(George Frey/Reuters)
CBS reporter Jan Crawford cited the “crushing impact that our Covid polices have had on young kids and children” as one of the most underreported stories of 2021 on Face the Nation on Sunday.
Crawford made note of the extraordinarily low risk that coronavirus poses to children and teenagers while also observing that it is they who have “suffered and sacrificed the most.”
“The risk of suicide attempts by girls now up 51 percent this year. Black kids are nearly twice as likely as white kids to die by suicide. School closures, lockdowns, cancellation of sports — you couldn’t even go on a playground in the D.C. area without cops scurrying, shooing the kids off,” continued Crawford, who concluded by asserting that “if our policies don’t reflect a more measured and reasonable approach for our children, they will be paying for our generation’s decisions the rest of their lives.”
“They will be paying for our generation’s decisions the rest of their lives”: @JanCBS explains why she thinks 2021’s biggest underreported story was the devastating impact of COVID policies on children pic.twitter.com/AUU1f6AFNi
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) December 26, 2021
While the toll of being out of school and other restrictions on children may come as news to some, others have been warning about the consequences for well over a year.
Last summer, Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) argued that “our fight against COVID shouldn’t lead us to deprive our kids of the tools they need to succeed,” who issued an order mandating that schools open up for in-person classes by the end of last August.
President Joe Biden has been a staunch ally of teachers’ unions that have sought to keep schools partially or fully virtual, but his surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, recently released a report on “the nation’s youth mental health crisis.”
The pandemic and the policy responses to it “disrupted the lives of children and adolescents, such as in-person schooling, in-person social opportunities with peers and mentors, access to health care and social services, food, housing, and the health of their caregivers,” per the report.
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