A plan was set in motion with no idea of how to stop it.
“While federal public-health officials made recommendations regarding schools, the actual closures were carried out at the state and local levels, in response to misplaced public fears and aggressive campaigning by teachers’ unions. Randi Weingarten, the high-profile head of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a February 8, 2021, New York Times article that she hoped things would be “as normal as possible” by the following fall. Class-action lawsuits in multiple states had been filed on behalf of children with special needs on the claim that the conditions of IDEA—a federal law that requires certain services (such as physical and occupational therapy, supplemental aids and equipment, etc.) for children with disabilities—were not being met in remote-learning models.
[..] Working parents, especially mothers, were dropping out of the workforce in staggering numbers because of child-care obligations during the pandemic. An analysis by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that nearly 60 percent of parents who had left the workforce had done so for this reason. The psychic toll on parents and children was never—and can never be—calculated. It won’t show up in statistics, but it was real for millions of families. And millions of children, especially those without resources for tutors or parents to oversee them during the day, were losing ground with their academics. Worse, they were suffering from isolation, frustration, and, for an increasing number of them, depression from spending their days alone in front of an electronic screen. Untold numbers of other children became “lost,” having dropped out of school entirely. Those in power who advocated for school closures were not adequately prepared for these consequences, which were still pervasive a full year into the pandemic.
But they should have been.
The damaging effects of school interruptions were not unforeseen. They were explicitly warned about in the academic literature. Exhibit A is a 2006 paper called “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,” in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, written by [director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health Jennifer] Nuzzo; her mentor (and global eminence on disease-outbreak policies), D. A. Henderson; and two others. “There is simply too little experience to predict how a 21st century population would respond, for example, to the closure of all schools for periods of many weeks to months,” these authors wrote. “Disease mitigation measures, however well intentioned, have potential social, economic, and political consequences that need to be fully considered by political leaders as well as health officials. Closing schools is an example.”
The authors went on to warn that closures would force some parents to stay home from work, and they worried about certain segments of society being forced to bear an unfair share of the burden from transmission-control policies. They wrote:
No model, no matter how accurate its epidemiologic assumptions, can illuminate or predict the secondary and tertiary effects of particular disease mitigation measures … If particular measures are applied for many weeks or months, the long-term or cumulative second- and third-order effects could be devastating.
Nearly a decade and a half before the pandemic—in a stark rebuke to the approach championed by the CDC, White House Coronavirus Response Task Force coordinator Deborah Birx, and other powers that be—the paper had called out the major harms that would come to afflict many families in our country as a result of school closures. Yet, from the spring of 2020, health officials who directed our pandemic response ignored many of the consequences they must have known to expect. Or, at the very least, they failed to provide adequate information about them to the public. The officials had opened a bottle of medicine while disregarding the skull and crossbones on the warning label.
[..] Just as public-health experts are biased toward intervention, they, along with the public, are also biased toward keeping interventions in place. This is a known phenomenon within the literature of implementation science, a field of study focused on methods to promote the adoption of evidence-based practices in medicine and public health. Westyn Branch-Elliman, an infectious-diseases physician at UCLA School of Medicine with an expertise in implementation science, told me that de-implementation is generally much harder than implementation. “People tend to err on the side of intervening, and there is often considerable anxiety in removing something you believe has provided safety,” she said.
There also is a sense of inertia and leaving well enough alone. It’s not unlike legislation—oftentimes repealing a law, even an unpopular one, poses bigger challenges than whatever barriers existed to getting it passed. Although the initial school closures may have been justifiable (even if off-script in many locations), there was no plan on when and how to reopen. Officials repeated a refrain that schools should open when it was “safe.” But “safe” was either pegged to unreachable or arbitrary benchmarks or, more often, not defined. This meant there would be limited recourse against a public that had been led to believe this intervention was a net benefit, even long after evidence showed otherwise. The lack of an exit plan—or an “off-ramp,” as many health professionals would later term it—would prove disastrous for tens of millions of children in locations where social and political pressures prevented a reversal of the closures.”
Full article, D Zweig, The Atlantic, 2025.4.17