Premature aging of adolescent brains, myopia, chronic school absencea dramatic rise in psychological problems like eating disorders, a third of the year’s lost learning… new evidence is emerging daily about how much Covid school graduation have had children in the UK and all over the world.

The influential American pollster Nate Silver claims that they “were a disastrous political decision of an invasion of Iraq (or possibly larger)” and most parents don’t need studies to show them the harm they see for themselves.

The Children’s Commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, goes so far as to insist that it must never happen again. “I would not close schools,” she has said, “the impact on children of closing schools has been enormous.”

The Covid investigation will investigate the impact of the pandemic on young peoplewith former education secretary Gavin Williamson to be questioned.

My kids were 11, 13 and 15 in March 2020 so we lived through it all: closed schools, canceled exams, kids stuck at home at the exact moment they should have found their independence. And we have seen the aftermath: anxiety, immaturity and fear. So many conversations I have with British parents are punctuated by the phrase “and then, Covid…” describing a point where something – academic grades, high-level sport, mental health – went awry.

So did we have to lock the school gates to stop the spread of Covid and protect the NHS?

Sweden is a country perceived to have done just that. Admired by lockdown skeptics, it is known as the place where restaurants and most schools stayed open and people made their own decisions about what risks they were willing to take.

The International Journal of Educational Research published findings showing that reading comprehension scores were as high as before the pandemic and that “open schools benefited Swedish primary school students”.

Vera Dahlström, 15, lives in Stockholm and realizes that her life maintained a certain normality in 2020 and 2021: “I had a social life because I met my friends every day at school.” She continued to go to school all the time and although she found their apartment in the center of the city cramped when everyone was home, she knew she was relatively lucky. Her father, Ingvar, is an academic advisor at a high school in Stockholm and was in contact with teachers in the UK at this time. “I am convinced that life was better (in Sweden) for children (and adults) than in Great Britain.”

But the picture is not clear – and Sweden has by no means averted the mental crisis gripping teenagers here in the UK.

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Vera’s sister, Annie, now 22 and a political science student at the Defense Academy, had a different experience. While primary (primary) and secondary schools remained open, secondary schools (roughly equivalent to the UK’s sixth form for 16-19-year-olds) moved to a mix of distance and in-person learning. “Vera was supposed to go to school and then come home, but I sat in my room all day. It was fun at first, but then I saw the ill effects of studying in the same room I slept in. The fatigue crept up on me and ate away at me.”

This exhaustion was also felt by medical student Elliot Hagander, 20, who spent the pandemic in Lund with his brother and parents, both doctors. As a high school student, his attendance was limited, but he still attended every three weeks. “My friends and I have all discussed how we still feel tired socially – we can’t meet people for long periods of time without needing to recharge.”

Both Annie and Elliot found their previously excellent grades slipping even though Elliot was still in school, part-time, throughout the pandemic. “I went to school, but after school I didn’t meet anyone,” he recalls. “I just sat at my computer and worked, that became all I did and I got a bad relationship with my studies. My sports were canceled so I had to train on my own, seeing friends was canceled, everyone was scared.”

They all agree that even the younger children who went to school every day had a far from typical year. “We didn’t do normal things like going to museums, swimming or playing soccer,” Vera recalls.

Working as a leader at a Christian summer camp, Elliot has noticed the legacy of Covid on today’s 15-year-olds even though their schools as 11-year-olds remained open. “During pandemicthey didn’t sleep over and so when they go to camp they are much more worried the first nights, come to us crying and say they miss their parents. For many of them, it was the first time they left their parents overnight.”

I ask Ingvar if he has noticed that the students he sees seem younger, as if the pandemic stopped their development. “Yes, but I’ve been complaining about it for years!” he says. “I think it’s equally to do with what we call curling parent‘curling parents‘ (parents trying to remove all obstacles in their children’s paths). Parents and children are much cozier and Covid maybe made it worse.”

The trends that worry educators and parents in Great Britain are also common in Sweden. “Mental health and other diagnoses have exploded here,” he says. “Screens and the whole way of socializing has contributed.”

Truancy It’s also a problem: – We call them “home sitters” – 16-17-year-old students with 20 or 30 percent absences, says Ingvar. This is supported by the latest survey by the National Education Agency which showed that up to 35 per cent of students in the ninth grade (equivalent to year 11 in England and Wales) had 15 per cent absenteeism.

Annie has noticed that “now if you have the slightest headache or cold you stay at home – that has changed because of Covid”.

If children did not emerge from the pandemic unscathed, even if their schools remained open, what about the effects of Covid on the rest of the population? After all, schools were closed elsewhere in the world to stop the spread and to lower the death toll.

In the end Sweden had what they New York Times has called “a remarkably average pandemic.” There was a huge increase in infections in the spring of 2020, but this has been mainly attributed to the failure of the Swedish authorities to protect the elderly in nursing homes. In any case, they had fewer deaths per million than the UK and fewer than the EU average, but more than their neighbors Finland, Denmark and especially Norway.

Part of Sweden’s strategy was to balance the risk of dying from Covid with the risk of dying from the effects of lockdown on the economy and other aspects of healthcare. A better measure of this is to look at excess deaths in the period 2020 to 2022. Here, Sweden stands out – undoubtedly fewer excess deaths than any other European country and half of the USA.

Mark Woolhouse is Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, government adviser and author of The year the world went mad about the pandemic. He believes Britain could and should have reopened schools much earlier.

At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, he says, “you could justify the decision because of the uncertainty around the Covid risk to children, the risk to staff and the contribution that schools could make to the transmission of the virus”.

But, he says, it soon became apparent that “there was very little evidence of these three effects anywhere in the world”. In other words, children were neither severely affected by Covid nor acting as carriers of the disease – there was very little benefit to closing schools and little thought to the obvious costs. “At the (government) meetings I went to, there was lip service to the idea that it was a bad idea for the kids to close schools, but nothing more than that.” He claims that we could have done like Denmark and reopened schools in April 2020.

Ingvar Dahlström believes that despite some doctors and experts objecting to Sweden’s more relaxed policy, most Swedes now believe that it was the right approach. “People seem happy with how things worked out,” he says now. “It would have been different if a lot of children had died, but they didn’t.”