At year’s end, the biggest news stories often garner the most attention, but in this moment, one of the most underreported stories of the year should get a second glance. On Face the Nation last Sunday, CBS reporter Jan Crawford bemoaned the lack of reporting and outrage on “the crushing impact that our COVID policies have had on young kids and children.” Crawford explained, “A healthy teenager has a one in a million chance of getting and dying from COVID … but they have suffered and sacrificed the most … and now we have the surgeon general saying there is a mental health crisis among our kids.”
Crawford is right. As a result of COVID policies, UNICEF reported learning loss due to school closures “could cost this generation of students close to $17 trillion in lifetime earnings.” The youth suicide rate among teenagers surged this last year by a staggering 22%. Las Vegas schools only reopened when student suicides skyrocketed. It’s hard to know what’s more heartbreaking: the current statistics demonstrating how much pain and loss our young people are coping with or just how much this result was unwarranted.
From the beginning, a handful of experts vocalized how small the risk to young people was of dying of COVID — small enough that schools and playgrounds should have remained open. As I wrote in The Atlantic, in a July 2020 interview just months after the pandemic began, Scott Atlas, the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, said, “There is virtually zero risk for children getting something serious or dying from this disease.” Even back then, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a statement about the importance of schools reopening. While some states, such as Texas and Florida, complied, others, such as New York, were stubborn and did not reopen until the damage had been done — a whopping 18 months later.
Even Vox hasn’t bought the hype that children’s schools should be shuttered, despite the delta variant this fall. A recent Vox piece quoted Betsy Herold, a pediatric infectious disease physician at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who said, “The risk in children has not changed with the new variant as far as we can tell.” The piece continues:
Herold estimates that less than 2 percent of children known to be infected by the coronavirus are hospitalized, and less than 0.03 percent of those infected die. It’s difficult to draw direct comparisons to American adults now that two-thirds in the US are vaccinated, while most kids aren’t. But before widespread vaccination, about 10 percent of people infected with Covid-19 were hospitalized, and around 1 percent died.
We knew children were at low risk for dying from COVID. At every turn, additional medical evidence proved this. Yet our societal betters continued to promulgate policies that hurt children the most: closing schools, mandating masks, and basically shuttering children inside their homes. Even where I live in Texas, a state that’s been open for most of the pandemic, playgrounds were roped off early on. We later learned that fresh air, sunshine, and exercise were some of the best ways to combat COVID, yet even now, politicians and “experts” continue to toss around the idea of shuttering schools again. This has harmed children, especially those with learning or physical disabilities, those in low-income families, or those already trapped in abusive homes.
There’s one last thing we’ve lost this year, and that’s a teachable moment: COVID policies have communicated to young people that they should not weigh risks and rewards when making choices. Instead, between vaccine and mask mandates and school closures, the overall message is that children should live in fear and trepidation and be subject to a “government-knows-best” dictatorship. Anxiety and irrational fear are not traits we as a society want to develop in our children. Death, unfortunately, comes to us all, but because of that, we want to teach our children to embrace each day, to live with caution and common sense but also courage and resilience, not to lie in wait for illness or death. What a wasted opportunity.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
