Last winter, a friend of mine complained that his niece and nephew were constantly ill “since the pandemic ended.” I pointed out that the pandemic hadn’t ended, that COVID waves were constantly cresting and breaking over our heads, and that COVID infections are dysregulating immune systems, leading to further illness. He rejected my explanation, saying the kids’ doctor assured his family that this was a simple case of “catching up on illness” after “lockdown.”
I countered that this was misinformation, first popularized by far-right wingers and libertarians arguing against public health interventions by framing them as harmful. Kids’ immune systems weren’t harmed by infection control measures; it’s not how immune systems work. It’s why we clean our water instead of purposely giving kids cholera to avoid cholera-debt. After a tense back-and-forth I offered a compromise: let’s agree to disagree, for now. If you’re right, the kids will be healthy again next year. If I’m right, it’ll be this level of sickness in perpetuity.
He’s since returned to wearing masks. The kids’ exhausted mother is ready to give masks another shot, too.
As the months and now years drag on since “lockdown”, the popular winter 2022-23 explanation for sky-high student absences shot past its expiration date. The claims that “lockdowns” (which never happened with any strictness and were brief in most places) had negatively impacted kids’ immune systems came from anti-vaxxers; they were never supported by any scientific study. The claims that masks could have made children more vulnerable to illness also came from anti-vax spaces and were loudly and correctly rejected by mainstream outlets way back in 2020. But something changed in the period of time between 2020 and 2022. Namely, major media outlets went from being critical of the mass infection approach to COVID, to trying to normalize it.
Normalizing constant mass reinfection with COVID requires shoving a lot of inconvenient data out of the way. From excess heart attacks and strokes, to falling test scores, to unprecedented rates of long-term illness, to record worker sick days, to overwhelmed hospitals, to increasing student absences, it all has to be buried, denied, or explained away.
With “immunity debt” becoming an increasingly strange explanation as the months and years continue to pass, COVID normalizers need a new culprit to pin sky-high student absences on. This week, the New York Times decided to run with an even flimsier, even less-evidenced explanation for the “post-pandemic” school absence crisis:
underlying it all is a fundamental shift in the value that families place on school, and in the culture of education during the pandemic. “Our relationship with school became optional,” said Katie Rosanbalm, a psychologist and associate research professor at Duke University.
It is truly astonishing and staggering that major news outlets are getting away with inventing ideological explanations for what is a clear, national and international expression of increased rates of illness. It’s particularly bizarre because this ideological explanation- that parents must for some reason value school less now- is attended by neither data nor even anecdotal evidence. Does it accord with anyone’s experience that parents are taking school “less seriously”?
Quoting a psychologist as your first resource to analyze widespread absence also points to an institutional bias toward casting these absences as the result of poor decisions made by parents, rather than reflective of material conditions imposed on the public.
The paper flails about for anything resembling evidence that might let them off the hook for pushing- nay, insisting- that kids be forced back into unsafe classrooms with zero airborne infection control.
Here’s their ironclad case:
Anyone who works in an office with a flexible remote-work policy will be familiar with the feeling: You diligently show up, but your co-workers aren’t there. What’s the point? Something similar may be going on in schools.
Oh, may it? When learning to read for propaganda, look for words like “may,” “could”, “some”, “possibly,” that are carefully inserted into opinion statements to pass them off as news.
Almost unbelievably, the paper goes on to note that teachers are also missing more school- a mysterious coincidence to the authors, surely- before providing a list of reasons that finally mentions illness, last and certainly least. The piece, however, doesn’t acknowledge that teachers are sick more often, or that they, statistically, have one of the highest rates of Long COVID. It instead states that, “since the pandemic, more people are actually staying home when they’re sick.” It provides zero evidence for this claim, nor does it provide any data about rates of school attendance while ill, before or since 2020, but simply repeats it multiple times.
Source: trust me, bro.
Once again, instead of acknowledging that harm and poor conditions are being foisted upon the public, the paper blames the public and parents for their own victimization by the states’ violent abandonment of infection control. It accuses parents of neglecting their children while gaslighting them that constant illness will make kids healthier and stronger, creating untenable pressure as families are caught between these claims and reality.
