r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Sep 09 '24

Neuroscience Covid lockdowns prematurely aged girls’ brains more than boys’, study finds. MRI scans found girls’ brains appeared 4.2 years older than expected after lockdowns, compared with 1.4 years for boys.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/sep/09/covid-lockdowns-prematurely-aged-girls-brains-more-than-boys-study-finds
29.5k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/Altruistic-Order-661 Sep 10 '24 edited Sep 10 '24

I’m not sure where you live but where I live the kids didn’t go to school for over a year and every time they had a cold we had to take a week off for pcr testing to come back because they didn’t take rapid tests for almost another year. It was pretty dang dramatic imo. I would say for at least a year, children and their families lives were turned upside down in many parts of the world. Not only could they not go to school they couldn’t even go to parks or outdoor spots, remember all of the caution tape around playgrounds for nearly a year? Remember police showing up at peoples homes during Xmas parties nearly a year after Covid started?

2

u/Mysfunction Sep 10 '24

I’m not using anecdotal observation from where I live to make the statement, I’m using data that describes the general experience in North America. Those restrictions were very limited in time for the vast majority of North Americans.

2

u/Altruistic-Order-661 Sep 10 '24

Well it certainly wasn’t for the most populous states (aside from maybe Texas in the US?) And that’s certainly not anecdotal. Can you show me some data that the “so called” lockdowns were and under 6 months for most of North America? I’m assuming Canada is part of north America correct?

2

u/Mysfunction Sep 10 '24

If we want to measure lockdowns by school closures, this article gives really great data.

Effectively this demonstrates that while all schools were closed from March to June of 2020, at most 1/8 experienced closures for 7 weeks in the following school year, and that’s assuming that those spikes were all the same schools, which is not the case. Those spikes each would have been a different mixture of schools, so it is well under 1/8 of schools that experienced 2 months of closures in the following school year.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/30/1/23-1215_article#:~:text=However%2C%20the%20initial%20months%20(February,slow%20virus%20transmission%20and%20reduce

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/30/1/23-1215-f1

And, again, that’s only if we measure lockdown by school closures, which was the most stringent of lockdown measures. Much of this time playgrounds and restaurants were open and people were allowed to gather in small groups.