Your arguments are very confusing to me, because on the one hand you are arguing that lockdowns are not good and that they should not have been done because of the damage due to social isolation and other economic follow-on effects.
But then you link to a post that argues that we didn't need to lock down, because people would have taken costly (what costs? They don't say afaict) measures to lock themselves down anyway. I mean, take the passage you linked. What is this supposed to show? They have one model that is unreasonably bad, and then they refine it so that it is more reasonable, and then they show it better tracks the data.
The intuition for this result is simple. If new infections and daily deaths from the disease grow too high, people take costly efforts to avoid interaction and thus slow disease spread.
So basically lockdowns. But how does this avoid any of the damage you're talking about? How do schools and businesses stay open under these circumstances, where everyone has decided independently on their own volition to isolate?
> Young people should take priority over the old.
Yes, I'm a teacher so I'm not going to argue with you there. I spend a lot of time putting children first. But this line of reasoning always seems to forget the fact that there's a lot of old people involved in teaching children. The people who demand to keep schools open usually seem to stop short of demanding that teachers are protected. Let's look at your linked study for instance. This study shows that they had a successful start of the Fall 2020 semester in North Carolina. How did they do it?
In weekly superintendent meetings, several key contributors to success were noted: daily screening of students and staff, high rates of mask wearing adherence for children and adults, transparency in publicly reporting confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections (eg, via Web site), efficient contact tracing, close collaboration with local health departments, regular updates with staff and principals to encourage adherence and report secondary transmission cases or any breaches in safety protocols, detailed schedule for all aspects of the school day to adhere to the 3W’s, definitive plans for the special needs community, and opening in the hybrid model of instruction. These refinements informed the 12 Principles for Safer Schools.
There was also full buy in from participating faculty, and plenty of training and education. During the period of Aug-Oct 2020 in North Carolina, community spread in general was low. It's true that schools are safer than many places if the proper precautions are taken. But that goes out the window when community spread is high. This distinction has been lost on many. This is a far cry to the environment of 2021, when community spread was quite high and parents were demanding teachers back to school in front of mask-less, unvaccinated children.
Look what happened in Georgia at the beginning of their school year:
The average age of the 42 teachers on this list who have died is 46 years old. The youngest was in their 20s. I don't know if this needs to be said, but dozens of young teachers do not usually die before the school year starts. There's a substitute teacher shortage [2], a bus driver shortage [3], school closures due to staffing shortages (not even COVID) [4], and yet people are out there demanding that this system be fully operational for their kids, immediately. That's not normal, and young people cannot expect normalcy given the above.
Whatever aggregate statistics you have about this situation, what they will fail to note is that even a single teacher death can throw an entire school and even a district into disorder in this environment. Because there are no replacements. No one wants to sub. No one wants to be a teacher anymore so it's hard to hire. When one teacher goes down then you have to tap unqualified people to teach a subject they aren't used to, and everyone is already oversubscribed. I mean, you're so worried about student outcomes, what happens to outcomes when teachers die and they are replaced with clueless substitutes? That's not a good learning environment either.
> My only comment was on the spike in deaths.
Right, but you immediately go to the idea that it's a spike due to despair from lockdowns. But if fentanyl has been a problem for a long time, maybe it's due to other reasons. For instance, the report you linked puts forth the notion that covid disrupted supply chains, leading to an increase in supply of tainted fentanyl batches, leading to a spike in deaths for people who potentially had already been using fentanyl before any lockdowns. So how would their deaths be due to despair at lockdowns?
> And all of them had restrictions that persisted long after the stay-at-home order was lifted. Which of those states didn't shut down in person schooling?
That's not the point, the point is that if loneliness due to lockdowns is causing fentanyl related deaths, then why are the states affected the most in the South or a border state? Like you said, Florida is a gateway for that stuff, so what if it's just that supply and opportunity increased, it comes over the border and affects those states most, but then it's also distributed across the country so it'll have an effect everywhere. Where is the connection from loneliness to deaths? You just have not shown it conclusively.
> Obviously this massive spike in fentanyl deaths is due to behavioral changes relating to the pandemic. And by far the behavioral change most likely to have contributed is social isolation, which is a known risk factor for drug use.
No, not obviously, that's the whole point here. None of this is obvious. You say "by far" and "most likely" with such confidence, but I am not as confident as you, and I don't know where you get your confidence from because it's not reflected in the articles you've posted as evidence for your positions.
