Premature aging of the adolescent brain, myopia, chronic school absenteeisma dramatic increase mental health problems like eating disorders, a third of learning lost during a year… new evidence emerges every day on the harmful consequences of this disease. Covid school closures have had on children in the UK and around the world.

Influential US pollster Nate Silver says it was “a disastrous political decision, on a scale (or perhaps greater) than the invasion of Iraq” and that most parents do not need studies to show them the damage they see for themselves.

England’s Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza, goes so far as to insist this must never happen again. “I would not close schools,” she said, “the impact of closing schools on children has been immense.”

The Covid investigation aims to examine impact of the pandemic on young peoplewith former Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to be questioned.

My children were 11, 13 and 15 years old in March 2020 so we experienced everything: schools closed, exams cancelled, children stuck at home just when they should have regained their independence. And we have seen the consequences: anxiety, immaturity and fear. Many conversations I have with British parents are punctuated by the phrase “and then, Covid…” describing a moment when something – academic results, high-performance sports, mental health – went wrong.

So, did we have to lock school doors to stop the spread of Covid and protect the NHS?

Suede is a country that is seen as having done just that. Admired by lockdown skeptics, it is renowned for being the place where restaurants and most schools remained open and people made their own decisions about what risks they were willing to take.

THE International Journal of Educational Research published results showing that reading comprehension scores remained as high as before the pandemic and that “open schools benefited Swedish primary school students.”

Vera Dahlström, 15, lives in Stockholm and admits that her life has maintained a certain normality in 2020 and 2021: “I had a social life because I met my friends every day at school. » She continued to go to school, and although she found their apartment in the center of town cramped when everyone was home, she knew she was relatively lucky. His father, Ingvar, is an educational advisor at a secondary school in Stockholm and was at that time in contact with teachers in the United Kingdom. “I am convinced that life was better (in Sweden) for children (and adults) than in the UK.”

But the picture is not clear – and Suede has in no way avoided the mental health crisis facing teenagers here in Britain.

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Vera’s sister Annie, now 22 and a political science student at the Swedish Defense University, had a different experience. While primary and lower secondary schools have remained open, upper secondary schools (roughly equivalent to UK sixth form schools for 16-19 year olds) have moved towards a mix of remote and face-to-face learning . “Vera would go to school and then come home, but I would sit in my room all day. It was fun at first, but then I saw the bad effects of studying in the same room I slept in. Fatigue invaded me and exhausted me.

This exhaustion was also felt by medical student Elliot Hagander, 20, who spent the pandemic in Lund, southern Sweden, with his brother and parents, both doctors. As a senior secondary student, his schooling was limited, but he still attended every third week. “My friends and I have all discussed how we always feel socially fatigued: we can’t meet people for long periods of time without needing to recharge. »

Annie and Elliot both found that their excellent grades suffered even though Elliot was still going to school, part-time, throughout the pandemic. “I went to school, but after school I didn’t meet anyone,” he recalls. “I would sit at my computer working, that became all I did and I developed a bad relationship with my studies. My sports were canceled so I had to train alone, meetings with friends were canceled, everyone was scared.

They all agree that even the youngest children who went to school every day had a far from typical year. “We didn’t do normal things like go to museums, swim or play football,” Vera recalls.

Elliot works as a leader at a Christian summer camp and has noticed the legacy of Covid on today’s 15-year-olds, even though at 11 their schools remained open. “During the pandemicthey didn’t have a sleepover and so when they go away to camp, they’re a lot more anxious the first few nights, they come to us crying and saying they miss their parents. For many of them, it was the first time they had left their parents overnight.”

I ask Ingvar if he has noticed that the students he sees look younger, as if the pandemic has arrested their development. “Yes, but I’ve been complaining about it for years!” “, he said. “I think it also has to do with what we call curlingförälder,’curling parents» (parents who try to eliminate all obstacles in their children’s path). Parents and children are much more comfortable and Covid may have exacerbated this.

The trends that worry educators and parents in the UK are also prevalent in Sweden. “Mental health issues and other diagnoses have exploded here,” he says. “Screens and the whole way of socializing contributed to it.

Absenteeism That’s also a problem: “We call them ‘house-sitters’ – 16-17 year old students with a truancy rate of 20 to 30 percent,” says Ingvar. This is confirmed by the most recent survey by the Swedish National Agency for Education, which found that up to 35 percent of students in grade nine (the equivalent of grade 11 in England and the Netherlands Wales) had an absenteeism rate of 15 percent.

Annie noticed that “from now on, at the slightest headache or cold, we stay at home – that has changed with Covid”.

If children did not emerge unscathed from the pandemic, even if their schools remained open, what about the effects of Covid on the rest of the population? After all, schools have been closed elsewhere in the world in order to stop its spread and reduce death rates.

In the end, Sweden got what New York Times dubbed “a remarkably average pandemic.” There was a huge increase in infections in spring 2020, but this was mainly attributed to the failure of Swedish authorities to protect elderly people in care homes. By any measure, they recorded fewer deaths per million than the UK and the EU average, but more than their neighbors Finland, Denmark and, especially, Norway.

Part of Sweden’s strategy was to balance the risk of dying from Covid with the risk of dying from the effects of the lockdown on the economy and other aspects of healthcare. A better measure of this is to look at excess mortality over the period 2020 to 2022. In this area, Sweden excels – arguably fewer excess mortality than any other European country and half that of the United States.

Mark Woolhouse is professor of epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, government advisor and author of The year the world went crazy on the pandemic. He believes Britain could and should have reopened schools much earlier.

At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, he said, “we could justify this decision because of the uncertainties around the Covid risk to children, the risk to staff and the contribution that schools could make to the transmission of the virus “.

But, he says, it soon became clear that “there was very little evidence of these three effects anywhere in the world.” In other words, the children were not seriously affected by Covid nor did they act as vectors of the disease: there was very little benefit to closing the school and little attention was brought to obvious costs. “At the (government) meetings I attended, there was talk that closing schools was a bad idea for children, but no more.” He says we could have done like Denmark and reopened schools in April 2020.

Ingvar Dahlström believes that despite the reluctance of some doctors and experts against Sweden’s more flexible policy, most Swedes now believe that it was the right approach. “People seem happy with the way things went,” he says today. “The situation would have been different if many children had died, but that is not the case.”