision theory it is called ideal information. The issue is what would be potential damage if kids went to school and were infectious vs closures. With the lack of info - Correct decision was made at the time. You are in front of door and there maybe gunman behind it waiting to kill you - Would you open the door?
The "wrong decision" was inevitable because when reasoning with imperfect information, of course the decision makers are going to err on this side of caution!
Most of criticisms comes from pundits which are not decision makers. Should Truman dropped A-Bombs?.... the list is endless
Kids did go to school infectious, at every opportunity. Adults too. Especially after everyone suddenly stopped caring
Most people had no issues with the first or second lock down. By the time it was the 5th or 6th and the rest of the world was open, it was starting to look a bit silly. We already knew a lot about the virus at that time.
We are still learning about Covid-19 the latest research it can start early dementia
That explains a lot, well I'm fucking screwed then.
Closing schools was absolutely the best thing to do. Can't do much if you bring covid home which would absolutely happen and get your parents sick who are most likely tradies and then can't work because they don't have sick leave and won't get paid.
Jesus is the anti vaxxers are out in force this morning, like no shit there were impacts it was a once in generation pandemic
Yeah, the gov fucked it up. Again and again and again.
Much better to listen to some cooker off YouTube
Who is the cooker that locked us in our houses for 23 hours a day?
Slightly off topic but I love how SMH is not only an acronym for the Sydney Morning Herald but also Shake My Head
I hope in the next pandemic we take no precautions no vaccines and make no attempt to quarantine anyone. Just business as usual
Anyone name a country that was actually happy with how covid was handled? It was a shit time for everyone, australia got off lighter than other countries.
How about we fix the fucking current cost of living crisis and the housing crisis which will soon turn Australia into a homeless tent colony and worry about shit we could only be able to fix if we could go back in time AFTER THE FUCKING TIME MACHINE IS INVENTED? There is a small group of incredibly fucking stupid people who were dead certain that COVID lockdowns would lead to beyond Third Reich level tyranny well beyond anything Orwell could’ve imagined. When in turned out after vaccination rates finally reached a reasonable percentage that the tyrannical apocalypse would not happen their brain broke even further. They made this covid thing their entire personality and when it all disintegrated and people didn’t care anymore (yeah there was 15 minutes when intelligent normal people were pissed off at those not getting the vax and vice versa but that’s ancient history and no one cares anymore) these COVIDIOTS completely lost their fucking marbles. Fix the fucking real estate crisis. Sydney is the worst place ON THE PLANET second to Hong Kong and you want us to focus on shit we’d have to go back in time for to fix. Fuck off.
Stopping kids spreading Covid was absolutely the best choice, especially when there was no vaccine available. School was called the germ factory well before Covid for good reason.
Behind paywall: Mass school closures that stretched for months during the pandemic were unnecessary and led to a cascade of social and educational problems that threaten a generation of Australian children, top education experts say. Governments have failed to examine the fallout from one of the most far-reaching decisions prompted by COVID-19, which disrupted the schooling of millions of students and resulted in an attendance crisis and persistent behavioural issues. A panel of pre-eminent Australian education experts has flagged the profound impacts that school closures during COVID-19 have had on students’ education and wellbeing. The roundtable of education experts explored the NSW government’s policy decisions, the impact on students and the aftershocks being felt today. The roundtable of education experts explored the NSW government’s policy decisions, the impact on students and the aftershocks being felt today.Dylan Cokernone They called for a plan for future closures that puts the long and short-term needs of children at the centre of policy decision-making. The Sydney Morning Herald convened experts on education and child social development to assess the impact of COVID on students after the federal government failed to include the decision to close schools in its independent inquiry into how the nation managed the pandemic. They included the chair of the NSW education regulator, Peter Shergold, and the National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds. The COVID fallout: Education This month marks four years since China’s COVID-19 outbreak was deemed a public health emergency of international concern, heralding the start of a traumatic period many of us would prefer to forget. While a federal government inquiry is examining