Yesterday I posted a brief item noting that the CDC never recommended that schools be closed during COVID. In fact, by July 2020, shortly before the new school year was about to start, they were strongly recommending that schools open in the fall.
So why did so many schools close? The answer is that the decisions were mostly made by states and local school districts, partly based on CDC guidance about how to reopen safely. To that extent the CDC did play a role, though probably one that even its critics wouldn't take issue with. Their safety guidance was generally pretty solid.
More important was probably public opinion. It's easy to forget what things were like when COVID was new, but people were scared and most parents didn't want schools to reopen quickly. Here's a KFF poll from July 2020, just before the start of the new school year:
Of the people polled, 63% wanted to open schools later rather than sooner. 71% said schools needed more resources and weren't ready to open. And 70% were worried their child would get COVID if they returned to school.
The results leaned even more heavily toward closure among low-income parents—which makes sense since they were most likely to live in areas where schools were likely to have trouble reopening safely.
Other polls at the same time showed similar results. In one poll, parents favored closure over reopening by 54-36%. In an EdChoice poll, 69% said they'd enroll their kids in distance learning if their school offered it. In an Ipsos poll, only 16% favored full reopening. An S360 poll gave the same result in California.
Most polls also showed noticeable differences between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats consistently took COVID more seriously and were more likely to favor keeping schools closed, so it's no surprise that Democratic states and cities were the most likely to close schools. They were doing what their constituents wanted.
And despite what we all think now, these policies were relatively popular at the time. An Ipsos poll in late 2021, after a year of COVID and closures, showed that 75% of parents felt their local schools had done a pretty good job dealing with the pandemic:
The moral of all this is not to let your memory play tricks on you. It might seem obvious now that schools should have remained open, but parents at the time didn't all agree. Most of them were worried about possible learning loss—they weren't naive about that—but still favored caution about sending their kids back to classrooms. Under the circumstances, it's hardly surprising that local school boards did what they wanted.
POSTSCRIPT: As it happens, I was skeptical of school closings from the start. But even now it's not an open-and-shut case. The danger of sending kids back to school was probably small, but the evidence suggests the ill effects of closing schools was probably small too. There was significant learning loss, but it doesn't appear to be related to school closures. Everyone suffered equally, whether they attended classes in person or stayed home. See here, here, and here. It was something more broadly about the pandemic that caused learning loss, not distance learning.
In other words, a cost-benefit analysis of school closures is tricky even now.
I think its pretty clear, that for whatever reason, people will not or can not have accurate memories of the COVID pandemic. It was probably just too traumatic or disruptive for the average person to be able to form memories in a normal fashion during that time. Heck, this probably helped Trump get reelected- it's almost like he wasn't even the President then in people's minds.
As usual our conflict addicted media gave the most coverage to the loudest complainers which badly distorted the impression people got about public opinion, I was shocked when I saw a poll of the parents of school kids in my urban district to see that the people who were most opposed to sending their kids back to school were minority parents. And when school offered the choice of staying remote or returning to the classroom they were the largest group in terms o percentage to keep their kids home. In many cases it was because they were also caring for elderly family members.
I was a teacher in a Los Angeles middle school at the time COVID hit. I didn't need a poll because I was in regular contact (Class Dojo Rules!) with parents.
In the days just before closing, about half my students were out. Their parents sent messages like "Please send my child's assignments to me. I am keeping them home till we find out what's going on with this thing."
When we were moving toward re-opening a little more than a year later, I received messages like, "We are going to wait until everyone is vaccinated."
As I mentioned in the earlier thread on this subject, when schools opened, we had far more teachers and aides at school than students.
After W got a free pass for allowing 9/11 to happen on his watch - "he kept us safe!" in the 2004 elections - I knew that Americans have zero long-term memory, especially if whatever traumatic happened didn't literally happen to them personally. Most people alive today survived covid just fine, therefore, covid wasn't that bad. The million plus dead people and their loved ones remember differently... but fuck them, says Southern/Midwestern Jesus and His followers.
I don't reckon that they've got much short term memory either.
But yeah, maybe lots of people rated learning loss as somewhat less important than life loss. And given that, in all, about 1,102,479 Americans have died of Covid overall, maybe that isn't so silly.
