Tragic Side Effect Of Lockdowns

An Emerging and Tragic Side Effect of COVID

Matt Vespa

As lazy teachers and their unions continue to fight going back to school in an effort to extend their summer vacation, kids are dying. They’re committing suicide at alarming rates due to the lack of in-person learning, social interaction, after-school activities, and sports. It's causing kids to become depressed at exponential rates. They’re also not learning.

I think parents have known this for months, but now there’s solid data to reinforce this commonsense point. Little kids cannot sit still in front of a computer screen. Also, not everyone has Internet access. To liberal America and the elites, you know this undercuts your ‘stay at home, we’re all in this together’ war cry, right?

 In Clark County, Nevada, its school district is rushing to reopen schools as soon as humanly possible due to a spike in student suicides. And now, in San Francisco, they’re seeing the same tragedies, which prompted the city to yank its own school board into court in an effort to get kids back in the classroom. These schools have been closed for over a year (via NY Post):

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera announced last week he was taking the dramatic step of suing the city’s own school district, which has kept its classrooms closed nearly a year. In the motion filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court, Herrera included alarming testimony from hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area, doctors and parents on the emotional and mental harms of extended distance learning.

One mother, Allison Arieff, said she had recently found her 15-year-old daughter “curled up in a fetal position, crying, next to her laptop at 11 am” Arieff said her daughter often cries in the middle of the day out of frustration and “is losing faith not just in SFUSD but in the world.”

Another mother, Lindsay Sink, has seen a “major regression” in her 7-year-old son who has “uncontrollable meltdowns that turn (the) whole house upside down.” Sink’s 10-year-old daughter is experiencing “depression and anger” and she fears her daughter’s “mental health will continue to suffer” until in-person learning resumes.

UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital has seen a 66 percent increase in the number of suicidal children in the emergency room and a 75 percent increase in youth who required hospitalization for mental health services, the lawsuit said, quoting pediatricians, child psychiatrists and emergency room doctors.

As long as teachers’ unions drag their feet and deny the science behind schools in the COVID era, which is that it's been safe to reopen them for quite some time, nothing will happen. The unions are too big an ally for the Democratic Party to anger. They will need their help in the 2022 midterms. Don’t expect much movement. I would be happy to see a seismic shift occur, but don’t bet the mortgage.