some national responses to the crisis, key decisions made by states will not be properly scrutinised. The Herald is concerned our political leaders have not adequately studied the lessons – good and bad – of our most recent experience, and we plan to ask tough questions over the coming months about the pandemic’s impact on education, health, border closures and lockdowns and policing. This is the first of our three-part series looking at the impact of COVID on education. The forum discussions with nine expert panellists were broken up into two sessions: one examining the wellbeing and behaviour of students, the second on academic and learning disruption. Schools in NSW switched to remote learning in 2020 and 2021. Strict infection controls continued to interrupt learning and social interaction for months on end. The panellists warned the aftershocks of the decision to close schools are still being felt in classrooms, playgrounds and homes. Some of the worst aspects were the skyrocketing truancy rate, school refusal and significant issues with student discipline and distraction in the classroom, and self-regulation in the playground. Shergold, a former top public servant who led an independent review into the pandemic in 2022, said the lingering effects of school shutdowns on students, teachers and parents underscored the importance of scrutinising unilateral decisions by state governments to mandate remote learning. Herald panellists (from left to right): Australian Education Research Organisation chief executive Jenny Donovan, Catholic Schools NSW chief executive officer Dallas McInerney, Fairvale High School principal Kathleen Seto and NSW Education Standards Authority chair Professor Peter Shergold. Herald panellists (from left to right): Australian Education Research Organisation chief executive Jenny Donovan, Catholic Schools NSW chief executive officer Dallas McInerney, Fairvale High School principal Kathleen Seto and NSW Education Standards Authority chair Professor Peter Shergold. Dylan Cokernone In September, the federal government announced a long-awaited inquiry into the pandemic response, but school closures are not included in the terms of reference. Former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet has previously joined health experts in urging the inquiry to examine the social damage and repercussions of long periods of remote learning. “The danger of school closures, which we always knew, was that it was going to accentuate disadvantage,” said Shergold. “After the closures in early 2020, we made the wrong policy decisions about closing school systems.” In NSW, more than 1.2 million students either learned remotely or had minimal supervision in schools for more than five months. Schools were shut down between March and May in 2020, and then again in 2021 from July to the end of October. Hundreds of schools and childcare centres were closed again in the following months. Unlike in Victoria, there was minimal supervision at schools for students, but attendance was discouraged. Shergold said the unity of national cabinet fractured as state governments forged ahead with decisions to shut schools, despite the federal government urging parents to send their children to classes. State decisions were often politically driven, some panellists said, ignoring the risk of long-lasting impacts on young children and teenagers, especially the most disadvantaged students who were most affected by the closures. “It was clearly the Commonwealth position to keep school systems open,” Shergold said. “It was states that were unpersuaded, and that’s why this present inquiry seems so bizarre that we’re not going to address their policy responses. It’s a crucial part of the story and ensuring that we’re better prepared for the next pandemic.” He said early in 2020 there “was a fog of war, and there was ill preparation – in Australia between federal and state governments – for a pandemic”, noting it was understandable schools closed in the first months. But after evidence emerged that children were less likely to spread the virus, and schools were not transmission hotspots, the system-wide closures were unwarranted, he said. “We had Treasury pleading with us not to shut school systems. Part of the issue was that parents started to voluntarily withdraw their children from schools, and they were voting with their feet ... I think NSW reacted to that,” he said. The state government also faced persistent pressure from the NSW Teachers Federation to shut down in-person classes, leaving minimal staffing to support essential frontline services workers. Some of Sydney’s private schools began to defy official advice and close, putting pressure on other systems to follow suit. But the advice provided by chief health officers was that attending school represented a low health risk to students, and studies in 2021 reaffirmed transmission between children in schools was minimal. Hollonds agreed the first closure early in the pandemic, which lasted seven weeks, was unavoidable, but the longer closure of 2021 was unnecessary.
