Covid Restrictions Can’t Be Allowed to Return

By Noah Rothman

Monday, August 28, 2023

 

‘Covid closed the nation’s schools,” the New York Times declared in a Sunday headline. But that’s not quite right. Though the event that initially prompted school closures was the pandemic, schools in America stayed closed for longer than their European counterparts — and stayed closed longer in richer parts of the U.S. than in poorer parts — because an influential minority wanted them to.

 

The results of that experiment are generally regarded as disastrous, so you would think that all that is needed to ensure that we don’t repeat it is our collective resolve not to. Not so, says Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli: “Clean air can keep them open.”

 

Mandavilli’s article opens with a clear premise, though it doesn’t remain clear for long: Covid cases are once again on the rise, so it necessarily follows that the menace of Covid-related restrictions looms large. But a return to the mid-pandemic status quo wouldn’t be necessary if school administrators had prepared for this moment. That preparation begins with ensuring proper ventilation.

 

Roughly “41 percent of school districts needed to update or replace the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems in at least half of their schools,” Mandavilli writes, “about 36,000 buildings in all.” She observes, however, that Congress appropriated about $550 billion for tasks like these, much of which has not yet been spent. Well, whose fault is that? Everyone’s, apparently:

 

Among the reasons: a lack of clear federal guidance on cleaning indoor air, no senior administration official designated to oversee such a campaign, few experts to help the schools spend the funds wisely, supply chain delays for new equipment, and insufficient staff to maintain improvements that are made.

 

If one or more of Mandavilli’s sources made the straight-faced claim that the prohibitive obstacle before improving ventilation in schools is the lack of a “senior administration official” dedicated to overseeing that project, her sources deserve to be laughed at. Indeed, as at least one confessed near the end of her piece, spending about $65 per student per classroom per year — a high estimate that amounts to a $5 billion annual expense —on air purifiers is sufficient to mitigate the risk of ambient pathogens in the air. But many localities devoted those funds to other priorities, among them, the Biden Education Department’s desire to engineer a “culture shift” toward “equitable practices.”

 

“In many schools, however, spending on ventilation trails other priorities, like hiring staff, purchasing laptops and other equipment, or extra help for students who have fallen behind,” Mandavilli writes. According to a CDC survey, just over “one-quarter had installed air cleaners or planned to do so,” while 70 percent of schools opted to address air-quality issues by pursuing “low-cost improvements, like opening doors or windows.” And implementing those improvements should not require constant guidance from the White House.

 

The banal manageability of this challenge belies the author’s premise from the outset, which is perhaps why her article quickly sprawls. “Indoor air may be contaminated not just by pathogens,” Mandavilli continues, “but also by a range of pollutants like carbon monoxide, radon and lead particles.” Indeed, even the plague of smoke that descended across the continent from Canada’s blazing forest fires presented a threat to indoor air quality — a threat that educators in Denver, Colorado, mitigated by, get this, keeping schoolchildren inside.

 

Expanding the utility of Covid-related mitigation measures so they might apply to far less extraordinary circumstances is a tactic to which advocates of the mid-pandemic status quo appeal with some regularity. “Masks also help protect from other illnesses like common cold and flu,” former CDC director Rochelle Walensky advised in a brief but aborted campaign to popularize masking in public as an essential element of basic hygiene. Dr. Anthony Fauci agreed. When pressed as to whether Americans will ever again fly maskless, the doctor had some bad news. “Even though you have a good filtration system, I think that masks are still a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it,” he said. Indeed, indoor air quality, or lack thereof, was a point of leverage for Chicago teachers’ unions when they forced a work stoppage against the city’s wishes in the winter of 2022.

 

Blessedly, these and many other interested parties were ignored. Yes, it would be wise for states and municipalities to apply the federal funds on which they are sitting to improve air quality and increase access to climate control in America’s schools, but the lack of those conditions is not an obstacle to keeping schools open. So why introduce the binary at all? Why menace American parents with the prospect of a return to the pandemic’s calamitous restrictions if not to present them with an ultimatum?

 

Mandavilli’s piece isn’t the first sign that those who subscribe to a particular psychological disposition are keen on seeing a restoration of the Covid protocols. Businesses that seek to limit masking for all but the immunocompromised — either among employees for the purposes of preserving customer relations or among patrons to discourage consequence-free theft — are threatened with lawsuits and public shaming campaigns. Medical settings that reintroduce masking mandates insist they are only focused on preserving hospital capacity as Covid hospitalizations tick upwards slightly. And now, we’re implicitly threatened with the return of school closures.

 

Maybe threats are all that justify the readoption of the pandemic’s failed and otherwise unenforceable mitigation strategies. That is telling enough. But there can be no doubt that, in the last month, a powerful coalition of the perpetually anxious has floated trial balloon after trial balloon, testing your willingness to acquiesce to renewed restrictions on your social and economic activity. If the balloons float by without so much as a scoff, that will only serve as proof of concept. It’s incumbent on all of us to say, loudly and unambiguously, whenever we encounter too-clever appeals to our sense of solidarity or paranoia in the effort to bring pandemic-mitigation measures back: No.