Dr. Anthony Fauci recently reflected on the COVID-19 pandemic and his decision to close schools across the country, resulting in a learning loss in students. Fauci spoke with CBS Mornings, saying the initial closures were not a mistake, but he questions the length in which the schools were closed. “Shutting down everything immediately — and we didn’t shut it down completely — but essentially major social distancing and even schools was the right thing,” Fauci said. “How long you kept it was the problem, because there was a disparity throughout the country. If you go back and look at the YouTube, I kept on saying, ‘Close the bars, open the schools. Open the schools as quickly and as safely as you possibly can.’ But initially to close it down was correct. Keeping it for a year was not a good idea.”

School closures differed in time throughout different states. In New York, all schools reopened in September 2021, where students returned to in-person learning after over a year. However, Florida schools reopened in August 2020 after the state issued an emergency order requiring all “brick-and-mortar” schools to reopen full-time the next month. “When we had a shutdown, that 15 days to flatten the curve, we were in a tsunami of cases. Right here in New York, you had freezer trucks in front of Elmhurst Hospital,” Fauci said. New York City used refrigerated trucks, many parked outside hospitals, to store bodies after COVID-19 deaths overwhelmed the city’s morgues and hospitals.

Research from NWEA has shown that it could take more than five years for students to completely catch up on the knowledge that was lost due to the pandemic. Students across the board are behind, with the widest gap being in Black, Latino and low-income communities. According to research from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, reading skills of students in grades fourth through eighth dropped to the lowest point in 30 years. In math, students are showing the worst performance since testing began in 1969 where 40 percent of eighth graders can’t understand basic concepts.