It probably never will.
The COVID-19 lockdowns disproportionately hurt service industry workers, black people, and children from low-income families. White-collar workers in knowledge industries, whose jobs shifted more easily to remote work, saw far fewer effects on their paychecks, and children from wealthier families suffered less academically and developmentally.
But the pandemic took a collective toll as well. American society is now more distrustful of institutions, less socially connected, and more divided than before March 2020.
Some of the changes brought by the pandemic lockdowns began well before the virus started spreading in Wuhan, China. People were already tuning out traditional media and turning to a more diverse array of sources for their news, for example, by the time the pandemic arrived and accelerated a massive decline for the industry. Online shopping was already eroding the footprint of brick-and-mortar retail before the lockdowns supercharged the trend.
Other lingering changes, big and small, seem to be unique byproducts of the era. Paper menus have not returned to some restaurants and bars that adopted mobile ordering systems to reduce the number of items shared by diners. The concept of a sick day in corporate America has all but disappeared with work-from-home arrangements, which created the expectation that employees will still log on for their jobs unless they are completely debilitated.
The country appears to have stabilized economically, although inflation has not yet rolled entirely back. But culturally and socially, the recovery is not over.
The kids aren’t alright
Few aspects of lockdown policy caused as much damage and inspired as much raw emotion as school closures.
Five years since classroom doors shut and laptops opened, the overwhelming consensus among experts and parents alike is that remote learning was a failure.
Students have yet to recover academically.
In January, the Trump Education Department released findings that showed fourth graders scored significantly worse in reading in 2024 than they did in 2019 and actually decreased in reading proficiency since 2022.
The scores revealed “a heartbreaking reality for American students and confirm our worst fears: not only did most students not recover from pandemic-related learning loss, but those students who were the most behind and needed the most support have fallen even further behind,” the Department of Education said in a statement. “Despite the billions of dollars that the federal government invests in K-12 education annually and the approximately $190 billion in federal pandemic funds, our education system continues to fail students across the nation.”
Under President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden, Congress rushed to send billions of dollars to schools in what teachers unions said was necessary emergency funding.
TRUMP GOES TO WAR AGAINST ‘EPIDEMIC’ OF NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS
Critics say the burst of funding did not translate into academic recovery.
“Private schools were opened much faster than traditional public schools were, and yet traditional public schools were getting significantly more money,” Jonathan Butcher, senior research fellow for education at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.
Schools spent much of the $190 billion they received in pandemic funds on hiring more administrative and noninstructional staff.
“That contributes to the bloat,” Butcher said. “It doesn’t do anything for actually changing the way that we teach kids so we can close the achievement gap.”
A case study from Washington state, for example, found that schools hired more than 12,000 employees after receiving the last and biggest tranche of funding from Biden’s Build Back Better Act. However, fewer than half of those positions were for teachers.
Pandemic relief money expired in September 2024, leaving many school districts with the prospect of having to lay off administrative staff they hired with one-time funding.
And even though the classrooms are open, not all the students have returned even five years later.
Chronic absenteeism continues to affect school districts across the country. In New York City, where schools stuck with remote learning longer than many other districts nationally, more than a third of all students are still chronically absent, according to a study published last week by the Manhattan Institute.
Severed social networks
Lockdowns thrust millions of Americans into a state of isolation that, for some, did not end when the mandates did.
In 2023, the surgeon general issued an advisory warning of a “loneliness epidemic” gripping the country. In it, the surgeon general noted that loneliness significantly worsens health outcomes for most people.
“[L]acking social connection can increase the risk for premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day,” the surgeon general said. “Social connection is a fundamental human need, as essential to survival as food, water, and shelter.”
But the necessity of socializing factored little into the decisions public health officials at every level of government made in the months — for some places, in the years — after the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic.
Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the pandemic, acknowledged last year that social distancing requirements “sort of just appeared” in public policy without the science to back them up. Those social distancing requirements kept people out of churches, classrooms, and one another’s homes for months.
And Americans have still not fully reconnected to their pre-pandemic social networks.
