A COVID Autopsy, Part 6: ‘What Has Lockdown Done to Us?’
The failures of the legacy media, the Left, and the experts during COVID carried enormous consequences. We’re only beginning to understand just how harmful shutting down the country for months on end to combat a virus with a 98% survival rate was. I can’t possibly cover all the consequences of lockdowns and beyond here. But I think it’s important to try to capture what we’re already seeing.
And of course that isn’t to say that all the damage inflicted on American life in recent years was attributable to lockdowns. A global pandemic caused plenty of damage, too, and it can be hard to unwind specific causality from the multicausal calamity. I’ve tried to delineate where harm stemmed from as a result of mitigation efforts – versus consequences of COVID directly – as much as possible.
Perhaps most depressing of all is we knew – or should have known – so many of the consequences of shelter-in-place restrictions and other harsh attempts at mitigation before the decisions were made to extend the lockdowns beyond the initial 15 days; before schools were closed (and in some cases, re-closed); before social isolation, rather than a virus, destroyed so many lives.
In December 2020, in a piece titled “What Has Lockdown Done to Us?” for the New York Times, I tried to raise some of the reasons why the instinct to reinflict severe mitigation efforts was misguided. From the health and social consequences of shelter-in-place restrictions to the downsides of remote learning, we had every reason, early in 2020, to be wary of just how much harm lockdowns could do. Even so, as I was writing the piece five and a half years ago, states were considering – and in some cases, reanimating – lockdowns all over again.
My attempt at caution was an uphill battle to a skeptical audience. It can be easy to forget, with the hindsight of over half a decade, that even suggesting in polite company that the harms of lockdown – rather than of a global pandemic – were worth talking about. As I wrote then: “Even suggesting that the negative effects of lockdowns can be measured on the same scale as those of the virus itself has been consigned to the fringes of public opinion.” But six years on, that fringe was clearly on to something.
Nowhere is the harm more immediately clear – and statistically apparent – than with the youngest Americans, deprived by force of a meaningful childhood, and the learning – educational, social, cultural, and beyond – that comes with it.
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Kids As A Sacrifice
One of the earliest visible consequences of COVID and lockdowns on kids was learning loss. Despite Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Teachers Federation, claiming that kids would be resilient, the lack of in-class education was devastating. A seminal report from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education found that students lost, on average, six-months worth of education during forced remote learning. In some states, and in subjects like math and reading, the numbers were even more pronounced – as much as a year and a half of learning loss in places that aren’t usually negative educational bellweathers like Connecticut and Virginia.
But it was a global pandemic! I hear a well-intentioned defender of COVID mitigation efforts mutter in protest, Of course there were bad outcomes to something like education! But a stark – if underreported – reality from a careful look at the data, like this one in Education Next by Michael Hartney and Paul E. Peterson, is that left-leaning states – who, on the whole, had much longer lockdowns – saw their students suffer the most from remote learning: despite these states often having better educational programs otherwise.
These findings add additional research heft to observations from researcher Emily Oster in 2022, which found that the longer districts relied on remote learning, the more learning loss students experienced. The math was clear: “Our estimates suggest that in-person schooling was very protective against test score declines, with fully remote districts predicted to decline by 13 percentage points more than fully in-person ones.”
Even the legacy media had to acknowledge that their initial assertions about remote learning were wrong. One study, highlighted by CNN in January 2023 found that kids “lost about 35% of a normal school year’s worth of learning during the pandemic.” Another analysis, shared with the Associated Press, found that students lost six months of math learning, and three months of reading learning, even while nominally going to school. In 2022, ACT scores – a college entrance exam – fell to the lowest performance level in 30 years, as high school students struggled to reach a level of academic performance once seen as necessary for higher education. “The COVID Academic Slide Could Be Worse Than Expected,” a headline at Education Week helpfully declared in February 2022.
These findings weren’t only on display in the United States. A systematic review of nearly 1,800 research studies on remote learning during COVID from around the world, published in June 2023, found sharp declines across subjects:
Remote learning has also negatively affected children’s cognitive and academic performance throughout all age groups (Colvin et al., 2022). Standardized assessments during and after obligatory confinement have revealed students’ difficulties meeting grade expectations, particularly in schools with less in-person class time (Colvin et al., 2022). Specific academic difficulties have been reported in mathematics, language, and reading skills. More than 1.5 million students from across the United States exhibited worse performance in mathematics and reading scores compared with the previous academic year.
A New York Times newsletter in May 2022 titled “‘Not Good for Learning’: New research is showing the high costs of long school closures in some communities” captures what really happened. Despite pronouncements from experts and the legacy media (as I revisited last week in Part 5 of A COVID Autopsy), remote learning didn’t work. The missive, authored by David Leonhardt, opens (emphasis mine):
When Covid-19 began to sweep across the country in March 2020, schools in every state closed their doors. Remote instruction effectively became a national policy for the rest of that spring.
A few months later, however, school districts began to make different decisions about whether to reopen. Across much of the South and the Great Plains as well as some pockets of the Northeast, schools resumed in-person classes in the fall of 2020. Across much of the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, school buildings stayed closed and classes remained online for months.
These differences created a huge experiment, testing how well remote learning worked during the pandemic. Academic researchers have since been studying the subject, and they have come to a consistent conclusion: Remote learning was a failure.
