America’s partiers drank away our children’s future

A brief history of the past four months in America:

Experts: Don’t rush to reopen, this isn’t over.

Donald Trump: LIBERATE!

COVID-19: Wheee! Trump officials: Here’s our opposition research on Anthony Fauci.

And we are now faced with an agonizing choice: Do we reopen schools, creating risks of a further viral explosion, or do we keep children home, with severe negative effects on their learning?

None of this had to happen. Other countries stuck with their lockdowns long enough to reduce infections to rates much lower than those prevailing here; COVID-19 death rates per capita in the European Union are only a tenth those in the United States — and falling — while ours are rising fast. As a result, they are in a position to reopen schools fairly safely.

Would a longer lockdown have been economically sustainable? Yes.

It is true that strong social distancing requirements led to high unemployment and hurt many businesses. But even America, with its ramshackle social safety net, was able to provide enough disaster relief — don’t call it stimulus! — to protect most of its citizens from severe hardship.

True, there were holes in that safety net, and many people did suffer. But we could have patched those holes. Yes, emergency relief costs a lot of money, but we can afford it: The federal government has been borrowing huge sums, but interest rates have remained near historical lows.

So doing what was necessary to bring the coronavirus under control would have been annoying, but entirely feasible.

Instead, many states not only rushed to reopen, they reopened stupidly. Instead of being treated as a cheap, effective way to fight contagion, face masks became a front in the culture war. Activities that posed an obvious risk of feeding the pandemic went unchecked: Large gatherings were permitted, bars reopened.

The botched reopening has also endangered something that, unlike drinking in groups, can’t be suspended without doing long-run damage: in-person education.

Some activities hold up fairly well when moved online. I suspect that there will be a lot fewer people flying cross-country to stare at PowerPoints than there were preCOVID, even once we finally beat this virus.

Education isn’t one of those activities. We now have overwhelming confirmation that for many, perhaps most students there is no substitute for actually being in a classroom.

Other countries have managed to reopen schools relatively safely — but they did so with much lower infection rates than currently prevail in America, and with adequate testing, which we still don’t have in many hot spots.

So we are now facing a terrible, unnecessary dilemma. If we reopen in-person education, we risk feeding an outof-control pandemic. If we don’t, we impair the development of millions of American students, inflicting long-term damage on their lives and careers.

And the reason we are in this position is that states, cheered on by the Trump administration, rushed to allow large parties and reopen bars. In a real sense America drank away its children’s future.

Now what? At this point there are probably as many infected Americans as there were in March. So what we should be doing is admitting that we blew it, and doing a severe lockdown all over again — and this time listening to the experts before reopening. Unfortunately, it is now too late to avoid disrupting education, but the sooner we deal with this the sooner we can get our society back on track.

But we don’t have the kind of leaders we need. Instead, we have the likes of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, politicians who refuse to listen to experts and never admit having been wrong.

As a result, the outlook is grim. This pandemic is going to get worse before it gets better, and the nation will suffer permanent damage.

What we should be doing is admitting that we blew it, anddoingasevere lockdown all over again — and this time listening to the experts before reopening.