Uhh, citation needed?
At least in terms of population, the two biggest countries in the world with a population greater than the US are China and India. I know for a fact (having family there) that schools in India were closed for longer than the US.
Perhaps in China things were better, but they also have totalitarian control over all your movements. Would you accept you and your whole family being monitored at all times as the cost of having your kid in school?
In any case, Western Europe and Canada did not close schools for more than a year and also didn't monitor everyone's movements like china did. And I assume it wasn't because of careless disregard for students and teachers. So that kind of invalidates your original point; closing schools for years is not a normal, necessary consequence of a pandemic. It was a policy decision that has not yielded any results, even if political rhetoric makes it hard to admit (in the US)
Your response immediately after the question indicates that you understood what the citation request was for. I was asking for a citation that schools in most of the world were open during Covid.
> Western Europe and Canada did not close schools...
So now we are down to a minority of the world population, incidentally in a political environment very different from the US, where basic pandemic precautions like masks and later vaccines were highly politicized.
> closing schools for years is not a normal, necessary consequence of a pandemic.
Just like frustrated commenters in the rest of the threads, you are continually moving goalposts to prove your preconceived point.
The reality is that there is no normal consequence of a pandemic, and yes, the US is completely different from the rest of the world in terms of how stuff works here. And no, schools were not "closed", teachers worked in the midst of a pandemic to try to deliver remote education with minimal training about how to do it. It is unsurprising that some problems would result.
Combined with the poor testing practices, we felt really unsupported. Not to mention, from pure observation of my family, I suspect we are some of the major carriers for viruses: children get it at school, bring it at home, then we spread to other adults.
My province had a curfew (another bad idea, to be fair), and even then we still kept schools open (after the first 2 months of the pandemic, and that was longer than a lot of other places). Keeping them closed for more than a year had nothing to do with keeping people alive, or we would have seen massive differences between children death rates in the US vs. the rest of the world.