And it wasn’t just educational achievement that suffered. Lockdowns caused a surge in ADHD risk for kids, as well as an increase in distress, worry, and anxiety. Kids whose schools stayed shut longer experienced higher levels of depression and anxiety, as well as other mood disorders, researchers discovered in 2025. Mental-health visits for kids spiked during lockdowns, as CDC data revealed late in 2020. “Compared with 2019, the proportion of mental health-related visits for children aged 5–11 and 12–17 years increased approximately 24% and 31%, respectively,” a report found, adding that “monitoring indicators of children’s mental health, promoting coping and resilience, and expanding access to services to support children’s mental health are critical during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Temper tantrums, behavioral issues, and loneliness were more pronounced for kids in areas where remote learning requirements lasted longer.
Hundreds of thousands of kids simply disappeared from public schools during the pandemic, according to a report from the Associated Press, For areas with the longest mandated remote learning, students dropped out at higher rates.
The effects have been tragically stubborn. As I write this in June 2026, depression and anxiety rates among young Americans have both more than doubled since 2019.
And kids’ physical health suffered, too. The shift to remote learning and lockdowns spurred a shift to a more sedentary lifestyle for young people, leading to widespread weight gain and a range of other physical consequences.
It’s impossible to calculate the more nebulous consequences for kids who were robbed of a critical learning and developmental period of their life. Soft skills are far harder to develop through a screen, or even behind a mask. Key moments for social exploration and growth were snuffed out by a life behind screens. Major events and milestones – school dances, high-school graduation ceremonies – were snubbed up by social distancing restrictions and online learning. And perhaps most amorphous of all, a generation of young people were infected by a sense of safetyism, that the world outside, and the people in it, are both threats.
So much of that damage done was to protect adults; a jarring inversion of intergenerational ethics that society, I think, has failed to reckon with.
About Those Adults…
That isn’t to say that only children were left worse-off from lockdowns and other mitigation efforts.
Like kids, adults faced considerable health impacts not just from COVID but from the sedentary and sclerotic nature of being locked inside for months on end. According to a study highlighted by the New York Times in March 2021, the average American gained two pounds per month “while shut in homes with stockpiles of food, glued to computer screens and binge-watching Netflix” under shelter-in-place orders. (For context, many such shelter-in-place orders lasted for months or longer: California’s was lifted in June 2021; days later, so was Oregon’s.)
There were other physical consequences. According to a 2025 study in Health Affairs, “Lockdowns and school closures were associated with detrimental health effects in the majority of outcomes analyzed, including over 90% of mental health, obesity-related, and health-related social need outcomes.” Obesity rates surged, particularly for lower-income Americans. Mortality rates for cardiovascular disease – long in decline – spiked, erasing years of gains.
The numbers were similarly grim for substance abuse disorders and alcohol. Historic spikes – of nearly 100,000 substance abuse deaths in 2020, with an even higher number in 2021 – have been attributed by researchers to social isolation caused by lockdowns.
As with kids, adult mental health suffered, too. Depression and anxiety rates for adults skyrocketed. One widely cited 2024 study published in Scientific Reports, which looked at “all mental health disorders with clinical codes,” found that (emphasis mine) “there is a significant positive effect of stay-at-home order across counties on the weighted population of mental health patients’ daily visits, with a mean difference of 1 in 10,000 daily patient visits between counties with stay-at-home orders and counties without. On average, mental health patients increased by 18.7% but declined by 1% in counties without lockdown.”
And adult life scripts were upended as well. Countless Americans witnessed the deaths of their older loved ones from behind window panes, or remotely – denied access to their bedside, or the ability to bury them. The number of weddings in the U.S. tanked.
But perhaps the most harmful outcome from efforts to mitigate COVID – and likely the most difficult to measure – was the damage done to our body politic and social fabric. We may never know the damage wrought by legacy-media inspired efforts to demonize those who objected to heavy handed lockdown measures, or the interpersonal cost of the rending of our social fabric that such battles delivered. But what we have learned (again, noting we likely have much more to learn) is depressing.
Unsurprisingly, trust in scientific and medical experts has gone south, with lower overall levels of trust since before COVID, according to Pew Research, and with Republican respondents having even a fair degree of confidence in experts dropping nearly 25% early in the pandemic. Trust in institutions more broadly has cratered.
Our divisions and polarization have only deepened. A poll conducted last year by Pew Research found that nearly three-quarters of adults think COVID did more to fracture the country than bring it together. Huge partisan differences appear when asking respondents about which institutions and leaders handled the pandemic well. The response to COVID has driven deep political polarization, with each side blaming the other for what went poorly. Post-COVID, America is the only country in the world, according to a recent survey, where a majority believe their fellow citizens are “bad” (over the border in Canada, 92% believe their fellows are “good”).
Millions of Americans cut out loved ones over disagreements over COVID – according to one study, one in seven have done so just over their loved ones’ views of the vaccine. That amid a “loneliness epidemic” where over 10% of Americans report having no close friends at all.
All these errors by the legacy press revisited across this series, and their consequences, likely help explain why trust in the media is at a new all-time low – only 28% of Americans across all political beliefs having so much as a “‘fair amount’ of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly,” according to an October Gallup poll.
COVID coverage should serve as a defining moment in legacy media, an extreme cautionary tale about how to screw up the stories that matter most, and the consequences of doing so – both for your readers, and your own industry. For an industry purportedly so concerned with mis- and disinformation, it should serve as a clarion call that it isn’t just the internet loonies who can inspire such “fake news,” and illuminate how hard it is to stamp out false narratives once they’ve been given life.
Where the first rough draft of history is concerned, there may not be a worse – or longer – example of how a blinkered journalistic corp crushed our understanding of a seminal event than the coverage of COVID, and efforts to combat the pandemic.
Can the industry learn from this colossal error and improve? Perhaps. But the evidence suggesting that they will not only continues to mount.