“We wish a great start to the new school year to the young Parisians who are going back to school this morning!”
tweeted
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, accompanied by a picture of herself standing in a classroom sans social distancing and surrounded by maskless children. This was not August 2022 or 2021, when COVID-19 restrictions had already been lifted in the wake of widely available vaccines and treatments. Nor was this a right-wing populist French politician. This was Paris’s socialist mayor in September 2020 celebrating the reopening of schools.
One day prior, California Gov. Gavin Newsom struck a decidedly different tone regarding the start of the school year. Newsom
shared
a video depicting Sesame Street’s Elmo’s sadness at the news he would not be attending school in person this year, along with a message of “we can all learn from Elmo — even if your school is at home, we can all learn together. And don’t forget to wear your mask!”
Two leftist politicians (one more so than the other, depending on the issue), adopting vastly different approaches to COVID-19 restrictions is emblematic of the divergent paths the United States and Europe have taken throughout the pandemic. While Europe may have had a harsher lockdown at the outset of the pandemic, the ability of its denizens to eschew cumbersome (and ineffective) restrictions outshines that of America, where choosing to forgo a mask on public transit can still garner glares or scornful viral tweets and mandating COVID-19 vaccination for children to return to public school is regarded as a “commonsense” measure.
Europe could hardly be described as a pandemic dove with a libertine approach to public health restrictions. Hit hard at the outset of the pandemic, most of Western Europe opted for lockdowns that render Americans’ definition of a “lockdown” laughable. In France, for example, citizens were
not permitted
to leave their homes unless they filled out paperwork explaining their reason for being outdoors, which must be one of the approved reasons for doing so (buying essential items such as food, visiting a sick relative, or working as an essential worker), with 100,000 police officers deployed across the country to ensure citizens complied. The United Kingdom had
similar measures
, restricting citizens from leaving their homes for nonessential reasons, allowing an outing only once a day to go exercise, limiting how far one can travel in a car, and shutting down schools, among other restrictions. With the possible exception of a comparatively renegade Sweden, Europe hunkered down. While the U.S. also experienced shuttered businesses and schools, not many people experienced a situation in which they could not leave their homes under the threat of hefty fines and, as was the case in some European countries, jail time.
But while Europe adopted some of the harshest lockdowns in the Western world, they were among the first to cast them aside. Though by no means a restrictionless free-for-all — many European countries still required masks and some degree of social distancing in public settings in spring and summer 2020 — Europe opened up, and city centers
bustled
once again as soon as spring 2020. Meanwhile, the U.S. remained stuck in pandemic limbo for another two years, with the severity of restrictions in any given place largely dependent on a state or locality’s political hue and city centers desolate as restaurants, bars, and offices remained closed.
Take April 2020, for example. Mere weeks after the virus shuttered the world, restrictions eased in Europe in a way that garnered far less controversy and hysteria than what was seen in the U.S. Countries such as Germany, France, Austria, Czech Republic, Italy, the U.K., and Spain all
announced
the reopening of “nonessential businesses.” The lifting of restrictions was hailed by conservative and liberal politicians alike, with members of the public returning to some form of their typical routine. When, that same month, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp also chose to lift COVID-19 restrictions, the blowback among members of the press was histrionic: “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” a contributor for the Atlantic infamously
wrote
. Similar reactions accompanied other reopenings, with the Washington Post
claiming
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had “ravaged” the state, and so forth.
As social distancing measures and mask mandates waxed and waned in Europe through successive COVID-19 waves, a consistent theme was the importance placed on school reopening and ensuring these institutions were the first to open and last to close. In April 2020, Denmark
reopened
primary schools across the country without the use of masks. And French students
returned
to classrooms in June 2020, to name just a couple of examples.
The U.S. chose a different path. The reopening of schools in Florida in August 2020, well after scientific evidence had made clear children were at low risk for severe COVID-19 illness and not “superspreaders,” was treated as a death sentence by the press. NBC News ran a piece
detailing efforts
by Florida lawyers to write living wills on behalf of Florida teachers returning to the classroom. Parts of California, New York, and Virginia endured some of the longest-running school closures, with schools in some counties in these states closed to in-person learning for well over a year. These closures were not without consequence: Sweden, which opted not to close its schools, saw no learning loss during the pandemic, according to one
study
. Meanwhile, U.S. students recorded
startling drops
in test scores and high rates of
absenteeism
due to long stretches of remote instruction.
