Quote:I happen to know a freshman in college.

He applied for his loans, got a maxed-out meal ticket, acquired his dormroom digs, signed up for 16 hours, and scored some university swag.

But just as he was sliding through that new school sweatshirt’s hood, reality reared its ugly head:

Due to the virus, he won’t have a roommate.
Due to the virus, he can’t have visitors.
Due to the virus, all sports are canceled.
Due to the virus, all classes are online.
Who ever imagined the most exciting year of their life…would turn out to be the loneliest?

It’s a common contemporary condition, and in these crudely contagious times, some would say the cure has become worse than the disease.

Apropos, kids in the country’s 5th largest school system will be making a return to the classroom.

The reason?

Clark County, Nevada’s seen a surge of student suicides.

As stated by The Daily Wire, “The shocking news of a rash of student suicides in Nevada has school districts across the country rethinking the strategy of in-home and online learning amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and reconsidering their position that students might fully recover from a year spent out of the company of peers.”

Makes sense.

Following a series of self-inflicted fatalities around the Las Vegas area, in January, the district voted to begin retuning select elementary school grades as well as struggling students to in-person learning.

This, despite the fact that the city’s continued to post — per the The New York Times — “huge numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths.”

According to the school board, mental health and physical health aren’t wholly separate.

The Wire observes that’s “something few entities [thought of] during the virus’ first wave — and even though the risk of contracting and spreading the novel coronavirus remains high in places like Nevada, the risk of losing a generation to isolation-driven depression and anxiety is weighing heavy on administrators.”

NYT drives the point further home:

Superintendents across the nation are weighing the benefit of in-person education against the cost of public health, watching teachers and staff become sick and, in some cases, die, but also seeing the psychological and academic toll that school closings are having on children nearly a year in. The risk of student suicides has quietly stirred many district leaders, leading some, like the state superintendent in Arizona, to cite that fear in public pleas to help mitigate the virus’s spread.

Depression’s taking hold.

For more, see Sarah Lee’s “The Lockdown Is Making Young People Want To Die.”

It’s an international ailment, as evidenced in Brad Slager’s “Japan Is Only One Country Where the Lockdowns Suicide Rate Is Outpacing the Pandemic.”

These are dire times. People need one another.

That may be most true of America’s children.

Clark County Superintendent Jesus Jara said those in charge have had a change of mind — perhaps via a change of heart:

“When we started to see the uptick in children taking their lives, we knew it wasn’t just the Covid numbers we need to look at anymore. We have to find a way to put our hands on our kids, to see them, to look at them. They’ve got to start seeing some movement, some hope.”