Yeah, the difference in what one county did and another was pretty wild. One only had 'essential services' allowed on roads. Ours never did that, but when parks were closed - they did ticket people who were going to our county from others for nonessential goods. (Most notably tourists driving to the beach).
But within a week they'd decided to change to every-business-is-takeout model, which seemed reasonable.
My county tried to set pretty basic masking requirements, but that was countermanded by the Party Of Local Control in the state capitol.
So, no wild variations from county to county, just good advice undermined by bad from the Governor's office.
You keep beating dead horses. What is this, the fourth dead horse? Is this your way of coping?
FWIW, after the first Omnicron, the risk of death was low enough for all age groups that the issue of schools being closed was moot.
Let's move on.
Talk about how the US already needs at least $1T in climate mitigation. Talk about how Toyota is leading the charge against zero emission vehicles. Talk about The Guardian's recent podcast covering the diminishing value of carbon sinks. Talk about something that is in the present, my God.
The dead horse flogging may be an attempt to prepare for the Felon's Administration, in which all the old misconceptions get litigated or relitigated -- literally. The agitprop and hasbara will be so thick, you'll need to wear waders.
This. And also: A lot of the discussion about school closings in particular has focused not on whether or not the policies that school districts imposed were sub-optimal (either in hindsight or with the information available at the time), or on what mechanisms drove decisionmakers to make poor/good decisions, but on how school closings were in and of themselves harmful.*
And all too frequently that discussion is used to (wrongly) demonize various folks (such as Fauci, Biden, or even Bill Gates of all people) as part of a broader political agenda. So it's very good of Kevin to post data about what actually happened.
________
*And I fully agree that school closings, in the abstract, are harmful--just like (albeit to varying degrees) all the other inconveniences/deaths from the pandemic were harmful. People who complain about school closures are often the same people who complained about wearing masks in grocery stores or on planes--yes, they have a point that such things are unpleasant, and worse than the status quo *before* the pandemic, but during a pandemic, all options are worse than the status quo before the pandemic. You unfortunately don't get to choose for there not to be a pandemic, once one has happened.
It's a bit like getting incensed that some government official is forbidding you from entering your own home! Sounds pretty bad, unless the government official is, say, a fireman, warning you that your house is on fire. In which case, it might be fair to complain about how too much/too little water was used in putting out the blaze, but not to complain that it would have been better for there to be no firemen and also no fire.
"A lot of the discussion about school closings in particular has focused ... on how school closings were in and of themselves harmful.* And by discussion, you mean bald faced lies. The problems with education we face now are not due to school closures, but due to the harmful effects the virus had on children's brains.
Oh definitely--a lot of it is not in good faith.
These are generally the same people who go on about "well the [pregnant woman or single mom] should've thought about that before she had sex," as if (1) circumstances never change between the moment you have sex and 18.75 years later when you legally become not-responsible for anyone else that resulted from it and (2) they themselves consult their budgets, get a health checkup, renew their marital vows, etc. before each and every sex act to ensure that there is zero chance anything will go wrong for the next 18.75 years. Some people just *have* to be right about everything and also be able to lord it over everyone else.
Omicron wasn't until November 2021. Wasn't the whole issue of opening schools over by then? My schools, which had been open in 2020-2021 with lower capacity rooms and no specials, was back in full force with the sole exception being the requirement to wear masks. But even PE and music were back. On the other hand, there were still quarantines. My school-age kid missed more school in 2021-2022 than he had in 2020-2021 due to quarantine and his own COVID case (likely Delta). My pre-school kid also had more small-time closures due to actual cases from teachers, etc...
And since Omnicron, the issue of school closure is moot. There is no value to bringing it up now, in late 2024. Future outbreaks will have different parameters.
In real time, there is no precise data and there are going to be wrong choices made, but as I argued then and still do today, it is better to fail safe than to fail catastrophically.
If it's better to fail safe then why isn't it important to fight back against the right-wing propaganda that Fauci and the CDC were engaged in a conspiracy to do as much harm to the public as possible, for unknown reasons?
Not that this will make much difference during the Trump administration, but at some point it would be desirable to work out procedures so that people will know what to expect and can be prepared for closures, if they are required.
