What Future Generations Will Remember About The Pandemic

We haven’t made our kids’ future important enough to inconvenience ourselves. And they know it.

Andy Slavitt
Medium Coronavirus Blog
4 min readAug 4, 2020

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Credit: Kiattisak Lamchan / EyeEm / Getty Images

I began writing a lengthy piece on the difficult decision of sending kids back to school, with four scenarios and decision criteria to try to help parents. Then I stopped because I started thinking about kids and what we teach them. I scrapped it for something much less useful.

I think about the things we all try to teach our kids:

  • How to be safe
  • Following the golden rule
  • Showing consideration
  • Using evidence
  • Looking out for those less fortunate

And I thought, WTF are they going to say about us when they grow up? They are watching us invoke them and how precious their education is (it is), but they see we weren’t willing to work all summer to make their buildings safe. That we decided to keep bars open and spread Covid-19 even knowing it would be impossible to control come fall.

That the governor in Arizona threatened to take a school district’s budget if they didn’t open even after a teacher died there. That we have some studies now that show school age kids get and spread Covid-19 and the…

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