STOP BLIGHTING YOUNG PEOPLES' LIVES.

Remember yesterday's sermon?  Today we read, "Sage experts warn of impact of Covid policies on the young."  That's not "sage" as in "wise beyond their years," rather it's a British rendering of an acronym, "Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies."  Their portfolio includes all emergencies, not one at a time, where the area specialists are supposed to contribute their local knowledge.

The were already concerns among experts about generation Z before the pandemic. A>bout 30% of children were already living in poverty, a figure that was predicted to increase.

During the pandemic, there has been a rise in the use of food banks, especially among households with children. Official data showed a dramatic deterioration in job prospects for young men in June to August 2020, with 16- to 24-year-olds accounting for almost 60% of the total fall in employment during the pandemic.

Prof Russell Viner, the president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, who is on Sage’s children’s task and finish working group, said: “This is a generation under threat. It will be catastrophically, disproportionately hit and harmed by the loss of economic and social opportunities as a direct result of the pandemic. We have taken money out of our children’s futures by racking up this huge national debt.

“We have to face up to the fact that we not only took away the protective net we throw around our children by closing schools and redeploying the children’s health workforce, but then we mortgaged off their futures for the current reality.”.

Let the record show that Britain's lockdowns, if they were intended for the good of the children, were anything but.

Viner’s comments were echoed by a second Sage member, Prof Chris Bonell from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“There will be a negative long-term mental health, economic, and social legacy of the pandemic and the government’s response on all young people, whether they are privileged or not, and whether they were scarred during lockdown or not,” he said.

“These adversities will be played out along their whole life courses: scarring like this doesn’t just wash out – it’s permanent. This is more dramatic disruption than any generation has experienced in modern times, and so will have more dramatic and disruptive effects.”

Bonell said the government had failed to protect this generation from the direct harm it suffered as a result of its pandemic policies. “Within a few weeks of lockdown, for example, there should have been a full national programme of learning instead of leaving it to individual schools to cope,” he said.

Yes. Had the British not acted as if they were going to reprise the Plague of 1666 with smart-phones, perhaps they could have kicked that particular can down the road for two weeks.  Now come the second round of full shutdowns, after a summer of only cursory reopenings, and they're screwed.

He said the government had been aware of specific risks to the younger generation: “People were voicing their concerns but they weren’t planning for the future, even though we already had empirical evidence showing this generation would suffer increased levels of risk.

“The immediate threat was older people dying and they [the government] saw that the problems hitting the younger generation would accrue more slowly, so they could and did fail to get it properly on their radar for any sustained period of time. The help this generation needed just wasn’t delivered.”

Whether, as the sages recommend, expanding social services now will hamper a future return to work by the young people once the danger passes, remains an open question.