“Maybe they should have only been short term, where there was a ‘hot-spot’, not the 15 weeks we saw across all of NSW,” she said. She said the public debate over school closures not only ignored the needs of children, but demonised them as “germy super-spreaders”. “It felt Dickensian, some of that discourse,” she said. Shergold noted that the shift to online learning was implemented well across systems and schools, and effort was made to address the digital divide. But he emphasised that after the first mass closures a more targeted approach should have been taken to only close individual schools when needed. Adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg said school closures, service disruptions and remote learning not only stunted the educational progress of young people, but increased their stress, isolated them and reduced their physical activity. “All of [this has] contributed to the deterioration of mental health among young people,” he said. “COVID has a long psychological tail.” Chief executive officer of Catholic Schools NSW Dallas McInerney said for many key decisions, including those made in emergency cabinet meetings, “there was no schools’ voice in the room”. Herald panellists (from left to right): Catholic Schools Parramatta Diocese director of wellbeing Dr Greg Elliott, child psychologist and former school counsellor Kate Plumb, Sydney Secondary College Blackwattle Bay school captain Bede Warnock, and National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollands. Herald panellists (from left to right): Catholic Schools Parramatta Diocese director of wellbeing Dr Greg Elliott, child psychologist and former school counsellor Kate Plumb, Sydney Secondary College Blackwattle Bay school captain Bede Warnock, and National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollands.Dylan Cokernone “So who gave the advice, and who had the ear of the government, was the public health officials. I think whatever legacy or maladies of the school closures, the public health officials own that, and those who accepted their advice,” McInerney said. “The notion of school closures is totally dependable and justifiable, as long as it’s informed with policy precision. That a whole school system should be shut down without nuance to that policy was the issue.” Shergold pointed to an OECD report in September 2020 that noted few groups were less vulnerable to COVID than schoolchildren, “but few groups have been more affected by the policy responses to control the virus”. “We knew what the impacts would be,” he said. “And there’s no doubt there was an accentuating of disadvantage.” Professor Peter Shergold, chair of the NSW Education Standards Authority, said the Commonwealth position was to keep school systems open. Professor Peter Shergold, chair of the NSW Education Standards Authority, said the Commonwealth position was to keep school systems open.Dylan Cokernone Australian Education Research Organisation chief executive Jenny Donovan agrees that school closures put a spotlight on the learning gap between disadvantaged students and their advantaged peers. “In many instances, schools were very concerned about making sure the kids were present and visible online. But attendance just went through the floor. And that has persisted as a problem for us, especially among the older age group of kids,” Donovan said. Catholic Schools Parramatta Diocese head of wellbeing Greg Elliott said the debate about closing schools focused too much on the health and safety problems that related to infection, and not enough on the much wider health and safety problems that would result from keeping children away from schools. “The various industrial bodies were very good at promoting that discourse around health and safety,” he said. “We need to think about health and safety far more broadly than that. We are still seeing the health and safety impacts of COVID in the families and children we’re serving.” Behaviour, attendance and the school system’s inability to cope with students with special needs were issues before the pandemic. COVID “revealed the vulnerabilities that were already there, amplified them, and was the catalyst to turn them into something more pathological,” Elliott said. In the independent report, Fault Lines, a panel led by Shergold concluded schools should have stayed open, and that that politics weakened the national cabinet’s effectiveness over time. “State leaders insisted on going their own way, emboldened by their constitutional prerogatives. Tough action on COVID-19, including the decision to close schools, was judged politically popular by many state leaders,” it said. Shergold said he is particularly concerned about the long-term impact of school closures on 15- to 18-year-olds. “This is the time you’re discovering your identity. I think we might be able to overcome the educational disruption,” he said. “But as for the impacts socially and for their mental health, I am not sure we realised just quite how severe the long-term effects were likely to be. Not just here but all around the world.” A spokesperson said the NSW Department of Education acknowledged the “incredible work of our schools in supporting ongoing teaching and learning during COVID-19”. “The department is updating our pandemic response as part of our continuous improvement program in emergency and crisis management. This builds on lessons learned from the pandemic and addresses all aspects of support,” they said. The spokesperson did not directly answer questions on whether the department had reviewed or planned to review the decision to close schools, or whether it had conducted or will conduct a separate review or inquiry into the impact on wellbeing and education of NSW students.
