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| Helayne Seidman |
Of all the COVID policy blunders, the most unforgivable — which will have by far the longest-lasting negative effects — is the closure of schools.
It was almost exactly three years ago that education officials and politicians started to put padlocks on the school doors.
Harvard was the first domino to fall. The vast majority of public schools soon followed suit.
The result — as we predicted at the time — was disaster.
Closures at the end of the 2019-20 school year alone will be associated with 13.8 million years of life lost, one study found, as educational attainment has a well-established relationship with both income and life expectancy.
Many parts of the country had an even longer closure to start the 2020-21 school year.
National Institutes of Health-published research shows life expectancy for high-school graduates is four to six years longer than for high-school dropouts.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates learning losses from the period could cause a 3% decline in lifetime earnings.
The loss of just one-third of a year’s learning has a long-term economic impact of $14 trillion in the United States alone.
The closures exacerbated a youth mental-health crisis.
Health and Human Services reports “there were significant increases in children’s diagnosed anxiety and depression, decreases in physical activity, and decreases in caregiver mental and emotional well-being and coping with parenting demands.” --->READ MORE HERE
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| Anadolu Agency via Getty Images |
They’re no longer California Dreamin’.
More than 500,000 people fled the Golden State since 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began, US Census migration data shows.
The exodus of roughly 508,000 residents between April 2020 and July 2022 was spurred by high housing prices, too-frequent natural disasters like wildfires and mudslides, and high crime rates in the cities, the Daily Mail reported Saturday.
The largest population declines were in San Francisco county, at 7.1 percent and Lassen county, at 7.5 percent.
Lassen County, in northwest California, was hit my the massive Dixie wildfire in 2021.
The ongoing housing affordability crisis is a key factor in the exodus, H.D. Palmer, deputy director of external affairs at the California Department of Finance, told the Sacramento Bee.
In Sacramento, a household salary of around $145,000 is required to afford the median-priced house in the region, yet the average income is no more than $71,000.
In San Francisco, which many tech industry executives abandoned due to the pandemic, many office spaces stand empty and the city streets sometimes-violent drug addicts have taken over in multiple neighborhoods. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates
WSJ: Coronavirus Live Updates
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