Gen z

Millions of American children are about to enter their fourth year of Covid-impacted schooling. In vast swaths of the United States, a child now entering second grade has never had anything resembling a normal school experience. No child entering kindergarten has a memory of life before the pandemic. A rising junior in high school has never had a normal high school experience. Over two years into the pandemic, we know that the effects of “long Covid” are basically nonexistent in kids. Following the release of a study published in the Lancet, Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in the United Kingdom, tweeted, “A new, large study on long covid in children using Danish registry data has some very reassuring findings.

In the spring of 2020, the pandemic catalyzed a startling personal revelation. As a begrudging student of Zoom University, I came to the realization that a college degree might not be worth it. Pre-pandemic Rikki was a dutiful, head-down student at New York University with a 4.0 GPA and her eyes set on law school. But when the world locked down in the middle of my sophomore year and my university still demanded full tuition for virtual classes, I began questioning everything. Although they certainly made a valiant effort at remote teaching, most of my professors proved too technologically inept to coerce twenty-five despondent teens to attend 8 a.m. Zoom lectures about medieval feudalism.