Look long ahead, who still wants that?
What should have been a great pandemic summer, for some even the promise of a return to their "normality", is already developing into the prologue for the next, fourth pandemic depression.
In the meantime, the first lockdown babies should already be walking, which on the one hand reminds us how long the crisis has lasted, but on the other hand it is also pure joy.
Because it also means: There is a tomorrow.
A few doctors from Providence, in the small, neat American state of Rhode Island, have been more interested than others in the possible future of these lockdown children. Ten years ago they founded the “Resonance” consortium, which aims to fundamentally document the cognitive development of children from the first few years through to puberty. After all, there are brain images, family surveys, questionnaires and cognition tests of more than six hundred children - including 39 who were born in the two years before the pandemic and 118 who were born since the first lockdown in March 2020. The evaluation has now been published on the medRxiv preprint server and, like many other pandemic research reports,which - although not yet scientifically assessed - attracts more attention the more difficult it is to interpret the results. Internally, in the consortium with its experts and pediatricians, one is careful. Outside, however, the finding quickly aroused dystopian longing.
The “intelligence quotient” of the lockdown babies, it was said, for example, had fallen alarmingly sharply in the state of emergency. That is of course not in the study, the IQ does not appear at all, and you certainly do not have to have raised children yourself to suspect that the use of the IQ measure lags heavily here. From a pre-lockdown value of around 100, which reflects the verbal, non-verbal, motor and otherwise cognitive expressive capabilities of the newborns, the lockdown babies have dropped massively by 27 to 37 points. Reason: overwhelmed parents in the home office and presumably lack of care, so the doctors. The infants lack the professional, varied pre-Corona care. What cannot be ruled out, however, is what the doctors themselves bring into play:that the strict mask requirement for the research staff in Rhode Island has severely dampened the expressiveness of the little ones. Speculation, too, maybe, but good enough to breathe a sigh of relief.