What about the other risk factors, and what's the interplay between those and the pandemic? Such as for instance, would someone's family member or friend dying due to COVID correlate to an increase in drug use? How does that compare to someone being lonely and isolated? What about someone who is feeling isolated and then their family dies? Did they start drugs because they were lonely or grieving a loss? I just don't see any accounting for these nuances in your posts, and so I just have to wonder what makes you so sure of your position, that you speak in superlatives?
> You can't simultaneously argue that people are not risk averse enough to be left to their own devices, and thus we need lockdowns, while arguing that lockdowns did not contribute to the spike in fentanyl deaths through their impact on behavior.
I'm not arguing Covid didn't increase fentanyl related deaths of despair; I'm arguing that you didn't show causation. But while you mention it, you can't simultaneously argue that lockdowns are the result of despair related deaths, at the same time you argue that when left to their own devices, people will lock down on their own when confronted with COVID. Everyone around you voluntarily choosing to isolate themselves would have the same isolative effect on you as if the government told them to do it.
> Even George Floyd had lost his job as a bouncer at a club due to the lockdowns before his attempt to use a fake $20 bill led to the deadly police interaction that killed him.
I assume you said this in response to my having brought up the BLM protests of 2020, but to be clear those protests were not in fact about George Floyd; he was the catalyst, but 2020 was in response to a long string of murders. If you're trying to insinuate that lockdowns caused those protests by proxy, no. Cops murdering black men well before lockdowns caused those protests.
>>Your arguments are very confusing to me, because on the one hand you are arguing that lockdowns are not good and that they should not have been done because of the damage due to social isolation and other economic follow-on effects.
My argument is that people by and large make rational cost-benefit analyses, and pay the cost of sheltering-at-home/social-isolation if the benefit in COVID risk mitigation makes it worth it.
I alluded to that here:
>>A lockdown rule, being rigidly preset, can't know when a young person is facing drug abuse problems, and faces far greater risk from social isolation than from COVID. The US saw a massive spike in fentanyl overdose deaths in 2020, showing the steep cost of social isolation - which lockdowns exacerbate - for public health.
To summarize, maximizing COVID risk mitigation is not the appropriate strategy for every individual. Whether it is, depends on their situation/circumstances. Lock-downs are a cookie-cutter solution that cannot make these kinds of distinctions.
>>The people who demand to keep schools open usually seem to stop short of demanding that teachers are protected. Let's look at your linked study for instance. This study shows that they had a successful start of the Fall 2020 semester in North Carolina. How did they do it?
>>In weekly superintendent meetings, several key contributors to success were noted: daily screening of students and staff, high rates of mask wearing adherence for children and adults, transparency in publicly reporting confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections (eg, via Web site), efficient contact tracing, close collaboration with local health departments, regular updates with staff and principals to encourage adherence and report secondary transmission cases or any breaches in safety protocols, detailed schedule for all aspects of the school day to adhere to the 3W’s, definitive plans for the special needs community, and opening in the hybrid model of instruction. These refinements informed the 12 Principles for Safer Schools.
It seems reasonable to assume that most of these measures would not impose significant harm to children, and thus would be perfectly appropriate to institute. Mask-wearing could harm children, due to its obstruction of communication and potential inhibition of social gathering and physical activity, and this would need to be seriously examined before the measure is mandated.
But school closures as a whole, which is the biggest point of contention, will absolutely harm children, yet teachers unions pushed for this for over a year in many jurisdictions.
>>Look what happened in Georgia at the beginning of their school year:
While this is obviously tragic, it is an ancedote, so these numbers cannot be generalized to all school districts. Moreover, there are far more likely vectors of transmission than exposure to students in schools. This study suggests that the vast majority of transmission occurs at home:
>>Whatever aggregate statistics you have about this situation, what they will fail to note is that even a single teacher death can throw an entire school and even a district into disorder in this environment. Because there are no replacements. No one wants to sub. No one wants to be a teacher anymore so it's hard to hire. When one teacher goes down then you have to tap unqualified people to teach a subject they aren't used to, and everyone is already oversubscribed. I mean, you're so worried about student outcomes, what happens to outcomes when teachers die and they are replaced with clueless substitutes?
A teacher dying is obviously damaging to students, and of course to the teacher themselves along with their family, but how could it possibly be more damaging to children than 30-40% of minority students not learning during the lockdown?
