The carnage-yet-to-come
How misguided attempts to keep children "safe" during the pandemic will continue to harm them in the years to come
Among the many ongoing tragedies wrought by misguided public health policies over the past two years—tragedies certain people would like us to ignore and forget—learning deficits emerging among young children are one of the most alarming.
Some of us spoke up about the dangers of school closures early on in the COVID pandemic—and got in serious trouble for doing so. But now even the fountainhead of fear porn itself—the New York Times—is printing stuff like this:
The Times cited a study showing that more American students in years K-2 were “at risk of not learning to read” and that black and Hispanic students had fallen further behind their white counterparts. They cited another study, this one done in Virginia, showing that the percentage of K-2 students falling “below benchmark at grade level entry” was the highest ever recorded—and was significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels.
The Times lamented the pandemic’s detrimental effects on reading proficiency and quoted experts who worried that the long term costs could be “pretty dramatic.”
The problem with the Times’ coverage, as I see it, is that the pandemic didn’t cause this problem at all. The hysterical and maladaptive overreaction to it did. An overreaction fuelled by fear porn published in, among other places, the New York Times—which now claims to be astonished and appalled by this entirely predictable outcome.
Sweden, last time I checked, has also lived through a pandemic. But, unlike most other countries, the Swedes never closed their day cares and elementary schools. The result? Almost identical COVID case rates in children as compared to Finland (which has similar demographics and did close schools), not a single death among elementary school kids, and rates of infection in teachers which were the same as the population average for Swedish adults. And, of course, no interruption in learning.
Just to be perfectly clear: A study comparing Sweden to Finland concluded that school closures had no measurable impact on the number of COVID cases in school-aged children.
Let that sink in for a moment as we look further at the costs of school closures around the world. A recent collaborative report from UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank said this:
The global disruption to education caused by the COVD-19 pandemic is without parallel and the effects on learning are severe. The crisis brought education systems across the world to a halt, with school closures affecting more than 1.6 billion learners. While nearly every country in the world offered remote learning opportunities for students, the quality and reach of such initiatives varied greatly and were at best partial substitutes for in-person learning. Now, 21 months later, schools remain closed for millions of children and youth, and millions more are at risk of never returning to education. Evidence of the detrimental impacts of school closures on children’s learning offer a harrowing reality: learning losses are substantial, with the most marginalized children and youth often disproportionately affected.
As reported in the LA Times, the authors went on to note that “students now risk losing $17 trillion in lifetime earnings, or about 14% of today’s global GDP, because of COVID-19-related school closures and economic shocks.” That’s trillion with a T. That’s what we’ve taken from our children.
And there’s no making up for it. Previous research on school closures (due to natural disasters, etc.) shows that kids who have fallen behind tend to fall further behind over the ensuing years. The disadvantaged become even more disadvantaged. The damage is multiplied.
Still, there will be those who insist that school closures saved lives (even though they probably didn’t.) They will argue that “children are resilient” (with its tacit admission that we have, in fact, harmed them.) They will bring up the false dichotomy of “saving lives” versus “saving money” and accuse you of trying to “kill grandma” if you dare to question the logic behind school closures and other disastrous lockdown strategies.
But it’s not just about reading and making money, is it? There is a strong association between level of educational attainment and life expectancy. And a study by Christakis et. al. (published in JAMA Open in late 2020) indicated that, even by that relatively early point in the pandemic, school closures had reduced the average expected educational attainment of primary school children in the USA by a significant amount, and that this reduction in educational attainment would result in an estimated 13.8 million years of life lost for the cohort currently aged 5-11.
Once again it will be the disadvantaged—those people whom the fear-mongers at the New York Times claim to care about—who bear the brunt of this carnage-yet-to-come. (And this is just the damage attributable to learning loss—we haven’t even talked about the direct mental and physical health effects of school closures on kids.)
This is a slow motion catastrophe we have unleashed on our society’s most vulnerable members—our children. And for what? To assuage the anxiety of the neurotically fearful?
My worry is that as the media continues to publish daily COVID death tolls—while simultaneously pivoting our attention to the next catastrophe and the one after that (World War 3? Climate change?), we will forget about the mountain of bodies which continue to quietly pile up on the other side—sacrificed on the alter of bad policy decisions for which there will be, it seems, no accountability. And we will be condemned to repeat our mistakes.
As Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute recently wrote:
“There is a vast machine extant that desperately wants everyone to forget. Not even forgive, just forget. Don’t think about the old thing. Think about the new thing instead. Don’t learn lessons. Don’t change the system. Don’t uproot the bureaucracies or examine why the court system failed us so miserably until it was too late. Don’t seek more information. Don’t seek reforms. Don’t take away powers from the CDC and NIH, much less Homeland Security.
Meanwhile, we live amidst a crisis without precedent. It affects health, economics, law, culture, education, and science. Nothing has been left untouched.”
Children and teenagers who were not vaccinated for COVID were further damaged because as in Calgary Alberta, they were not allowed to participate in their out of school activities such as: art, drama, hockey, swimming, gymnastics, dance. Furthermore they are forever psychologically impacted by being labelled as coming from families who are selfish, "grandma killers", and in the words of Justin Trudeau, demonized by being referred to as "misogynist, racist etc etc." FYI I write this as a great-grandmother.
Well, duh! I hope this information reaches beyond the choir loft.
Our youngest was in grade 9 when this all came down. He also has "multiple exceptionalities", that is, neurodevelopmental disabilities.
Despite living in an area that was very lightly affected, his life pretty much stopped. No classroom. No therapies. No clubs. His besty's family completely locked in, so he wasn't there. Fortunately one friend was able to.visit. Even the older siblings became unavailable, except via the exhausting Zoom chat.
Now, he would be quite happy to live out the rest of his life staring at a screen. We are busting our butts to get his now-adult self out into society again. He is resenting it immensely.
Despite the hours I spent trying to make an on-screen education work for him, his literacy and numeracy are much farther behind than they needed to be. And he is not economically or culturally disadvantaged.
I do not envy those who, in their waning years, are at the mercy of these now youthful folks.