Dr. Phil is Correct that COVID School Closures Harmed Children
On February 26, Dr. Phil McGraw appeared on The View, where he disagreed with the show’s hosts on the necessity of Covid-19 lockdowns and school closures. When co-host Ana Navarro asked McGraw “Are you saying no school children died of Covid?” he replied, “[they were] the safest group, they were the less vulnerable group, and they suffered and will suffer more from the mismanagement of Covid-19 than they will from the exposure to covid.” Co-host Whoopi Goldberg concluded the segment by stating “We don’t even have time to talk it out now,” prompting several articles claiming to debunk McGraw’s claims about lockdowns.
However, the best available data show that Dr. Phil accurately characterized the low-risk Covid-19 posed to school children and the immense harm that befell them during school closures. The median infection fatality rate (IFR) of Covid-19 in people ages 0-19 is 0.0003%. There is evidence that hospitals overcounted the number of children with Covid-19 by almost 50%, suggesting that the CDC’s already extremely low statistics for children are inflated.
There is also no evidence closing schools protected children from Covid-19. In Sweden, schools remained open for children aged 1-16 during the Spring of 2020, with research demonstrating no children died of Covid-19 as a result. Several other studies on school closures corroborate this result. The New York Times reported on the vast majority of schools in Europe remaining open during the pandemic, with medical researchers affirming that “the rate of coronavirus transmission in schools is relatively low, especially among the youngest students; children who do get infected tend to have mild symptoms; and measures like mask-wearing, social distancing, and air circulation are more effective than they had predicted.” Further, when private schools in New York City reopened in Fall 2020, one study found “Covid‐19 infection rates in these selected private schools were low compared with community rates, suggesting that children might have a limited role in virus transmission in these communities.”
What’s more, school closures likely increased the risk of Covid-19 for elderly people. In a piece for the New York Magazine entitled “Why Spending Time With Kids Might Actually Help Protect You From Covid,” journalist David Zweig reports that there was never a risk in sending children to school, citing two studies published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The first analyzed the insurance records of 3 million adults, with results “suggest[ing] that cross-immunity from common coronaviruses — which sometimes cause the colds and sniffles that children tend to carry — may play a role in protection against severe Covid-19 outcomes.” The second affirmed, “at least for a limited time, getting the common cold appeared to help some people’s immune system protect against Covid.” Zweig explains, “Taken together, the findings suggest that social distancing and isolation at a population level, particularly from young children, may have counterintuitively put some people at greater risk of Covid-19 infection or severe disease once they resumed normal contact.”
Meanwhile, CDC research also demonstrates that lockdowns and school closures caused a significant increase in physical and emotional child abuse, with instances of abuse growing from 5.5% and 13.9% in 2013 to 11% and 55% during the first year of the pandemic, respectively. A Harvard study published in late 2020 also found a significant increase in food insecurity, doubling from 14% to 28%, as a result of school closures. One study of 3,000 four and five-year-olds found a rise in “aggressive behavior such as biting and hitting, feelings of struggling in class or being overwhelmed around large groups of children,” with an increasing number of students falling below grade-level standards in all subjects.
A Stanford analysis found students are falling so far behind that “recovery of the 2019-2020 losses in our nation could take years,” resulting in a “three percent decline in annual earnings lifetime for the affected students, summing up to a 1.5% reduction in Gross Domestic Product until the end of the century.” Ultimately, multiple meta-analyses showcase universally adverse behavioral and mental health effects in children stemming from lockdowns resulting in significant learning deficits among other negative consequences.
Overall, McGraw was correct to assert that the adverse behavioral, mental, social, and economic effects of lockdown were far more harmful to children than Covid-19 itself.
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