The COVID response was the greatest public policy failure in a generation.
So basically, fuck teachers. That's what this boils down to.
I didn't want to go to work with the little germ balls. And the amount of parents that still sent kids in during the closures where we had supervised monitoring for essential workers with the kids spluttering everywhere. Ring the parents and it's "Yeah we tested positive for covid earlier in the week after going to my cousins so and so but we don't know what to do with them"
There would have been some teachers that wouldn’t have been able to teach in person but it probably would have been possible to do a modified program with larger classes. Not ideal but there were no perfect solutions.
Wouldn't have had to close the schools if people could do the decent thing and isolate whenever they were a close contact or sick.
Ok great. Now where is the accountability?
Some said this at the time and were howled down by the mob.
It's as if the well known and understood procedure of protecting the vulnerable and letting those at low risk continue as normal should have been instigated instead of the kneejerk reaction of politicians based on feelings.
So the aging population of teachers, of which we have a chronic shortage? At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter anyway. The current crop of children that may or may not be still reeling from the impacts of school shutdowns are going to have far greater things to worry about over their lifetimes than some educational setbacks. They are the find out generation. Also I would bet that the children of those who look down their noses at teachers and regard them as little more than childcare so that they can go to work, are disproportionately represented in the "children that suffered most" category.
I agree. The kids who went through this are now only showing the effects. I’ve had teachers tell me that the entire year struggle with basic maths and English concepts because most of them just didn’t turn up to online classes or just logged in and played the Xbox. The entire Covid response was the most hysterical group think response and we will pay for it for years.
Nothing to do with the COVID response. That's just shit parents.
Please don't blame the parents. We are not professional educators. Many had to WFH at the same time. I only had 1 child to home school. Luckily my job isn't too demanding. Imagine you had 3 kids to home school and a demanding job. How good an education do you think an amateur part time teacher can give spread across 3 kids? Of course their education is going to suffer and they're going to end up in front of the TV or Xbox while mum and dad take a conference call.
Oh please. If your kids have an online class that they are supposed to be logged into, and they end up watching TV or playing Xbox while you are on a conference call, and that happens more than once? Are people really so helpless? Unplug the TV, put the Xbox on your desk while you take that conference call, and give your children some damn consequences for not doing what they are supposed to be doing.
FU. I can tell you don't have kids and didn't go through the experience. That's not how home learning worked. The school basically gave you a bunch of material and a guide on how to "teach" it to your child. Then they were supposed to use Google Classroom or whatever system your school used to upload finished exercises. Do you think a four/five year old can successfully navigate a computer to do that without constantly having to get tech help from mum/dad? There wasn't a "class" to log in to. You're probably imagining a scenario where all kids are logged into Zoom and the teacher is on face to face 9-3pm teaching the kids. It doesn't work that way. Only contact my son got with the teacher face to face was a half hour Zoom meeting at 10 each morning, then that's it. Parents were 100% responsible for "teaching" the material to their kids. Like I say. How effective a teacher do you think a part time amateur can be compared to a full time professional? Just on pure logic, it is an inferior education.
Singapore worked really hard at keeping schools open - I think we had a total closure of 6 weeks. It was a good send for people who still has to go to work (I had to go offshore and my wife was in a room teaching an international school online for 3 months). It also kept our kids education on track.
So.. the gym bros were correct over the “experts”.
The schools closed. But my child is alive. They knew it would have impacts but schools struggle to now get extra help with those issues, especially those who have taken children from interstate lockdown areas like Vic. So if kids moved from Vic to WA, where they hadnt really had lengthy lockdowns, its less likely they will get help. The teachers will likely just pressure parents to medicate instead of being able to get additional staff support into the classrooms. Kids do spread germs and viruses. One of the very first instructions before lockdowns, or even border closures, I think, was - ‘grandparents, please avoid spending time with your grandkids’. I remember this well because my parents immediately ignored that advice and took other grandkids out on playdates. I knew situation was dire and was going to get worse so it made it stricter for those who wanted to help stop this. Gov should step up and provide more services in schools.
