The main COVID lockdown casualties: Children

The evidence keeps piling up that children were the biggest casualties of the government’s response to Covid. The latest comes from a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that youth homicides and suicides hit a 20-year high in 2021 following lockdowns and the turn to progressive policing.

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Suicides among adolescents and young adults have been increasing more or less steadily for two decades. But the new data show that, after a small decline between 2018 and 2019, youth suicides climbed in 2020 and 2021. The two-year increase among the college-aged (20 to 24) was the largest in at least two decades.

The rise in mental-health problems among young people during the pandemic has been widely chronicled. One CDC survey found about half of 18-to-24-year-olds experienced anxiety or depression during the summer of 2020. Lockdowns and college closures no doubt drove some into depressive funks and down social-media rabbit holes.

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