>>Right, but you immediately go to the idea that it's a spike due to despair from lockdowns. But if fentanyl has been a problem for a long time, maybe it's due to other reasons.
The spike, not the baseline, is due to despair. So fentanyl being a problem for a long time is not relevant to my argument.
>>For instance, the report you linked puts forth the notion that covid disrupted supply chains, leading to an increase in supply of tainted fentanyl batches, leading to a spike in deaths for people who potentially had already been using fentanyl before any lockdowns. So how would their deaths be due to despair at lockdowns?
This could also be another cause, but we know mental illness and substance abuse increased in 2020, so "bad batches" cannot explain the entire spike in overdose deaths, and a portion of the spike needs to be attributed to the behavioral changes that emerged in 2020, the most likely cause of which is pandemic-related measures.
Beyond an increase in drug use and a rise in the frequency of bad batches, there is the additional risk of isolation during drug use, which makes overdoses more likely to become fatal.
>>That's not the point, the point is that if loneliness due to lockdowns is causing fentanyl related deaths, then why are the states affected the most in the South or a border state?
One more time: I am not saying that loneliness is the sole cause of fentanyl use. I'm saying it's the cause of the spike in fentanyl use seen in 2020. You're not grasping my critique of your argument as you keep on referring to the higher levels of overdose deaths in the South/border-states.
>>Where is the connection from loneliness to deaths? You just have not shown it conclusively.
I can't prove anything definitively, but the correlation between fentanyl deaths and the pandemic makes it pretty obvious that there's a causative association. The effect of loneliness on the risk of substance abuse is also well documented:
>>No, not obviously, that's the whole point here. None of this is obvious. You say "by far" and "most likely" with such confidence, but I am not as confident as you, and I don't know where you get your confidence from because it's not reflected in the articles you've posted as evidence for your positions.
It's extremely obvious to me, based on what I have read and seen. A massive increase in social isolation, caused by COVID mitigation measures and efforts, is obviously going to cause enormous harm to mental health, and to normal healthy life habits, which will lead to exactly the results we've seen, with the spike in mental illness, substance abuse and obesity during the pandemic response era.
>>What about the other risk factors, and what's the interplay between those and the pandemic? Such as for instance, would someone's family member or friend dying due to COVID correlate to an increase in drug use?
Given 2.8 million people died in the US in 2019, it wouldn't make sense that the 385,000 COVID deaths, which only amounts to 13.7 percent of the baseline number, would have that profound of an impact on mental health and prevalence of substance abuse. We've seen the share of adults reporting anxiety/depression increase from 11 percent in 2019 to 41 percent in 2021:
That magnitude of a difference can't be reasonably explained by an increase in the death rate amounting to 0.1 percent of the US population.
>>I'm not arguing Covid didn't increase fentanyl related deaths of despair; I'm arguing that you didn't show causation.
Those arguing for mandatory behavioral modification have to prove it's safe. The onus is not on me to prove that the subsequent surge in mental illness, obesity, and substance abuse was caused by this mandatory behavioral modification. The onus is on lockdown supporters to prove that it wasn't. You have to prove that a highly distressing/disruptive intervention, that is forced on millions of people, is not going to harm them, before instituting it. And there are plenty of indiciation that it was in fact harmful.
>>But while you mention it, you can't simultaneously argue that lockdowns are the result of despair related deaths, at the same time you argue that when left to their own devices, people will lock down on their own when confronted with COVID.
You're oversimplifying my argument. I'm saying that people will generally make rational cost-benefit analyses that will lead to them taking the appropriate measures that minimize all risks that face them. For a person with substance abuse problems, the risk of social isolation that emerges from social distancing measures may outweigh the risk from COVID from not taking those measures, and they may choose to not socially distance as a result. These kinds of individualized responses are not possible with lockdowns.
>>I assume you said this in response to my having brought up the BLM protests of 2020, but to be clear those protests were not in fact about George Floyd;
They were triggered by the George Floyd video. The number of unarmed black people being killed by police is very small, and has decreased enormously over the last decade. More black people are killed in single days in Chicago by people other than police than the number of unarmed black people killed across the entire US over the course of a year by police.
> It seems reasonable to assume that most of these measures would not impose significant harm to children, and thus would be perfectly appropriate to institute.
And yet most of those measures are very expensive to implement, and in fact they are resisted by various groups. They don't want to do anything.