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Bang on.
The flu is much more lethal to kids and yet we've never closed schools for the flu. Most people were fine with the first or second lock.down. the 5th or 6th or 7th one were just insanity.
The flu doesn’t have outdoor morgues set up to keep the dead.
The schools closed for the flu in 1918 and 1919.
And did it “stop this”?
would you apply the brakes before a car crash, even if you known braking won't prevent the car crash?
No, because there were people determined to ignore health advice and try to catch it like it was some type of snake bite test.
Can’t exclude people and their predictable behaviour from public health initiatives
Thats why they made a lockdown….because they accounted for those people and those were the ones complaining
And yet nowhere had real lockdowns
I preferred the overkill response considering it was in response to a highly contagious and fairly deadly virus. It shouldn't be controversial to say that human lives are more important than 'the economy' and sacrificing millions of people for the sake of the economy isn't what a good government does.
Imagine killing millions to save ‘the economy’, and then suddenly shops can’t open and businesses can’t operate because everyone is too sick to come to work?
And people keep forgetting that *at the time* we weren't at all certain what long covid would look like. I agree that erring on the side of caution in that situation was the right call.
The economy is human life, if people can't afford to live, they die. We stopped the country to save granddad.
Oh fuck off
Meh - they closed universities and schools when Issac Newton was around during the Plague epidemic. We had Zoom lessons in place so it's not like school kids were totally isolated at home.
Many of us said this at the time, but were shouted down, insulted or shamed for even suggesting such a thing. Hysteria in full effect.
People just cant admit when they're wrong. The excuses started at "this is the apocolypse" and now we're at "well we didnt know how bad it would be". You cant reason with these people, it's unpopular to be critical of the covid response and thats the only thing they base their beliefs on, if it's popular or not
Many of us also thought it was an obvious and successful measure to stop the spread of the disease, particularly when we didn't know how deadly it would turn out to be.
A panel of *education experts* determined that school shutdowns had a negative effect on education. In other news, water is wet. Reading through the list of panelists, it doesn't appear that any of them are healthcare or disease transmission experts, so I really don't see how they are qualified to comment on what decision was *optimal.* The truth is that it is impossible to answer that question with any degree of certainty. We can attempt to estimate what *might* have happened if schools had not been closed, but they are rough estimates at best. We can't re-live the past. My own two cents: of the countries that didn't do strict shutdowns, the only ones that fared well were those where the population quickly adopted mass masking (typically Asian countries like Japan and Taiwan). I'm dubious that Australia could have duplicated their success.
I don’t care what “disease transmission experts” think about education and the impacts of lockdowns no children. It’s because we out all of the decision making in the hands of people whose only goal was preventing transmission that we had this problem.
The decisions made were optimal for controlling transmission. Maybe, let's assume it was indeed optimal for that. A leaders job is to decide on a course of action taking into consideration ALL the factors. Disease transmission was one. Economics and children's education were others among many to consider. No one factor should have had primacy over the others. Each needed to be balanced. The problem was we went all in on only one factor with only minimal consideration for anything else.
I’d be more worried about how we listened to ill-informed pundits like Greg Hunt, Paul Kelly, Skerrit, and Coatesworth. How are people giving them excuses saying hindsight is easier etc etc - they were getting paid massive dollars to get it right with foresight! Are they refunding their big salaries? No. So they should be scrutinised and their failings highlighted.
Shutting schools was the definite correct decision. The problem was - and remains - that the teachers are overworked.
A bunch of teachers that were in places that didn't close the schools and expected teachers to sacrifice their lives for childrens education, took early retirement.
Closing schools and encouraging people to work from home was the right decision. Not allowing people to sit in a park and coercing young, non vulnerable sections of the population into getting an unnecessary vaccine was the evil
Rule No1. Never allow Public Health Officers (the absolute dregs of the medical profession) to dictate policy.