I am disappointed that a global respiratory pandemic that cost humanity trillions of dollars has not resulted in more significant changes. I'd figured for sure that there would be, at least in rich countries, a bunch of funding pushed to upgrade all HVAC systems with UV sterilization, for example. Or that funding for rapid vaccine development and emergent disease monitoring would have been vastly expanded.
Like, for thousands of years, people were just resigned to getting water-borne diseases. Until one day, somebody (in a rich enough city) said "Hey--maybe we can treat the water so that it's safe!" And a couple of decades later, water-borne disease is basically gone from the developed world. I would have thought that a respiratory pandemic would be the trigger for changes that would lead to reduction in other respiratory diseases.
But I guess not. As you observe, too many people have latched onto the idea that the pandemic was either fake or Not Actually That Bad, and that it was instead cover for various boogeymen to do this or that thing. And thus even though maybe *some* of us are trying to learn lessons/implement improvements, enough other people aren't that progress is stymied.
We also need to learn from the past and the mis/disinformation that is being spread about that past. It’s important that people understand the recent past because Trump is seriously threatening to prosecute people like scientists at the CDC and NIH.
Omnicron was pretty late in the whole thing,
My vague, unreliable recollections of those Dark Days were that even though children and healthy adults were thought to be reasonably resistant to the Novel Coronavirus, the children bringing the virus home would transmit it to their elderly grandparents, who had a strong likelihood of dying from it, or at least requiring hospitalization. And the hospitals in major met areas were already bursting with coronavirus patients that nobody really know how to treat.
Once a decision to close the schools is made, it's harder than turning an aircraft carrier to change course. The carrier just has mass and momentum; the school system has layer after layer of bureaucracy beyond your wildest nightmares.
In the fall of 2020, a small group of us were closely watching the statuses of K-12 schools (in-person, remote, or hybrid) to be able to advise the National Assessment Governing Board (the people who make decisions about NAEP). Our statisticians had come up with some numbers for the minimum viable sample sizes, and we used those numbers combined with near-real-time data on schools to create visualizations showing which states were falling below the thresholds. Day by day, more and more states went under. Some of the red states took longer, but they, too, eventually bit the dust.
I didn't participate in the NAGB meeting, but it's my understanding is that it was the visualizations that we had prepared, in particular a map of the US showing the tiny fraction of schools available for assessment in each state, that was the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were, and convinced them to cancel NAEP 2021.
That's a great point. COVID-19 looks a lot less scary in hindsight than it did back in the spring of 2020 when it was bearing down on us.
In some of the first places to get hit, we saw hospitals completely overwhelmed. Case fatality rates were hard to understand because the data were so messy, but at the time it seemed like it might have run as high as a few percent.
A few percent of the US population is ten million dead.
Of course people were freaked out. Even if the bug is inevitably going to reach everyone, it was worth slowing it down just to distribute the case load more smoothly over time, and to give us time to work out some better treatment techniques.
I remember thinking that I'm definitely going to get this thing sooner or later, and I'd really like for it to be later--I don't want to be one of those poor souls who's dumped in an improvised cot in a hospital hallway. I thought maybe if I could keep my head down and catch it long after the first wave, I'd have a better shot.
It's so easy to forget now just how terrifying this thing was at the time. I think a lot of people are embarrassed at how scared they were then, and are engaging in a bit of retroactive bravado so they can live with themselves.
And it was really, really worth avoiding infection until it was possible to be vaccinated. One of the things that's in danger of being swept into the memory hole is just how effective the vaccines were in preventing serious illness and death.
"COVID-19 looks a lot less scary in hindsight " At it's peak it was killing more than 4000 americans a day. Compare that to 9/11 which was grand total of 2996 dead and resulted in permanent and very expensive and destructive changes to our society.
And don't forget long covid and the possibility that covid has permanently made the world less intelligent. (And it's still going to be permanently the number 10 killer of Americans.) Anyone who isn't scared of it is an imbecile.
"It's just like the flu" overheard at a friendsgiving last weekend. From somebody who then related how they caught it in 2021, had a blood clot from it and ended up in hospital for a couple days and on blood thinners for half a year. Yes, exactly like the flu.
So many assholes unleashed by the internet and Trump roaming around our society today.
"COVID-19 looks a lot less scary in hindsight than it did back in the spring of 2020 when it was bearing down on us."
