In this episode, we talk about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education system in Canada, and how governments across the country failed to act on the overwhelming lack of data and data available at the time.
00:00:17.540Did they have any information that would guide their policymaking or were they really just flying blind?
00:00:22.340And I think it's very reasonable to say that, OK, within the first, let's say, one, two, maybe even three months, there wasn't a lot of good data.
00:00:31.760There was a lot of uncertainty and fear during that period in the pandemic.
00:00:39.140But the reality is that in Canada and including Alberta, schools were closed in Alberta well into January 2022.
00:00:47.940So that's spanning three school years.
00:00:49.800In other parts of Canada, they were closed up until February 2022.
00:00:54.500And so just to put that into context, that is 110 days minimum that Alberta students missed due to school closures related to the pandemic, which began in March of 2020.
00:01:07.620And our report really found that there was a no good reason, no evidence informed reason to believe that school closures would help in terms of the health and safety of children or even necessarily stopping the spread of COVID-19.
00:01:23.860And certainly we knew very early on, if we're being really, really conservative in what we're saying, by December 2020, at the latest, that there was almost no significant health risk to children of COVID-19.
00:01:42.180And yet governments continued to close schools.
00:01:45.360So they really didn't let the data inform their response.