> While this is obviously tragic, it is an ancedote, so these numbers cannot be generalized to all school districts.
I mean, we're talking about an entire state here. It's more than an anecdote is an ever-growing list of obituaries. The shortages are not an anecdote, it's a systemic failure of which we can identify the cause. And the solution isn't "Let's just get back to school"
> Moreover, there are far more likely vectors of transmission than exposure to students in schools. This study suggests that the vast majority of transmission occurs at home:
Where the virus is contracted does not matter if the issue is that you don't have a teacher to teach the children. I don't know why this keeps getting lost. Let's pretend that everyone inside of a school is magically immune from covid. Schools have some special property that confers immunity while people are in the building. Even if that were true, if a teacher gets covid outside of school and can't come in to work, who is going to teach the class that day? Please just answer that question, keeping in mind there is a substitute and teacher shortage due to covid.
> how could it possibly be more damaging to children than 30-40% of minority students not learning during the lockdown?
The link you provided does not say that 30-40% of minorities students are not learning due lockdowns. That may be one aspect of it, but it also goes on to note that black and Hispanics were hit harder by the pandemic in terms of cases and deaths, which were due to not locking down certain industries (e.g. meat packing plants, where Hispanics are overrepresented and died at higher rates). I dunno about you, but if my mom died because her boss said she had to come in to work, I don't think I'd be able to learn no matter what the setting and access to technology.
This is again a very complicated and nuances topic you are laying entirely at the feet of the "lockdown" boogeyman.
> but we know mental illness and substance abuse increased in 2020, so "bad batches" cannot explain the entire spike in overdose deaths, and a portion of the spike needs to be attributed to the behavioral changes that emerged in 2020, the most likely cause of which is pandemic-related measures.
Thank you finally some nuance. So you now admit there are a number of factors, and the question before us is how much do they each impact the outcome. But then you again assert without evidence (the link you provided does not support your claim) that the "most likely cause" is pandemic-related measures (rather than the pandemic itself). I really think you need to start separating your opinions from evidence-based assertions.
> It's extremely obvious to me, based on what I have read and seen.
And it's not obvious to me. If you can't even provide me with proof of something that is "extremely" obvious to you, then I think it's incumbent upon you to question your foundational assumptions here. How is it that you have so easily dismissed the actual pandemic that his killed hundreds of thousands in the US and millions around the world as the cause of anu purported despair. Why do you think that restrictions (which your own links note were not even enforceable, and to the extent they changed behavior, the behavior actually would have changed regardless) are the thing that is causing all the problems in society?
> Given 2.8 million people died in the US in 2019, it wouldn't make sense that the 385,000 COVID deaths, which only amounts to 13.7 percent of the baseline number
One characteristic of covid is that while a majority of deaths are the elderly, it has caused some very untimely deaths, which are infinitely more tragic than a death after a life well-lived. Just take the Georgia teachers for instance. 40 seniors in nursing homes die all the time. That's not going to impact anyone aside from the immediate family, who honestly will largely carry on as normal the day after the funeral. 40 teachers from the same state dying in the span of weeks under the age of 50 just does not happen, ever, from any cause. This result causes extreme existential dread not just for the people who knew them personally but for millions in that profession around the country.
> Those arguing for mandatory behavioral modification have to prove it's safe.
> The onus is not on me to prove that the subsequent surge in mental illness, obesity, and substance abuse was caused by this mandatory behavioral modification.
Forget onus, how does one prove that something wasn't? Moreover, what you're asking for is inaction in the face of provable imminent danger. How do you prove an untested action will not harm people more than an unknown pathogen while the pathogen is rapidly spreading? How would that even work? It wouldn't, it would just lead to the pathogen doing whatever it wants while we try to prove our mitigation methods work.
So really the best we can do right now is to look back and see what harms mitigation measures caused, versus what harms the virus caused. And then we can use the magic of statistics to try and figure out what were the most important factors, and which ones were not so important. But nothing about this process is obvious to me at least, so I'm still mystified as to why this is so clear to you, yet you can't actually prove it to me. If you can intuitively see these things and know you are right in your heart, good for you, but that doesn't help the rest of us.
