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Passing this article around to support the reopening of schools at seemingly all costs is a wildly misinformed and negligent interpretation of the alarming trends in youth mental health we're seeing play out in communities around the US. (1/n) https://twitter.com/ProfEmilyOster/status/1353325470322995200
The first sentence of this article says it all: "Firmly linking teen suicides to school closings is difficult." Determining causal relationships is literally the foundation of epidemiology. That's what we do. (2/n)
If you're not able to sufficiently demonstrate that X (school opening) causes Y (youth suicides), intervening on X (i.e., opening schools at all costs) will have no appreciable impact on Y because the true causes of Y are raging on, unabated. (3/n)
Anyone with even the most basic training in epi will tell you that the obvious common prior cause here is the pandemic which has been grossly mismanaged and accelerated by efforts to open schools/workplaces/etc. when community spread is out of control. (4/n)
Conditions today are exponentially worse than they were in the spring and they grow worse by the day. At minimum, we need a national lockdown of even just a few weeks to serve as a circuit break. We need to support children and families by cutting monthly checks. (5/n)
Yet all we have are leaders telling us to expect more death, as though it is an inevitability.
Newsflash: it's not inevitable. It's a choice. (6/n)
Newsflash: it's not inevitable. It's a choice. (6/n)
Lawmakers, politicians, people in power...They've made a choice that "business as usual" (whatever that even means given everything we've been through, I don't know) matters more than the lives of everyday people. (7/n)
And let's be really real here: they've made a choice that it matters more than the lives of Black and Brown people and the elderly, who represent the bulk of deaths to date. (8/n)
This choice was made for us, not by us. It's a choice that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives - which everyone seems completely unfazed by, even as our death toll exceeds that of WWII - and it will cost hundreds of thousands of more if we don't speak up. (9/n)
Attributing the youth mental health crisis to school closures is dangerous bc it shifts focus to a symptom of the problem rather than the actual problem. The only thing that will mitigate recent upticks in youth suicide is stopping the constant stream of mass COVID death. (10/n)
Keeping schools open when there is uncontrolled community spread only serves to fuel the pandemic. Telling ourselves otherwise doesn't make this basic & obvious principle of infectious disease transmission any less true. (11/11)
