that one study that showed babies born during the pandemic had lost 2 standard deviations of cognitive development compared to babies born earlier
Whoa, that effect size is huge. Too big for me to believe it without more evidence. Seems more likely to be a confounding factor. The discussion section of that paper is pretty good, listing a bunch of hypothesis of what the reason could be, but not finding any obviously good ones.
One thing that stands out to me:
One aspect also not investigated here is the impact of mask-wearing by the study staff during child visits and assessments [53]. The inability of infants to see full facial expressions may have eliminated non-verbal cues, muffled instructions, or otherwise altered the understanding of the test questions and instructions.
This seems like it could be a big confounder. (Though it only makes sense if it has a differentially larger effect on younger children, since the cognitive loss supposedly applies to babies born during the pandemic rather than babies tested during the pandemic.)
Whoa, that effect size is huge. Too big for me to believe it without more evidence. Seems more likely to be a confounding factor. The discussion section of that paper is pretty good, listing a bunch of hypothesis of what the reason could be, but not finding any obviously good ones.
One thing that stands out to me:
This seems like it could be a big confounder. (Though it only makes sense if it has a differentially larger effect on younger children, since the cognitive loss supposedly applies to babies born during the pandemic rather than babies tested during the pandemic.)