Suicides were actually down. This is entirely due to Covid deaths. This effect is so large you can’t minimize it, and some of these kids who didn’t die will have lifelong issues because of Covid. It doesn’t only kill old people.

And it always amazes me that people are just now caring about kids education. Our school systems have been demonstrably backsliding for 20 years. The ranks of teachers are thinner than ever, and the pay/benefits are so low teachers aren’t going to risk their lives to go into the classroom — many were already working second jobs, which made it really easy to stop teaching.

You want to improve kids education? Invest in the school systems, because a big part of the reason the pandemic was so negative for kids’ learning is that we had starved our public school systems of resources for decades before anyone ever got sick.