It's been really bad.
In March of 2020, we weren't sure how bad it was going to be. The worst end of the plausible range of outcomes was something like an order of magnitude worse than the really awful results we actually got.
"And don't forget long covid and the possibility that covid has permanently made the world less intelligent." Does that explain the November election?
"It's so easy to forget now just how terrifying this thing was at the time."
Definitely. Here in Albuquerque, at the very start of the pandemic, there was an outbreak in one of the very chi chi retirement/nursing homes a few miles from my house. It killed several, including a few of my friends from a volunteer organization that I'd been with for decades. The pandemic immediately became "personal."
I'm constantly astounded at younger people, say thirtyish and below, who think that AIDS wasn't really that big a deal. Of course, being that age, they don't interact much with the fifty and older set. That last goes to effect on collective memory, of course.
"Two weeks to flatten the peak" made sense. When it extended to a month and then to multiple months that was educational and economic malpractice obvious to anyone.
Much of it was virtue signaling against the MAGA right. Does anyone remember the wind instrument sections of student orchestras being forced to wear masks with holes cut out of them?
Kevin,
in every one of these examples you bring up, you keep trying to litigate the case you wish you had, not the case you actually have.
In this particular example, the specific most important issue that radicalized people was the number of medical professionals who pivoted from prohibiting small gatherings to insisting that mass protests were just fine, were in fact the healthiest way to live your life during covid: eg
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-health-protests-301534
The blatant hypocrisy here revealed to many people the rottenness at the core of even the medical establishment. Relitigating arguments about school closure will not bring back that lost trust.
SDS in 1968 had a slogan: "The issue is never the issue. The issue is always Revolution".
What has become clear since about 2015, one institution at a time, is just how true this is. You thought Greta was all about Climate Change - but turns out she was happy to pivot to Palestine when that seemed a better route to the revolution. You thought OAC was about climate change, but again she was happy to sacrifice that to push the goals of the revolution into the Green New Deal package. We assumed the medical establishment was above this; oh no, they were ALSO willing to bob and weave their "advice" so as to serve the goals of the revolution.
The country pivoted to Trump not because they like the man or his methods, but because enough of them have seen this pattern enough times now not to be fooled. Trump's crew probably are dangerous and somewhat incompetent. But they're much less dangerous and incompetent than these SDS-successors planted through every institution of our society.
I'm sure that all made sense in your head, but you should be aware that something happened on the way to the page.
That is for sure….
… that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” and that the inevitable victory of the proletariat, or working class …Revolution
Sounds like a Carl fan.
I prefer “ The revolution will not be televised”
I know a few people like this. They've got lots of big feelings and lots of abstruse grievances and once they get rolling, they've got to express all of them. But they're in such a rush to express so many that the viewer catches only a fleeting blurry glimpse of each thought as it goes tumbling by.
Eventually I came to suspect that this is no accident--one dumb, poorly-thought out idea, just sitting still to be examined at leisure, can't survive. But if you've got a whole clutch of them, then when the shortcomings of one begin to tickle your awareness, you can set it aside for later consideration and shift your attention to another.
Amen. (To Laertes)
You seem to have confused bafflegab with erudition.
Lord Jesus. When Civil War II or World War III finally is brought about by these assholes and destroys the United States from within... one big silver lining will be the complete unraveling of the internet, and we won't have all these assholes online writing gibberish or throwing shit everywhere.
The hypocrisy is in your post.
Lemme get this straight: people who are masked, using their best ability to stay apart and outside...
...are somehow similar to your ability to go to a crowded bar inside?
+1
Nicely put
Yes. And if one day we have a real pandemic with a high mortality rate the memory of this hypocrisy will kill tens of millions of people.
More than young people occupied the schools while they were in session, people who very much were of higher risk to COVID (e.g. teachers, other staff). The fear was also that those pupils could serve as vectors for spreading the virus to their own and other families. The closure decisions therefore still are very defensible to this day.
In New Mexico, the governor noted that the state's teacher population was largely elderly, and thus more vulnerable. Schools went online, the state endeavored to make free Internet access and laptops more available to students, and the Guv even taught some classes herself.
I am most surprised that low income families were more supportive of closures, since they were the most likely to be stuck with in person work, thus having more significant childcare issues.
