Swedish students under the age of 16 didn’t miss a single day of school to COVID closure and were never masked. According to this study:
- No COVID-19 related learning loss in reading in Swedish primary school students.
- The proportion of students with weak reading skills did not increase during the pandemic.
- Students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds were not especially affected.
HT: Committee to Unleash Prosperity
From Paragon Health:
Medicaid enrollment and spending exploded during the pandemic as Congress passed legislation that boosted the federal government’s share of Medicaid costs in exchange for states keeping everyone enrolled, even when they were no longer eligible. Now 15 million or more people who are ineligible are enrolled in Medicaid. The federal spending boost, which is highly inflationary, and the Medicaid enrollment requirements persist with the official public health emergency.
Peter Coy writes:
the number of people ages 25 through 44 who died from all causes in the United States in 2021 was 52 percent higher than the number who died in an average year from 2015 to 2019,
whereas among seniors the increase was only 9 percent.
An NBER Working Paper by Casey Mulligan and Robert Arnott calls the elevated death toll among younger Americans “a historic, yet largely unacknowledged, health emergency.” It asks whether young adults suffered “collateral damage” from policies such as lockdowns that were meant to protect older people. They write:
All of this suggests that large and sustained changes in living habits designed to avoid a single virus had not only “economic” opportunity costs, but also cost a shockingly large number of young lives.