> For a person with substance abuse problems, the risk of social isolation that emerges from social distancing measures may outweigh the risk from COVID from not taking those measures
Okay, I agree, but you're still not addressing the fact that people social distanced on their own, as noted by your own supporting evidence. How do you imagine this playing out? What happens when customers at your work decide on their own they'd rather stay home than face the disease, business slows down so you get laid off, and you're stuck at home unemployed and lonely because your friends are all social distancing. Nothing about this scenario requires a mandated lockdown, it results in the same loneliness, the lonely person is still powerless to fix their situation, and none of it was caused by government intervention. This counterfactual is completely in line with all the evidence you have presented and it doesn't support your argument at all.
> They were triggered by the George Floyd video. The number of unarmed black people being killed by police is very small, and has decreased enormously over the last decade. More black people are killed in single days in Chicago by people other than police than the number of unarmed black people killed across the entire US over the course of a year by police.
I don't know what you're trying to say here. You're just minimizing people's stated reasons of grievance.
>>And yet most of those measures are very expensive to implement, and in fact they are resisted by various groups. They don't want to do anything.
Yet many school districts shut down in person schooling altogether. The notion that they'd be willing to acquiesce to this very extreme demand from teachers unions, but not much milder demands like those you mentioned, is hard to believe.
>>I mean, we're talking about an entire state here.
You can find an outlier state for any given statistic, so it is in fact an anecdote.
>>It's more than an anecdote is an ever-growing list of obituaries.
It's an anecdote.
>>The shortages are not an anecdote, it's a systemic failure of which we can identify the cause. And the solution isn't "Let's just get back to school"
There is no analysis done to see how much of that could be attributed to in-person schooling leading to COVID deaths among teachers, and the comparing the social/human cost of that to the cost of children missing out on in-person schooling for a year, because the teachers unions are interested only in advocating for their employees, not in genuinely searching out to find the best policy for the public interest.
They have already made their mind up on what the correct conclusion is, and they are just searching for arguments that could plausibly support it.
>>Even if that were true, if a teacher gets covid outside of school and can't come in to work, who is going to teach the class that day? Please just answer that question, keeping in mind there is a substitute and teacher shortage due to covid.
I don't understand why all in-person schooling has to be shut down because some teachers cannot attend class. There are still many teachers available that can do in-person schooling. Why not at least have them do in-person instruction?
>>The link you provided does not say that 30-40% of minorities students are not learning due lockdowns. That may be one aspect of it, but it also goes on to note that black and Hispanics
It says specifically that they were not learning via remote instruction. Here's a graph that lays it out:
So you're mischaracterizing what the linked page is asserting. It is absolutely claiming that remote education led to massive education losses for a significant fraction of minority students.
This is absolutely for the school shutdown position, which makes it unsurprising that you're not willing to accept the conclusions of that analysis, and are even mischaracterizing what they are.
The rest of your arguments are just rehashing points I've already rebutted, or more of the case of you demanding definitive proof from every conceivable indication of damage from lockdowns, while accepting every claim of harm from the absence of a lockdown.
>>I don't know what you're trying to say here. You're just minimizing people's stated reasons of grievance.
I'm not even commenting on their stated reasons, which are orthogonal to my point about what triggered the riots. I'm pointing out the fact that the riots were triggered by the George Floyd video. That's not a disputable fact.
But any fact that shines poorly on the lockdown, you feel compelled to dispute. This is the typical case when debating unionized teachers who argued, under the lockdown philosophy, that schools should be shut down for a year or more, in favor of the disastrous remote learning that led to so much educational loss for children.
But then you link to a post that argues that we didn't need to lock down, because people would have taken costly (what costs? They don't say afaict) measures to lock themselves down anyway. I mean, take the passage you linked. What is this supposed to show? They have one model that is unreasonably bad, and then they refine it so that it is more reasonable, and then they show it better tracks the data.
So basically lockdowns. But how does this avoid any of the damage you're talking about? How do schools and businesses stay open under these circumstances, where everyone has decided independently on their own volition to isolate?> Young people should take priority over the old.
Yes, I'm a teacher so I'm not going to argue with you there. I spend a lot of time putting children first. But this line of reasoning always seems to forget the fact that there's a lot of old people involved in teaching children. The people who demand to keep schools open usually seem to stop short of demanding that teachers are protected. Let's look at your linked study for instance. This study shows that they had a successful start of the Fall 2020 semester in North Carolina. How did they do it?