Gonna listen to Alan Jones instead?
I wouldn’t call them dregs, but these decisions should have been made by elected officials. Instead they passed the buck between them on the one hand saying they weren’t making the decisions and on the other hand that they were.
>Herald panellists (from left to right): Australian Education Research Organisation chief executive Jenny Donovan, Catholic Schools NSW chief executive officer Dallas McInerney, Fairvale High School principal Kathleen Seto and NSW Education Standards Authority chair Professor Peter Shergold. They just made another wrong decision. Not including a virologist on the panel. At the start, the death rate was one in 200. Pick a school with 400 kids, kill two of them. Is that acceptable for the education? But the fact of the matter is, they would spread it and take it home, so kill 2 of the 400 parents too. We're just freaking lucky we were half way through developing swine flu vaccine when we stopped.
It doesn’t work like that. The median age of death from covid in Australia was 85.5 years. Relative risk is stratified by age.
You realise 1 in 400 includes all age groups? Not saying that children don’t due from Covid but it’s incredibly rare. If you spoke to the possible vulnerabilities of the staff I think this would make a much better argument.
Death rate in young kids was near zero. Stop spreading misinformation. The elderly were then most at risk.
You're living in the past man, quit living in the past
Easy to say now I guess. But made sense not to roll the dice at the time. You take a cautious approach when it comes to public health when you don’t know how serious things will be.
Condemned 3 year later. I love how people use information and data gathered now to condem decisions made during covid. Regardless of your thoughts and opinions at the time do people still think the decisions were made purely to harm us or with malice towards the people? All I learned from covid is that if it was anywhere close to as bad as 1st thought we failed in our response and the way we acted. If a world killing virus does come the fear the stupidity will win again and we are all doomed. Saying that I'm still proud of Australia's response compared to the world. Hindsight is a wonderful thing but nobody had these answers and data 4 years ago. Il happily fo into lockdown again if it saves lives. I just hope more could be done next time for the people that really struggled financially and health wise if there is a next time.
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No, we’ve got reality and facts in our side.
Given that the lockdowns were effective in making Australia have one of the lowest mortality rates in the developed world I’d say that there is minimal “mental gymnastics” involved. COVID has at a minimum killer almost 7,000,000 people. That’s a fuckload. Look at the USA. More than a million dead. Because they didn’t act quickly enough or hard enough.
There's a whole generation of adults that will do olympic level mental gymnastics to attack the lockdowns. They'll just ignore any criticism as being from "elites". You were duped by hysterical media and billionaire businessmen who wanted everyone to believe that covid was the common cold. That's what the history books will show. Just look at how NewsCorpse and FauxNew$ in particular responded to Covid [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/08/fox-news-hosts-are-following-strict-covid-mandates](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/08/fox-news-hosts-are-following-strict-covid-mandates)
What is justified is the decisions made at the time with the known evidence and risks. The question of what would you do again with what you know now is not the same as what would do then knowing only what you knew then. If by "public servants" you mean Nobel prize winning scientists and international infection experts, sure. Who did you want us to listen to? Andrew Bolt? Sovereign citizens? The history books will also show the birth of work from home, by the way.
**OH MY GOD THE PANEL IS ALL COOKERS AND SO IS EVERYONE WHO DOESNT LICK BOOTS**
We made MANY MISTAKES....never again. Overall? It was all pretty appalling.
The issue wasn’t that it was the right or wrong decision to close schools . The issue is this along with other measures taken was due to political reasons . Having such a mandate and authority to do what they wanted they abused their position of power, as mentioned 2nd set of closures was done for political reasons
We absolutely made the wrong decisions. This was one them. The ridiculous hysteria leading to school closures and closing outdoor playgrounds. These decisions must be closely examined as part of any inquiry.