I wonder if the income results are controlled for political leanings of an area, since I would guess that rural areas are, on average, both lower income and more conservative.
Obviously, there may be other confounding factors, nevertheless, this is pretty interesting
Well, this study was indeed broken down by income, race, urban/rural, and political affiliation. Just like Kevin said, low income definitely was more cautious about reopening.
https://www.strategies360.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/20-250-July-California-Community-Poll-Release-1-Crosstabs.pdf
My guess is low income people may have had an older generation component to their household. Or just could not afford to miss work. No one knew if the little ones were carriers that showed no symptoms. Very understandable.
I wish that people would get off the CDC's ass on this crap. COVID was a new virus. It was unknown if herd immunity could be established for COVID (it can't - despite the hysterical claims in the Great Barrington Declaration), other things like means of transmission were not well established. So sure, initial advice was overly-cautious, and deliberately so, pending further knowledge about the virus. School closures were part of that.
One reason for having a government is to insure that public health is not endangered. In many instances that means coercing virtually everyone to restrict, or change, their behavior. And often that means tough enforcement because some public health events require a near-unanimous response by the citizenry to prevent a catastrophe.
"it can't - despite the hysterical claims in the Great Barrington Declaration" Everything about the Barrington declaration was known to be 100% crap the day it was published. The doctors involved were utterly evil monsters. "initial advice was overly-cautious, " That's complete crap. If anything, initial advice was too slow in advocating caution. NY turned into disaster because it waited til more than a week after the conservative governor of Ohio shut down his state to follow suit.
We mostly have herd immunity right now.
Very few people are still getting COVID vaccinations. I certainly am not. But I don't seem to be getting COVID anymore unless severity has reduced to common cold levels.
Kevin is forgetting the reality at the time:
1) many parent were keeping their kids home, so schools need to setup online/remote schooling.
2) A substantial fraction of teachers and other school staff were out, either with COVID-19 or quarantining after exposure. Schools didn't have enough working teachers to do normal teaching, and were taking several classes, and combining them under one teacher for supervision.
The open schools had disrupted / ineffective teaching with so many people out and kids assigned as best the school could manage. There were no extra teachers for remote teaching, so teachers had to double teach, both online and in class if school was open. And in open schools, the situation changed week to week as COVID-19 surged, staff dropped out on sick leave, etc.
Going to fully remote education gave the school a stable target.
One fun feature of the pandemic is that we all had to react to it before the partisan valence of various policy options became clear.
Just as it was emerging--as we sat nervously waiting for it to reach the US--all we knew was that it was a respiratory thing. In the very early days, I got the idea that the USSG's office was recommending against mask use, on the grounds that there weren't very many masks and people without the proper training wouldn't get any benefit from trying to use them, and the available masks were best directed to medical personnel. (I say I "got the idea" that the USSG said this, because, as the CDC stuff shows, sometimes what the officials are actually saying doesn't square with what people think they're hearing, or recall having heard.)
Meanwhile, my Trumper friend thought "communicable respiratory illness? Obviously we mask up,
We didn't see eye to eye on this. He thought masking was the obvious response, and I thought that it was reasonable to follow (what I imagined to be) the USSG's guidance.
Some time later it became clear that good masks, worn properly, helped a bit. So I started masking. Also, some time later, it became fashionable for conservatives to eschew the use of masks, so my Trumper friend was suddenly anti-mask.
" USSG's office was recommending against mask use, on the grounds that there weren't very many masks " No expert ever recommended not to use masks. The claims were always carefully and accurately phrased as the evidence to date indicated masks wouldn't help. And that was truth as the pre-covid mechanical studies showed that masks could not prevent spread though mechanical filtering. Media people then added their 2 cents worth that since masks weren't expected to work, people should reserve them for doctors. That was not experts. But after real world experience, by the end of april 2020, it was clear that masks did reduce spread through some unknown mechanism.
The mechanism wasn't unknown: droplets and vapors are caught by the masks, instead of sucked down directly. This reduces the dosage, even if it's not 100%
Maybe partly, but the primary mechanism is to slow down outgoing breath so the mask-wearer is effectively further away from the person they are talking too. Whether or not the mask is catching incoming droplets, the outgoing droplets are ejected less far.