Let’s take a look at the data they themselves chose to share, from the American Enterprise Institute:
The graph shows that between 2016-2020, between 13-15% of students were categorized as “chronically absent,” or missing at least 10% of the school year. In the two years since world governments decided to pretend COVID is “over” without introducing clean air or other mitigations in schools, the rates of chronically absent students were 28% and 26%, respectively. In other words, rates of chronic absence have nearly doubled since COVID began spreading. When you word it this way, it’s a lot less mysterious than the purposely befuddled and befuddling “nearly doubled post-COVID”. After all, kids were never at high risk of death from COVID, are being reinfected at high rates, and many of them are still unvaccinated. In what sense are they, then, “post-COVID”?
Ostentatiously missing from this report, as always, is the dreaded term “Long COVID”. A recent article in JAMA titled “Millions of US Children Experience Range of Long COVID Effects” reports that a narrative review in Pediatrics estimated 6 million children living with Long COVID in the US. A systematic review in CIDRAP found that one in six children had symptoms three months after a COVID infection.
It’s interesting what types of “learning loss” are cause for concern to our media. Harming the health of millions of children, potentially long-term, is not to be mentioned. Imaginary bad parents, on the other hand, are much easier to accuse of wrongdoing than the state.
One of the explanations for record absences- because of years of repeated viral infections and total lack of disease mitigation, kids are missing more school- is simple and requires state action. The other just vaguely waves a hand of blame across the most marginalized while once again excusing the powerful from responsibility. “They just wanna do that” seems to be the best alternative explanation the Times can come up with for the absence crisis.
The story here is that COVID was prematurely declared over; that there is no long-term immunity; that kids are thus stuck in a carousel of constant reinfection; that that constant reinfection is harmful. It’s a much more straightforward story than “at some point during the lockdowns there was a mass psychological shift away from schools as a priority and therefore individual adults are choosing to keep individual kids home to do….something but don’t ask us what.” At the Times, the urgency of exculpating the failed pandemic reopening strategy combined with a neoliberal worldview that consistently blames individuals for social problems has birthed an absurd narrative that cannot withstand even the mildest scrutiny.
Other media outlets, like VOX, have also continued to massage the narrative around student absences, acknowledging high rates of illness but handwaving them away and seeming to imply that sick kids should be in school anyway:
In August, the chief medical director for the Los Angeles Unified School District posted an online notice to parents stating that it is “not practical for working parents to keep children home from school for every runny nose” and that it is not “in the best interest of children to continue to miss school after pandemic school closures.” The district, which has seen a large spike in absenteeism related to student medical issues, instructed parents to send kids to school if they test negative for Covid-19, where they can wear a mask if they have mild symptoms.
Emphasis mine. That throwaway phrase could’ve been the headline; instead, VOX implies that sick kids are being lazy and parents irresponsible by not attending school when infected with contagious pathogens. It’s a negative feedback loop of disease spread leading to absence leading to disease spread leading to absence. It has apparently not occurred to the authors that forcing sick kids into school will not, in fact, increase attendance, but will worsen viral spread.
As kids get sicker, pressure increases on them to attend school while actively ill, resulting in more sick kids and more absences. Perhaps most egregiously, a much-criticized public campaign in the UK encouraged parents to send kids into class with, among other things, headlice. This is bizarre, anti-social behavior that almost anyone would be disgusted by prior to 2020. But with a “new normal” of disease spread over disease control, it seems anything goes.
Media outlets are charged with informing the public of threats to health and safety. Instead, they are obfuscating our governments’ failures to protect children behind paper-thin talking points, then pivoting to blaming kids and parents for the obvious, expected outcomes of abandoning disease control.
The absence phenomenon is hardly limited to the US and the UK; this thorough thread by Long COVID patient and activist Salvatore Mattera cites data from Japan, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Sweden and beyond. This data aligns, unsurprisingly, with an underlying change in our material conditions, not to some mysterious, collective cultural decision to not care about school anymore.
Parents, meanwhile, seem to roll their eyes, shake their heads, and accept that constant illness is now a fact of life. One mother posted this week her frustration with “daycare” along with a shocking list of test results confirming that her child had not one, not two, but five concurrent infections. We are the adults. We need to address this situation, protect kids, and clean the air, not laugh it off or act like airborne viral infections are some sort of inevitable act of God.
Individual
parents are not to blame for the level of circulating illness; they are
called upon however, like the rest of us, to push back on these harmful
and false normalizing narratives. Step one is to get educated, step two
is to get angry. The best thing we can do for kids right now is to
reject the state’s assertion that airborne disease cannot be controlled
and debunk the media’s continual invention of narratives that exculpate
said state for its inaction. The student absence crisis won’t be going
anywhere without layered mitigations, and most particularly strict new ventilation and filtration standards to improve indoor air quality.
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