The divergent paths between the U.S. and Europe are hardly limited to schools. Indeed, Europe’s approach to vaccination differed vastly from that of America. For months following vaccines being made widely available to adults in the U.S., public health advocates and media outlets fretted about what this would mean for children below the age of 5 who could not yet be vaccinated. Major outlets published
long pieces
highlighting the fears of these parents and answering questions about a possible timeline for vaccine availability for this (low-risk) age group. As someone who follows the European press closely, I found it extremely rare to find similarly frantic coverage on the other side of the Atlantic. While there was some reporting on the status of trials, there was a comparative scarcity of reporting regarding parents worried for the safety of their children heading to schools or other public settings without COVID-19 vaccines to protect them.
In the U.S., vaccines for children were
authorized
and recommended for children below the age of 5 in June 2022. After months of being told American parents were experiencing a wave of anxiety regarding the inability to have their toddlers vaccinated, the COVID-19 vaccination rate for those below the age of 5 stands at just
6%
. In contrast, the European Union has yet to offer an opinion or timeline as to when it plans to approve vaccines for children under the age of 5. The continent has managed to carry on despite this.
Some schools in the U.S. have even gone so far as to require vaccination against COVID-19 in order for children to return to in-person school. Public schools in
Washington, D.C
., have announced that students will not be allowed to return to the classroom until they have been vaccinated against COVID-19. In
New York City
, students will be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to participate in extracurricular activities. Denmark, meanwhile, has advised
against
vaccination for those between the ages of 5 and 17, citing the lack of severe illness in this age group and stating that vaccines can only be given to someone in this cohort after “a specific medical assessment” proves the child is at high risk for severe illness. The idea that children will be kept from in-person instruction because their parents chose not to get them vaccinated against a disease for which they are at extremely low risk of experiencing severe illness is outrageous given the evidence we have about the negative consequences of remote learning. Nordic countries do not even recommend
testing
symptomatic children or healthy adults, nor do they
require
masks in schools.
The divergent protocols and cultural shifts are numerous: from the early lifting of entry restrictions such as pre-departure testing (dropped among European countries in January and February but not lifted in the U.S. until early June) to vaccine passports (discontinued in Europe after omicron rendered vaccines ineffective at stopping transmission but kept in places such as New York City until spring 2022) to recommendations regarding testing symptomatic adults who are otherwise healthy to return-to-office rates (
back
to 70% in Europe while just
43%
in the U.S.) to the return of bustling city centers and more. While by no means perfect in all cases, Europe has exited the pandemic malaise faster than the U.S.
With all these contrasts, the question arises: Why has Europe taken a more evidence-based approach to the pandemic compared to the U.S., at least in blue areas of the country? On the face of it, the cultural similarities between the U.S. and Europe should have meant similar approaches to pandemic restrictions. Both the U.S. and Europe are open, liberal societies that claim to place scientific evidence over personal feelings.
While this debate churns on, it is difficult to ignore the political aspect of restrictions present in America as a central factor in these differences. In the U.S., political leaders’ implementation of pandemic restrictions became the equivalent of waving your partisan flag — proving to one’s constituents that they were not like those “reckless” Republicans, out to initiate an “experiment in human sacrifice” similar to Kemp or a “ravaging” of vulnerable communities similar to DeSantis. The adherence to restrictions in deep-blue areas of the country served as an assurance to those around you that you were “taking COVID-19 seriously,” especially as the 2020 presidential election kicked into high gear. (It’s no coincidence that restrictions around the country dropped soon after Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial win in Virginia in 2021.) The apocalyptic tone from the American media also did not help people learn to cope with living with COVID-19 as an endemic disease.
Europe did not have to deal with this problem. Europe undoubtedly has partisan and cultural cleavages of its own, but public health and scientific evidence is not one of them. Given the relatively
high trust
Europeans place in its institutions compared to the U.S., European politicians were able to act according to evidence rather than partisan fealty and without fears that leading newspapers in the country would slap them with the “Trump-like” label. If public health institutions accepted that the scientific evidence was not there to support a particular restriction, it was removed without controversy, the feelings of particularly COVID-cautious people be damned. There was no need to use pandemic restrictions as a proxy to signal to your fellow citizens how seriously you were taking the virus through the use of ineffective face masks, and without a Trump- or DeSantis-like politician as a proxy upon which the media can garner hysterical coverage, there was a lack of entrenched fear of a return to a pre-pandemic status quo in the population.
Both the U.S. and Europe saw a deadly 2020, filled with high death tolls from the pandemic and subsequent emotional trauma. But the policy responses to these similar tragedies could not have been more divergent. This is not because science in European countries is different. It is because the politics are.
Alicia Smith is a public policy consultant based in Washington, D.C., with experience in both U.S. and European policy and political economy.
