It can be difficult to remember now — after years of increasingly vicious political debates, after the war of epidemiologists against economists, after the mea culpas and the hysteria — that one of the few things most Americans agreed on in mid-March 2020 was this: For our children’s sake, we had to close the schools.

In the spring of 2020 the novel coronavirus was truly novel — there were no vaccines, no clear treatments. America didn’t even have reliable tests. It wasn’t clear yet who would be most vulnerable to infection, how deadly the disease was, or precisely how it spread. Schools could be incubators for infectious disease, something that was made clear every winter flu season. If the price of keeping children safe was interrupting a few weeks or even months of schooling, that seemed a price that parents, teachers, and politicians from both sides of the political aisle were willing to pay.

What we now know, nearly three years later, is that the children were safer than we thought. Americans under the age of 18 have accounted for less than 0.3 percent of Covid deaths. They weren’t invulnerable to the disease — children made up over 17 percent of all cases, severe infections and tragic deaths did happen, and had school somehow continued unchanged, those numbers surely would have been somewhat higher. But thanks to some fortunate roll of the genetic dice, young people were largely spared the direct effects of Covid.

But if Covid didn’t target the young, the pandemic itself — and many of the measures the US took to fight it — will have long-lasting effects on them that we are only beginning to reckon with. The loss of the pedagogical and social structure of the classroom, the drag of often inferior, jerry-rigged remote education, the pain of losing caregivers to the disease, the epidemic of mental health problems linked to pandemic isolation — it all adds up to generational trauma that can’t be captured by any epidemiological curve.

According to nationwide test scores of 9-year-olds released this fall as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Long-Term Trends report — which has tracked educational progress in the US going back to the 1970s — the rough equivalent of two decades of advancement for American students in reading and math was erased in just two years of deeply disrupted pandemic-era schooling.

Read the full article about COVID's impact on youth by Bryan Walsh at Vox.