There was also full buy in from participating faculty, and plenty of training and education. During the period of Aug-Oct 2020 in North Carolina, community spread in general was low. It's true that schools are safer than many places if the proper precautions are taken. But that goes out the window when community spread is high. This distinction has been lost on many. This is a far cry to the environment of 2021, when community spread was quite high and parents were demanding teachers back to school in front of mask-less, unvaccinated children.Look what happened in Georgia at the beginning of their school year:
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/60-georgia-teachers...
The average age of the 42 teachers on this list who have died is 46 years old. The youngest was in their 20s. I don't know if this needs to be said, but dozens of young teachers do not usually die before the school year starts. There's a substitute teacher shortage [2], a bus driver shortage [3], school closures due to staffing shortages (not even COVID) [4], and yet people are out there demanding that this system be fully operational for their kids, immediately. That's not normal, and young people cannot expect normalcy given the above.
Whatever aggregate statistics you have about this situation, what they will fail to note is that even a single teacher death can throw an entire school and even a district into disorder in this environment. Because there are no replacements. No one wants to sub. No one wants to be a teacher anymore so it's hard to hire. When one teacher goes down then you have to tap unqualified people to teach a subject they aren't used to, and everyone is already oversubscribed. I mean, you're so worried about student outcomes, what happens to outcomes when teachers die and they are replaced with clueless substitutes? That's not a good learning environment either.
> My only comment was on the spike in deaths.
Right, but you immediately go to the idea that it's a spike due to despair from lockdowns. But if fentanyl has been a problem for a long time, maybe it's due to other reasons. For instance, the report you linked puts forth the notion that covid disrupted supply chains, leading to an increase in supply of tainted fentanyl batches, leading to a spike in deaths for people who potentially had already been using fentanyl before any lockdowns. So how would their deaths be due to despair at lockdowns?
> And all of them had restrictions that persisted long after the stay-at-home order was lifted. Which of those states didn't shut down in person schooling?
That's not the point, the point is that if loneliness due to lockdowns is causing fentanyl related deaths, then why are the states affected the most in the South or a border state? Like you said, Florida is a gateway for that stuff, so what if it's just that supply and opportunity increased, it comes over the border and affects those states most, but then it's also distributed across the country so it'll have an effect everywhere. Where is the connection from loneliness to deaths? You just have not shown it conclusively.
> Obviously this massive spike in fentanyl deaths is due to behavioral changes relating to the pandemic. And by far the behavioral change most likely to have contributed is social isolation, which is a known risk factor for drug use.
No, not obviously, that's the whole point here. None of this is obvious. You say "by far" and "most likely" with such confidence, but I am not as confident as you, and I don't know where you get your confidence from because it's not reflected in the articles you've posted as evidence for your positions.
What about the other risk factors, and what's the interplay between those and the pandemic? Such as for instance, would someone's family member or friend dying due to COVID correlate to an increase in drug use? How does that compare to someone being lonely and isolated? What about someone who is feeling isolated and then their family dies? Did they start drugs because they were lonely or grieving a loss? I just don't see any accounting for these nuances in your posts, and so I just have to wonder what makes you so sure of your position, that you speak in superlatives?
> You can't simultaneously argue that people are not risk averse enough to be left to their own devices, and thus we need lockdowns, while arguing that lockdowns did not contribute to the spike in fentanyl deaths through their impact on behavior.
I'm not arguing Covid didn't increase fentanyl related deaths of despair; I'm arguing that you didn't show causation. But while you mention it, you can't simultaneously argue that lockdowns are the result of despair related deaths, at the same time you argue that when left to their own devices, people will lock down on their own when confronted with COVID. Everyone around you voluntarily choosing to isolate themselves would have the same isolative effect on you as if the government told them to do it.
> Even George Floyd had lost his job as a bouncer at a club due to the lockdowns before his attempt to use a fake $20 bill led to the deadly police interaction that killed him.
I assume you said this in response to my having brought up the BLM protests of 2020, but to be clear those protests were not in fact about George Floyd; he was the catalyst, but 2020 was in response to a long string of murders. If you're trying to insinuate that lockdowns caused those protests by proxy, no. Cops murdering black men well before lockdowns caused those protests.
[0] https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/least-50-georgia-te...
[1] https://www.ajc.com/education/get-schooled-blog/teacher-my-p...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/labor-shortage-georgia-schoo...
[3] https://thegeorgiavirtue.com/georgia-news/bus-driver-shortag...
[4] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/entire-south-ga-school-dis...