THE ECONOMIST HAS AN “UNEXPECTEDLY” MOMENT: Covid learning loss has been a global disaster.

When covid-19 first began to spread around the world, pausing normal lessons was a forgivable precaution. No one knew how transmissible the virus was in classrooms; how sick youngsters would become; or how likely they would be to infect their grandparents. But disruptions to education lasted long after encouraging answers to these questions emerged.

New data suggest that the damage has been worse than almost anyone expected [emphasis mine — Ed]. Locking kids out of school has prevented many of them from learning how to read properly. Before the pandemic 57% of ten-year-olds in low and middle-income countries could not read a simple story, says the World Bank. That figure may have risen to 70%, it now estimates. The share of ten-year-olds who cannot read in Latin America, probably the worst-affected region, could rocket from around 50% to 80% (see chart 1).

Children who never master the basics will grow up to be less productive and to earn less. McKinsey, a consultancy, estimates that by 2040 education lost to school closures could cause global gdp to be 0.9% lower than it would otherwise have been—an annual loss of $1.6trn. The World Bank thinks the disruption could cost children $21trn in earnings over their lifetimes—a sum equivalent to 17% of global gdp today. That is much more than the $10trn it had estimated in 2020, and also an increase on the $17trn it was predicting last year.

Who on earth could have foreseen this? Flashback: Politico: How Ron DeSantis won the pandemic.

Related:

● Why we must demand that leaders who got COVID wrong admit it and apologize.

—Karol Markowicz, the New York Post, March 6th.

● Speech Therapy Shows the Difficult Tradeoffs of Wearing Masks.

—Atlantic headline, March 2nd.

As Ace of Spades wrote, at the start of a lengthy post on that last headline, “The masking mandates that the corrupt US and state and local governments forced on children, under pressure from the corrupt teachers unions have imposed developmental disorders on children that they may never recover from. The early years of development are critical ones. You don’t get those back. These are critical years of development in which children’s brains are wired to rewire themselves like crazy. Their brains will reconfigure themselves during these years like in no other point in their lives, ever. There is no ‘Do Over’ switch on a child’s formative years.”