The key phrases, beyond the acknowledged "may be" already touched upon are these from the conclusion:
We believe that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States has extracted an enormous sacrifice from its youngest citizens to protect the health of its oldest. During a pandemic, this may well be an ethically defensible tradeoff, but only if resources are invested to reverse the potential damage to health and education that this strategy may inflict on a population with low visibility and high vulnerability.
The "may" is still there, of course, but with it is how the government
could respond to ameliorate the
possible loss of years at the end of life.
But hang on a sec and let's look at 3 numbers from their study:
24.2 million children.
5.54 million years of life possibly lost (YLL)
1.47 million additional probable YLL had schools remained open
Their estimate is that the average child impacted by the school closures lost just over 84 days of life.
EIGHTY-FOUR days.
That's without subtracting the saved years because it is hard to know how many people it's spread across, but please note that that 1.47 YLL is damned close to their estimated YLL already lost - suggesting a
doubling of lives lost had the schools remained open!
The lives lost from schools staying open is a fact that the original poster of the article has previously denied, so it's lovely to see the acknowledgment here, implicit in his insistence that this be heeded.
But beyond the potential loss of those 84 days for the children, late in life, if the government does nothing to fix it, are the rest of the implications in his position, from this article!
Child poverty affects more than 11.5 million children in the United States. The numbers globally are horrific.
Educational outcomes are one of the key areas influenced by family incomes. Children from low-income families often start school already behind their peers who come from more affluent families, as shown in measures of school readiness. The incidence, depth, duration and timing of poverty all influence a child’s educational attainment, along with community characteristics and social networks. However, both Canadian and international interventions have shown that the effects of poverty can be reduced using sustainable interventions.
And we can see examples of the gap in educational attainment, which the OP's JAMA article uses for its relationship to YLL:
Among 2014 high school graduates, 68 percent were enrolled in higher education as of October 2014. Among students whose families were in the top income quartile, 87 percent of graduates continued on to college, compared with 77 percent in the third quartile, 69 percent in the second quartile, and 60 percent in the bottom income quartile—representing a gap of 27 percentage points between the top and bottom quartiles.
Among a sample of students who were sophomores in high school in 2002, 84 percent—or 77 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native students, 79 percent of Hispanic students, 82 percent of black students, 87 percent of white students, and 93 percent of Asian or Pacific Islander students—had entered postsecondary education within eight years of their expected high school graduation.
...
Among students in the bottom socioeconomic quartile, 15 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree within eight years of their expected high school graduation, compared with 22 percent in the second quartile, 37 percent in the third quartile, and 60 percent in the top quartile.
Further: "parents from disadvantaged backgrounds were not only more likely to have their babies born prematurely, but these prematurely born children were also disproportionately at higher risk for school failure than children with a similar neonatal record from higher income families."
This is
arguably one of the factors in the lower life expectancy among those impoverished families:
(This) study shows that in the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average.
This eye-opening gap is also growing rapidly: Over roughly the last 15 years, life expectancy increased by 2.34 years for men and 2.91 years for women who are among the top 5 percent of income earners in America, but by just 0.32 and 0.04 years for men and women in the bottom 5 percent of the income tables.
So, while the OP is worrying about
84 days, women in poverty live
3689 fewer days while men in poverty live
5333 fewer days, on average.
If those lives actually mattered to the OP, then we know what we need to do societally, speaking of science being ignored.
But they don't.
Poll
5 (45.5%)