Professor Martin Kulldorf, a Harvard epidemiologist has been making the case against COVID passports and mandates. In a recent post, he notes the discriminatory effects of the mandates against the working class. A similar analysis could be applied to the differences in the effects on the mandates on the young versus the old. Young people have an extremely low morality risk from COVID in the first place but they have suffered far greater harm from the lockdowns and mandates that the old.
Even posh kids are fed up with lockdowns. American colleges have long resembled left-wing madrassas in terms of ideological uniformity so perhaps it's fitting that they adopt the same social practices.
BOSTON (AP) — Hundreds of students at Amherst College in Massachusetts are pushing back against what they call the school’s overly restrictive COVID-19 protocols that include double masking indoors, restrictions on off-campus activities, and no in-person campus dining. ...
Students are allowed to leave campus to take care of personal business and to pick up takeout meals, but should not go to restaurants, cafes, or bars, she said.
More here.
Story out of the Boston Herald on hospitals being swamped by psychiatric patients as a result of the lockdowns and COVID hysteria. It is not surprising as the political class and meia have been telling us for a year and a half that the world is a terrible, dangerous place.
COVID-induced job losses, fear and isolation have all taken a toll, as well as delays in seeking care, leading to a regular bottleneck of over 500 patients per day in the state awaiting specialized psychiatric care, according to a survey by the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association conducted this summer.
Patients are also sicker — a new impact of the pandemic — including “patients with severe psychosis, patients with severe depression or other mood symptoms or anxiety that lead to suicidal thoughts, patients coming in after suicide attempts,” said Dr. Sejal Shah, medical psychiatry chief at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
The toll on young people is particularly high. Brad Polumbo writes that college students are literally frightened out of their wits. College used to be fun. Now it's got the feel of an internment camp.
Government restrictions on daily life during the pandemic have fueled a youth mental health crisis . Yet, even with many of these restrictions now lifted, young people are still living in a hysterical state of fear.
Likely as a result of this widespread fear, 61% of students think their schools should impose restrictions on attending parties and large social gatherings.
There’s just one problem: There’s almost no basis for any of these fears, and college students are living scared of their own shadows for no reason.
For one, COVID-19 does not pose and has never posed a high risk of death or hospitalization for individuals of college-age. (With the rare exception of those with preexisting conditions that compromise their immune system, individuals for whom many diseases are life-threatening.) Yes, COVID-19 is a serious virus and has claimed many lives. But the deaths are almost exclusively among those much older than the college demographic.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 6,744,362 Americans aged 18 to 29 have tested positive for COVID-19. Among that same age cohort, an estimated 2,951 have died. These figures allow us to calculate a rough fatality rate of 0.04%. This means that if 10,000 members of this age group contract the virus, four will die. And these rates are assuming no vaccination! The available vaccines are highly effective at preventing infections serious enough to lead to hospitalization or death — even for the delta variant . So, for vaccinated students, the risks are even more minuscule.
Remote work is not turning out to be a great thing for those starting their careers. You don't get the skills and connections that come with on-site work. When asked whether they'd be willing to take a 5 percent pay cut to be able to continue to work at home, members of Gen Z were the least likely to want to take that bargain.
Smart move. Remote work isn't all that it is cracked up to be. Millions of young people will find it harder to build networks and develop their talents when interaction with others takes the form of Zoom calls versus the give and take of workplace interactions. That will stunt young careers much more than that of the Millenials and older generations that have had the benefit of close contact with colleagues.
Bad news: Gen Z is more likely to approve of censorship of freedom of speech than in 2018. According to Pew two-thirds of Democrats want government or big tech to censor speech.
Roughly half of U.S. adults (48%) now say the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it means losing some freedom to access and publish content, according to the survey of 11,178 adults conducted July 26-Aug. 8, 2021. That is up from 39% in 2018. At the same time, the share of adults who say freedom of information should be protected – even if it means some misinformation is published online – has decreased from 58% to 50%.
Terrible news for the country and for young people. The ability to express oneself is the most basic of human freedoms. Young Americans are heading into a new dark age. In many ways, they have themselves to blame. Stop voting for Democrats would be a good start.
More results below:
Gen Z standing against cancel culture. Good.
An interesting example may lie in the experience of the unlikely conservative icon of Scott Cawthorn, the creator of the videogame series Five Nights At Freddy’s. Cawthorn might initially seem like an odd figure to represent conservatism in pop culture. His videogame series is about a fast-food restaurant where animal robot mascots go on murderous rampages at night, and the player, as a security guard, must avoid being killed in gruesome manners. On paper, it is exactly the sort of violent videogame that parents in the early 1990s would have sought to “cancel,” lest it corrupt their kids. And today it has established an enormous fanbase among teenagers, including, for some reason, gay and lesbian teens.
When it was revealed that Cawthon had donated extensively to both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Donald Trump, however, he came under sustained attack online from publications accusing him of “betraying” his “LGBT” fanbase. But something interesting happened. While most media publications, generally staffed by millennials, rushed to condemn him, on social media, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok, Gen-Z users rallied to his defense. So after initially condemning Cawthon, many of the millennial journalists quickly shifted to expressing horror that teenagers could possibly defend Cawthon on Twitter and in public, attacking them instead.
