We can’t ignore that lockdowns are impacting our children

Every aspect of human life is being sacrificed to be covid safe. And we can’t ignore that lockdowns are killing people too.

OPINION

“We’ll all end up in the same place.”

So my wise old mate from Melbourne told me a year ago when he was walled up in a hospital at the height of the long lockdown and barred from even seeing his carer because of covid concerns.

This might not have been such a big deal were he not a quadriplegic, a somewhat specific circumstance in which your carer is basically your arms and legs.

But such was the lockdown hysteria in the southern capital that a man who could not move his own body was denied access to the person who effectively was his body.

And why? For his own good of course.

Now NSW — the once celebrated standard bearer of freedom — is rapidly heading down that same suffocating mole-hole in which every other aspect of human life is sacrificed in the name of covid safety.

At this rate there won’t be much life left that’s worth saving.

It would be nice to think that this was simply a figure of speech. Sadly, it is quite literally true.

At the apex of the marathon Melbourne lockdown, the Victorian Coroners Court released the first of what were to be new monthly reports encouraging “safe and honest conversations about suicide”. It found no increase in suicides between January and August 2020.

Predictably, the pro-lockdown brigade and the #IstandwithDan social media mob seized upon this as evidence of how harmless lockdowns were.

However that tale has now turned.

Exactly a year later a report in The Australian opened with this stark sentence: “Eight teenage girls have committed suicide in the first seven months of this year, a marked increase in the number of young women taking their lives in a tragic toll being closely watched by the Victorian Coroners Court.”

A near empty Sydney Opera House forecourt.

Mental health experts, led by the eminent Professor Patrick McGorry, call it “a real phenomenon”.

“This is the shadow pandemic. And every lockdown makes it even worse,” Prof McGorry said.

“It’s not that the government hasn’t recognised the problem, it’s that they don’t have the same sense of urgency – federal or state – about addressing it like they do with covid.”

These are not people in their 80s and 90s in nursing homes or hospitals or palliative care dying with comorbidities. These are teenagers with their whole lives ahead of them — but not anymore.

And even if we were to accept that the number of suicides in Victoria didn’t rise last year, the horrible fact is that as the lockdowns rolled on kids were trying to kill themselves in never before seen numbers.

As news.com.au reported in June: “Attempted suicide rates among Victorian teenagers have skyrocketed by 184 per cent in the past six months”.

“Disturbing new data from the Kids Helpline revealed the shocking statistic after Victoria was plunged into its fourth major Covid-19 lockdown in the past 12 months.

“Teenagers aged 13-18 were the most at risk, accounting for 75 per cent of the total crisis interventions from December 1, 2020, to May 31, 2021.”

This horror show was not only entirely predictable but also exactly the same as what has now been seen overseas.

An article in the Houston Chronicle this month details the same phenomenon with the simple headline: “As Covid-19 rose, so did teen suicide attempts. Girls are most at risk.”

Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews addresses the media.

But it wasn’t actually Covid that was killing these kids, it was the lockdowns imposed to combat it: “The pandemic stripped teens of important mental health anchors: sports practices, peer hangouts and interactions with trusted teachers, coaches and counsellors.”

Meanwhile in Sydney a school counsellor I know is dealing around the clock with a tsunami of kids in stages ranging from tantrums to trauma, all pleading to go back to the classroom.

Somehow we have created a world in which children are begging to go to school but the government won’t let them. At least that’s one thing we have in common with the Taliban.

Most of us will think it’s a temporary pain in the arse that we can manage and recover from but we are the lucky ones. Think about the thousands of children who don’t have access to computers or the internet, who don’t have parents who are willing or able to teach them, or who don’t have parents at all. What happens to them?

Shamefully, we already know the answer: They disappear.

Following last year’s lockdown in NSW thousands of children simply vanished from school and never returned. This is no anti-lockdown conspiracy theory, this is evidence presented to an inquiry by the Teachers Federation.

“More than 3000 public school students in NSW have not returned to their classrooms since the remote learning period ended in May,” it was reported — in September.

“The chief executive of Fams, the peak body for non-government organisations working with vulnerable children, said the situation was ‘as bad as we feared’, with many students becoming disconnected from trusted relationships with teachers and school counsellors during lockdown.”

Fams CEO Julie Hourigan Ruse said: “We know that for some children and young people, the connection to school was tenuous at best. Lockdown was the circuit breaker those kids did not need.”

Former NSW Teachers Federation president Denis Fitzgerald told the inquiry: “We’ve lost about 3700 students in public education who will not return to schools.”

Meanwhile Victoria locked down hard and fast just like all the zealots wanted it to yet just like NSW it is still in lockdown today with no fixed end in sight. Their governments now look to closing off playgrounds and preschools, more crushing of kids for the sake of covid.

So many children lost, so many abandoned and so many trying in desperation to end it all.

So tell us again, dear one-eyed ideologues, how well these measures work. Tell us again how lockdowns save lives.