We’re republishing a post today by Dr. Alberto Giubilini, a Senior Research Fellow in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, that originally appeared on the Collateral Global website alongside its latest report, which is about the impact of shutting down university campuses on students’ mental health. Among the shocking findings are that one in three students across a range of countries have reported symptoms of depression or anxiety in the last 20 months. Here is an extract:
The results in the report published this week in Collateral Global this week on the impact of pandemic restrictions on university students’ mental health – sadly – should not be too surprising. Young people were not a priority during the pandemic. It is quite telling that most countries – and most people – did not change strategies and attitudes after the initial uncertainty, as we gained more evidence about how minuscule young people’s risk is from Covid. We continued imposing population-wide restrictions, including the closures of schools and university campuses, and moving to online-only teaching, even when it became clear that these restrictions would not benefit young people. They did not need protection from Covid as much as they needed protection from the effects of policy responses on their mental health and their psycho-physical development more generally. This report emphasises once more how we failed to protect young people’s well-being from the inevitable harms of prolonged restrictions.
Public health policies are justified to the extent that they produce significant enough collective benefits without disproportionately burdening certain groups. Admittedly, in situations of uncertainty, a rigorous cost-benefit analysis is not always possible. And yet, the stricter the restrictions, the stronger the duty to rigorously gather real-time evidence on what costs they impose on different groups. Like many other pandemic measures, the extended closures of university campuses have been a massive social and public health experiment. But even experiments require constant interrogation as to whether they are working, and a measure of their success must be the continuous evaluation of whether they are creating collateral damage. It seems we didn’t want to see or give due consideration to such damage.
The prolonged closure of university campuses and the decision to move online all the teaching, socialising, and formal and informal interactions that play a central role in young people’s psycho-physical development resulted in enormous costs that we could not see on our computer screens. With the report this week, the evidence of the significant damage we caused to them becomes more apparent – for example, with the studies showing one in three students reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Worth reading in full.
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No matter how often we repeat “health”, it has little to nothing to do with what’s happened since last March.
The demoralisation and the crushing of spirits is the point. Our “nudge” unit has bragged about using terror as a tool.
After Germany just confirmed that they will follow Austria’s lead and lock down just the unvaccinated population, I think the UK is going to be next soon. It makes sense. Boris is acting like he desperately doesn’t want a lockdown, getting the useful idiots all excited for a free Christmas. Now he’s dropping hints that he will lockdown, making the useful idiots scared and desperate. Come December, he will probably say: “Well, we can’t get away without a lockdown so… how about we just lock down the unvaccinated?” and the useful idiots will cheer and throw us along with human rights under the bus.
Stay tuned, it will happen.
How I love these optimists. They really keep my spirits up.
Judging from a short look at current news from Germany, this claim is But the Germans ARE all Nazis !!1 – style wishful thinking (at best).
We have precedent for Boris dropping in lockdowns after he said it will never happen again. Now he is going down the same road. He already has the precedent of Austria and Germany. He will most likely have the public opinion on his side, who when faced with the choice of everyone in lockdown, or the other people in lockdown, guess what they will choose.
You may sarcastically call me an optimist. But I think I am being a realist. Time will tell.
For now, time tells that you are making wrong claims: In Germany, there’s an ongoing push to restrict activities allowed to the unvaccinated on condition of having a negative test result. But currently, no lockdown, neither for everyone nor for the unvaccinated and this also isn’t being discussed. There’s a lockdown in Latvia — of course also because they’re all Nacommuzimonists (!!2) but that’s a different issue.
Get back to me come Christmas and let me know how off I was.
The point is what you were saying about Germany actually wasn’t quite the case. That being said, anything can happen with the crazies in charge at Westminster and so probably will. There is however no viable alternative to continued resistance to the Covid “poison death shots”.
Well, forewarned is fore-armed!
Now it’s Italy too: https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/17/five-italian-governors-wish-to-follow-austrias-lead-in-locking-down-the-unvaccinated/
Like I said, a precedent has been set, Boris will not hesitate to take it.
I fully agree that students and schoolchildren have been shockingly abused.
However, I would just observe that, although I am an oldie, being locked up, bullied and stripped of my freedoms hasn’t done my mental or physical health any good either.
Yes indeed. Often overlooked that the folly and evil has had a terrible impact on the very people it was purported to help.
I have time for the poor students, but none for the wokery of the syllabus and financial exploitation: politicisation, political correctness, projection, pennilessness.
Actually, given what dreadful, woke, indoctrination machines universities have become, I’m not sure I agree!
Frankly it would these days protect the young from years of debt incurred to study often made up subjects that are of no practical use to them or to wider society and which are anyway hopelessly compromised by faddish wokeism. At least in the past university education was limited to those whose parents had connections and could afford for their offspring to waste three years or to those who demonstrated academic merit and received grants.
A local college came to a happy compromise: Even students studying by correspondence must be vaccinated.
If universities close, students might move to jobs where they can learn real skills, the sort people use to become self employed and independent (if they’re any good) instead of staring at the walls of a dull grey office for 50+ years. Oh wait…. We can’t have that, can we!
Woke University is full. Happily, Zoom University still has places.