If most or many people are wearing masks the R-value is lower and transmission reduced … everyone is safer, even the sociopaths who refuse to mask up.
I'm amazed that years later so many people still don't understand that the main purpose of wearing masks is not to protect the wearer from others, but to protect others from the mask wearer. The more people that wear them, the better protected everyone is.
N95 masks are very effective at protecting the wearer, too. That's why industrial workers wear them.
You aren't going to convince many people to wear them by appealing to their better natures to protect others. Good thing we don't have to.
It was something more broadly about the pandemic that caused learning loss, not distance learning.
It's the corrupt scapegoating of every intellectual authority figure, anyone who had, or has now, a real clue about anything has to be destroyed.
The virus directly impacts the brain negatively. In its more severe version, this is known as covid fog. But if the severe version is very significant impact, the version that affects everyone is brain degradation only noticeable at the whole population level. Specifically covid has a similar level impact to the lead we use to add to gasoline. Something only measurable decades later or when specifically looking for it.
Is there any reason to think that a small reduction in the average standardized test scores is harmful for kids or the nation in the long run?
Often do we just assume this because test scores are easy to graph and chart and track?
It seems like a wild assumption.
I dont think that test scores or even the general concept of education and learning were behind most of the objections to school closures. Other factors played a much bigger role.
I’m a former member of the teacher’s union, and at the time of the pandemic I was a psychologist at a state psychiatric hospital for children. I went to work every day, which left me at an increased risk, much like teachers. Also all other hospital staff, grocery store workers, and plenty of other people in other jobs.
Teachers made the argument at the time that they didn’t sign on to put their lives at risk, but neither did the rest of us. We had to accept the risk as part of the job, or decide to quit - an option that was always open to us. I didn’t think teachers were uniquely deserving of having their workplaces closed until their safety was assured, as if their safety was more important than mine, or that of the clerk stocking shelves at the supermarket. Public servants are paid to serve the public’s needs, even at somewhat increased risk.
More people will die if there's no store clerk for a month than if there's no teacher.
This is a bizarre take. Nobody is uniquely deserving and this wasnt the case made by teachers or really any workers around the country who were trying to balance getting some work done while staying safe. Especially at the beginning of the pandemic.
Many offices closed. Many stores closed. Many people worked odd, offset hours trying to balance risk vs the need to do some work. Some could work from home 100% of the time, some 50%, some 0%. Lots of people got laid off if their employer couldnt figure out a way to keep them employed safely and effectively.
Blaming or accusing teachers is just bizarre. If youre employer (or you) werent trying to figure out how you could continue to work in a safe manner, thats not the fault of employees or employers who were.
Certainly having a union that is actively working to keep members safe is different than being at the whims and mercy of your employer....but again, thats not a bad thing.
One of the great cons that employers have pulled is creating this mindset that workers (like you) are threatened or harmed if other workers somewhere else receive any kind of....anything. More pay, better hours, less risk.....and youre pissed at the people who received it.
Bizarre.
Amazing job tackling this question, Kevin, that hardly anyone even pays attention to now. This is why we are in deep, deep trouble with this new media narrative that feelings are more politically important than facts. And the worst thing of all is that the punditocracy seems to have decided that this is the way it should be.
Mostly we see this with the complete surrender on the economy and the "working class," where we are supposed to now abandon all reference to the "elite" economic statistics -- even mock them -- in favor of how people "feel" about inflation, jobs, recession, and everything else that comprises "the economy." After all, if Democrats want to win bac the coveted working class, they have to stop relying on that silly, outdated concept known as "truth" and face the new reality that if the working class "feels" abandoned by the elites, then we should all just nod and smile.
So in this case, if Real Americans "feel" that the CDC is just another elite bureaucracy that doesn't understand the struggles of the working class, they should just be ignored.
Kevin, you did a great job with this. This is a fantastic collection of data, analyzed soberly.
It is important to return to better understand how public health actions came to be, what were the arguments, and whether helped mitigate the situation. Too often, there are superficial statements blaming liberals (who else?) for closing schools, while in fact, a lot of this was driven by parents and local authorities.
I can't remember who said it, but there was a quote that correctly pointed out that successful prevention will always give critics the chance to point out that it was never really necessary, because we don't have the counterfactual world for comparison.