A study published in November found that Americans are socializing less than they did before 2020. Researchers found that people attend fewer sports games and concerts, go to restaurants and bars less frequently, and practice religion in person less often than before the pandemic upended their routines.
Another study published last fall found that millions of Americans remain out of the dating pool, leading to a “dating recession” that has left a significant number of Americans under age 40 single.
Eric Hogue, president of Colorado Christian University, said the years that college-aged students spent at home affected both their ability to adapt to university life and their professional goals.
“We see concerns around core studies, maybe unpreparedness in engaging our liberal arts and core curriculum in freshman year, definitely anxiety, depression, and I would think social skills are lacking,” Hogue told the Washington Examiner. “Because think about it, they missed two years of working on that when they were in high school.”
“That type of student support is up on campus, [for] anxiety, depression, separation anxiety,” Hogue added.
From his experience, students who endured remote learning during their high school years hope to land in-person jobs when they graduate
“A lot of students do not want to work remotely,” Hogue said.
“And here’s my theory — I am not a psychologist, but a layman’s theory — I think they’re tired of the isolation,” he added. “I think they enjoy community. They’re still learning how to do it.”
Institutional breakdowns
Critics have blamed the evolving COVID-19 guidance from public health officials in 2020 and beyond for Americans’ falling trust in the scientific community.
Those critics frequently point to the shifting guidance on masks — people were told that masking was not effective in slowing the spread of COVID-19 before masking in public became mandatory — as an example of scientists’ unreliability. They also often cite the data public health officials appeared to ignore, which show relatively early on that schools were not significant sources of community spread, when allowing schools to remain closed for many months.
“During the pandemic, Americans’ confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests fell: 87% expressed at least a fair amount of confidence in April 2020, but that number dropped to 73% in October 2023,” the Pew Research Center noted in a report published last month.
But the scientific community is not the only entity whose public image has taken a hit in recent years. Polling shows Americans are losing trust in nearly all major institutions.
FEDERAL WORKERS ORDERED TO RETURN TO WORK TO FIND THEMSELVES OFFICELESS
“Since trust in institutions was falling before the pandemic and the causes of those drops presumably remained in place during the pandemic, it is difficult to know what role pandemic-specific factors played in the downward trend in institutional trust,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Washington Examiner. “But survey data do suggest that trust in science at least remains higher than that for most other institutions.”
Indeed, other institutions that played key roles in the pandemic have seen the public’s trust in them continue to shrink in the past five years for a wide range of reasons.
According to Gallup, fewer Americans today said they trust the mass media than at any point in the past 50 years, with just 31% saying they trust the media a great deal or a fair amount.
Only a slightly larger percentage of Americans, 36%, said they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in academia, Gallup found in July, which marked a significant drop from the 57% of Americans who said the same thing in 2015.
Vaccine skepticism on the rise
One of the most contentious aspects of pandemic policy — the COVID-19 vaccine mandates — may have contributed to a decline in trust in vaccines overall, which is worrying public health officials.
The Pew Research Center report published last month found that while most Americans believe the benefits of the measles vaccine, for example, outweigh the risks, “support for policies requiring vaccines for children to attend public schools had fallen 12 percentage points, a drop driven almost entirely by falling support among Republicans.”
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show vaccination rates for kindergartners are ticking down nationally and, in some states, have dropped significantly, the New York Times reported in January.
Skepticism stemming from the COVID-19 vaccine campaign, during which public health officials initially said the shot would completely prevent transmission of the disease before saying its primary benefit was preventing the recipient from a severe case of the virus, is not the only driver of the trend.
Online misinformation, state laws increasing exemptions from vaccination requirements, and the politicization of the matter — vaccine hesitancy is now more common among Republicans than Democrats — have all contributed to the drop in trust in vaccines.
Restoring trust in vaccines and the expertise of scientists could prove difficult amid a fractured information environment and the politicization of things that once had no partisan associations.
That process could start, according to Jamieson, in individual Americans’ doctor’s offices.
“Trust in local institutions and your own healthcare provider remains strong,” Jamieson said. “We should rebuild trust from the local level up.
