An article in nature blames a myopia epidemic on pandemic mitigations. This is excessive.
NATURE 29 May 2024 A myopia epidemic is sweeping the globe. Here’s how to stop it Time spent outdoors is the best defence against rising rates of short-sightedness, but scientists are searching for other ways to reverse the troubling trend. By Elie Dolgin The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t just reshape how children learn and see the world. It transformed the shape of their eyeballs. As real-life classrooms and playgrounds gave way to virtual meetings and digital devices, the time that children spent focusing on screens and other nearby objects surged — and the time they spent outdoors dropped precipitously.
This doesn’t make any sense. Digital devices were not a result of the pandemic, the trend upwards in screen time was well established pre-pandemic. And many kids spent more time outside because it was considered safer, so in many parts of the world school was moved outside. Remote schooling wasn’t an extremely common norm for very long. But further than that – before the pandemic, kids have been given tablets TO USE IN THE IN-PERSON CLASSROOM because big tech got boondoggles with school districts to sell all these devices. Kids are using these devices at IN PERSON school, and tablets in schools are not new. That isn’t the fault of the pandemic. Kids spending time on screens has been a trend that started before the pandemic and will probably continue even with kids being stuffed back into covid laden classrooms even while sick.
The pandemic virus and all its horrid effects are terrible, and many of those real effects are largely ignored, while ridiculous claims keep being made about “lockdowns” that are not happening, and in many cases never happened, other than that lockdown revisionists include any public health mitigation to be called “lockdown” even if it had “little to no restriction on social mobility or interaction” (COVID-19 lockdown revisionism Blake Murdoch, Timothy Caulfield CMAJ Apr 2023, 195 (15) E552-E554; DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.221543)