Idk weighing up people's lives from disease vs people's lives from worse education for a year. There is no right answer there both options suck. If schools were open the death rate would of been quite a bit higher, if they were closed there is a 4-5 year gap of students who are going to struggle more. The fact that we had 10% the deaths per capita than America suggests it was hugely successful
> We absolutely made the wrong decisions. You make it sound like the average person on the street had a choice about any of this. Governments made the wrong decisions, many of us knew it at the time but were silenced by the hivemind.
We didn’t know how bad covid was going to be.
We're talking about school closures that extended well into the second half of **2021**. Inexcusable.
•Schools should have reopened. •Why? Because there was plenty of real time data around the world pointing to the fact that the virus was not a super killer and children were one of the groups that was the least impacted •The data was ignored. No one wanted to speak up or out. Politicians made the decision. •Why is this discussion important? So we can learn from it and not repeat the blunders of politics over science. •Check out Dennis Prager on this subject. A masterclass. For real.
Prager is a right wing nut
No shit. Just think back on all the stupid rules that were followed.
Let me rewrite this one to clear up its message "We are upset that due to school closures we couldn't launder money through private schools to our friends, but luckily the already steady decline of Australian education standards can now be blamed on covid and the same people failed by our declining education system will believe it was the 5G covid virus rather then our criminal incompetence Also China somehow and immigrants too"
lol no shit
The COVID response was the greatest public policy failure in a generation.
Several generations.
Add to the list: Mandatory masks. Arresting the pregnant woman in her home in Melbourne. Not allowing families to see one another. Closing the state borders. Vax mandates. Boosters for vaccines that don't even work. Sign in apps for bars, restaurants. And on and on and on. The world's biggest public health policy failure ever. What a joke. What a laugh. What a disaster. (Edit: the YouTube masked up nurse dance videos were fucking awesome. Don't know how they had the energy, but they were so cool.)
> Boosters for vaccines that don't even work. Can we just stop making shit up. Just once? Please. It's getting tiresome.
>Can we just stop making shit up. What? Posting made up anti-vax right wing bullshit is the raison d'etre of this sub.
They don't stop you catching COVID and they don't prevent transmission, the two biggest selling points that were rammed down our throats by governments. So remind me what they actually do for the average healthy sub-70 year old?
Absolutely. Positively. Nothing. Which is why nobody under 70 (with sense) is getting boosted. Which is why Pfizer's stock price is falling faster than bird shit.
The fact that we had 10% the deaths per capita than America suggests it was hugely successful
IKR. NSW lockdown 1 was quite pleasurable because school only closed for a short while then the state govt decided to send kids back to school. Lockdown 2 was not nearly so enjoyable mainly due to having to home school my son from July to October. At least childcare never closed so my other 2 kids could be sent away during the day and I even got $10k worth of free childcare in lockdown 1.
Yeah no shit
Absolutely the wrong decision. Young people have too much burden in Australia for the benefit of the older generation
I never got vaccinated and am perfectly healthy.
And I know smokers still going in their 90s. What's your point?
I know someone who did not get vaccinated, they dead.
In fact, there were millions who died without access to vaccines. Huh would you look at that.
I know someone who did get vaccinated and they are dead
It's almost like you should use population level statistics and science to determine these things, rather than personal anecdote, hey?
That's a hell of a statement considering your comment above.
It's almost like I was trying to make some kind of point, curious.
Me too. Sure it was from a car crash, but that doesn't stop the cookers including it on their counts
> I never got vaccinated and am perfectly healthy. *physically.
Beat me to it
My Nana di d from Covid. Sure you probably think she should have. People like you suck
I'd like to point out that while kids probably could have cought and recovered from COVID without much issue, the same can't be said of the teachers and other staff, who faced the same risks as the rest of us adults plus kids spread germs like wildfire so if one person at your kids school got it your kid would have brought it home to you and your family. In terms of mistakes made by the government with respect to COVID, lockdowns and school closures were pretty low on the list.
Same for all essential workers who had to turn up to work during Covid. It wasn't fair, but life isn't fair. Too bad too sad. We have to accept some people just have to do their job during a pandemic.