Yes, another COVID variant is coming. But there’s no way we should let it close schools
With vaccine boosters seemingly recommended every few months and a new COVID variant — Omicron BA.2 — now “dominant” in the U.S., suffice it to say COVID isn’t disappearing as fast as we’d hoped.
And yet, one thing is clear: State governments have no reason to impose school closures because of COVID again. Not only did school closures fail to stop the spread of COVID, but it ultimately hurt kids and adults.
The data overwhelmingly shows that for the past two years, people younger than 18 rarely get serious cases of COVID, let alone die from it. In fact, fatality rates don’t increase rapidly until ages 65 and older.
Let’s take data from four states, two that reopened relatively early in the pandemic and two whose schools remained locked down until fall 2021. In Florida, 42 people younger than 16 have died of COVID in the last two years. In Texas, that number is 91.
In California, where schools did not open until fall 2021, there were 65; in New York, it’s 61. Those four states also rank highest in population, from highest to lowest: California, Texas, Florida, New York.
School closures did not prevent COVID spread or deaths for kids younger than 18.
Nationwide, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, 0.1%-1.5% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization and less than 0.01% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death.
I’m hardly alone in this analysis, even though I begged for schools to reopen in a piece for The Atlantic way back in July 2020.
We know now, based on U.S. and global studies, that schools don’t spark the spread.
One small district that reopened well before vaccines were available saw no and COVID spread among 1,630 kids. Peaster ISD, which I profiled in a recent column, not only reopened in fall 2021 but did so without a mask mandate.
Though COVID reporting wasn’t mandated either, superintendent Lance Johnson recalls a handful of cases after 10 weeks of all three schools being open. The experience should be a model for all.
There’s a human side to school closures that is important to grasp. This data has been available to everyone, and yet some states refused to reopen their schools or allow businesses to reopen without heavy restrictions, giving way to fear instead. This has cost millions of children years of growth and, sometimes even their lives.
Shuttering an entire generation of children for over a year in their homes caused depression, anxiety and suicide to escalate. Even those who escaped those fates fell behind academically.
These misjudgments were due to miscalculation of data and risk, which spurred a contagious fear.
My friend CNN commentator Mary Katherine Ham lost her husband, Jake, in a freak bicycle accident in 2015. The death of the father of her two children was a low-probability event but it caused ongoing anxiety.
“There was nonetheless a temptation to organize my life around fear of another such event,” she wrote in 2021. “It’s not totally irrational! The one-in-a-million thing happened to me. But if I lived trying to avoid that level of risk, I’d live no life.”
When the pandemic arrived and panic began, followed by school and business closures, Ham put the pieces together and realized her experience and state mandates shuttering schools were both related to risk analysis. Ham rejected her fears and slowly, smartly continued to live life in boldness. She recently celebrated her two-year wedding anniversary and the birth of her third daughter.
So it has been with COVID and school closures. The risk analysis on this is clear: The likelihood of youth fatalities and the severity of impact were and still are both incredibly, mercifully low.
We knew it then and we regretfully did not follow the data, forcing children to be a proxy for our fears and live in anxiety and isolation. We will now have to help our children claw their way back toward progress. As variants continue, we must resist the urge to ever close schools over COVID again.
This story was originally published April 1, 2022 at 5:04 AM.
