Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell riled up anti-Trump conservatives on Thursday by saying that he would “absolutely” support former President Donald Trump were he the 2024 Republican presidential nominee. McConnell’s statement came just weeks after he took to the Senate floor and declared that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the Capitol riots that left McConnell’s own staffers barricaded in his offices and fearing for their lives.

But in reality, there was no reason to expect that McConnell would offer any other answer than he did. Polls show that a majority of Republicans prefer Trump to be the 2024 nominee if he runs, and three-quarters have said they want him to play a “prominent” role in the party.

There are very few politicians who would be willing to go against their own voters. And from McConnell’s own short-term perspective, it does him no good to exacerbate the brewing GOP civil war when asked a question about a scenario that may not happen and won’t even play out for three years if it does.

Conservatives who were appalled by the events of Jan. 6 and who hoped that Trump would be ostracized by his party have been sorely disappointed. But elected Republicans are only taking their cues from voters. If they had the courage to declare Trump persona non grata, it would not rid the world of Trumpism. Had they decided to convict him and barred him from running from future office, it likely would have only further inflamed populist passions among voters. Trump likely would have maintained influence from the outside and could have anointed his successor.

The reality is that the only way that the Republican Party will move beyond Trump is if another candidate comes along who is able to win with a different coalition.

Back when Trump was running, few people thought his bombastic style and eclectic views that often challenged Republican orthodoxy were what the primary electorate wanted. In hindsight, we can understand what happened. But nobody in 2013 was saying that a Trump-style candidate was gonna take over the party in 2016 and then go on to win the general election.

Even though Trump is still the dominant force within Republican politics, it is possible that another candidate can cobble together a different coalition to win in the primary and then the general election. Yes, Trump got 74 million votes. But most people who voted for him would have voted for any Republican over President Biden and will vote for any Republican over whomever Democrats nominate in 2024. Trump’s 46.8% of the popular vote was less than Sen. Mitt Romney’s 47.2% in 2012. The “Trump or bust” vote would dwindle considerably if, in Nov. 2024, Republican voters have to choose between a non-Trump conservative and keeping Democrats in power.

In all likelihood, anti-Trump conservatives are never going to have the satisfaction of that theoretical post-Trump candidate being anti-Trump. President Ronald Reagan, for instance, did not run as an anti-Nixon Republican. But he did run as somebody different. Most likely, anti-Trump conservatives will be forced to decide if they can support somebody who doesn’t act like Trump, even if that candidate won’t explicitly denounce him.

The important point in all of this is that there are no shortcuts. There is no scenario in which somehow the head of the Republican National Committee and Republican congressional leaders come together and suddenly decide they’ve had enough and that Trump is out. Somebody else is going to have to come along and offer a compelling alternative to voters.

I recently participated in a wide-ranging discussion on Clubhouse contemplating the end of the pandemic hosted by my friend (and Washington Examiner contributor), Karol Markowicz.

Karol has done an exceptional job depicting the harm caused by unscientific and arbitrary COVID-19 restrictions (especially as it relates to school closures). She is now raising alarms about the fact that even with a highly safe and effective vaccine being deployed, there’s a reluctance to acknowledge that things should swiftly return to normal.

Indeed, even as Dr. Anthony Fauci warns that vaccine hesitancy is going to be the major barrier to achieving herd immunity, he’s out there saying things that reduce the incentive for people to get vaccinated.

“There are things, even if you’re vaccinated, that you’re not going to be able to do in society,” Fauci said in a White House briefing. “For example, indoor dining, theaters, places where people congregate. That’s because of the safety of society.”

The media has gotten the message, publishing a steady stream of articles downplaying the vaccine by suggesting that it should make no difference to human behavior.

“You’re fully vaccinated against the coronavirus — now what?” NBC reported recently. “Don’t expect to shed your mask and get back to normal activities right away.”

In reality, this is completely the wrong approach, especially given that we’re a few months away from having the opposite problem that we have now. That is, we’re going to have an abundant supply of vaccines and more than 100 million reluctant people who will need to be convinced to take them. For those indifferent to or skeptical of the vaccines, underselling their effectiveness and removing the reward for getting vaccinated is going to be a huge barrier to achieving the 85% vaccination rate that Fauci has most recently been pushing.

It’s true that a 95% effective vaccine isn’t the same as a 100% vaccine, and there has not been significant testing as to whether vaccinated people who become exposed to the coronavirus can transmit it. But the vaccine down players are overemphasizing low-probability events while ignoring the big picture.

Even though a small percentage of people can get fully vaccinated and get COVID-19, virtually nobody with both doses has become severely ill, has required hospitalization, or died.

In fact, even the Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine (which at 72% efficacy in the United States., is less preventive of infections than Moderna and Pfizer), was 100% effective at preventing hospitalization and deaths.

Furthermore, for all the fears about variants making vaccines useless, Johnson & Johnson proved 64% effective in preventing moderate to severe COVID-19 in South Africa. That’s still more effective than the typical seasonal flu shot.

In addition, while inconclusive, early evidence out of Israel, which has the highest percentage of its population vaccinated, is suggestive that the vaccines also reduce the likelihood of transmission of the virus.

As some stubbornly refuse to accept that an end is within sight, it is worth remembering how far the goal posts have shifted.

In the early days of the pandemic, we were in an untenable position. It was too late for foreign travel restrictions to make much of a difference, we didn’t have the capacity to implement a sophisticated testing and tracing regime, and masks were in short supply. Also, there was very little understanding of how the coronavirus spread and the best way to treat it.

Given that the disease was highly contagious, and while harmless to most, deadly to others, it created a multi-dimensional challenge. We’ve all been forced to consider the individual element, the social element, and the government element.

The individual element pertains to people’s own assessments of their risk of getting severe COVID-19 relative to their desire to engage in certain activities. The social element refers to individuals’ desire to reduce the likelihood that they may unwittingly infect others who are more vulnerable than they are. The government element refers to policies imposing restrictions on human behavior.

The complex interaction between these different elements is one reason that it’s so hard to talk about whether lockdown policies “worked.” The reality is that some people started scaling back activities weeks before government restrictions kicked in, and many won’t engage in activities such as movie-going or indoor dining even where they are permitted to. On the other hand, in some places with harsher lockdown policies, people have been willing to skirt coronavirus restrictions and guidance based on their own risk assessments. In other words, there’s a distinction between lockdown policies and the extent to which people are locking down.

In the early days of the pandemic, there was some recognition that the government was taking extraordinary and draconian measures to close down schools and businesses as a last-ditch effort. At the time, we were told that there was no way we could prevent COVID-19 from spreading widely and from killing people, but we needed to impose lockdown policies for just a few weeks. Doing so, public health officials hoped, would “flatten the curve.” This meant that the inevitable infections would be spread out over a longer period of time so that at the peak, hospitals didn’t become so overwhelmed. The experience from Italy was that once the medical system collapsed and people didn’t have access to critical care, the rate of deaths skyrocketed.

This should have created a natural limiting principle on government action. That is, government would take extreme measures to avoid a systemic collapse, but once that was not at risk, those measures could be removed, and we’d return to people making decisions based on their own individual risks assessments and social conscience. But we ignored this limiting principle. Instead, we migrated into the mindset in which restrictions wouldn’t be lifted until we met some sort of arbitrary and constantly shifting standard of safety.

As problematic as this approach was, the idea of maintaining restrictions with hundreds of millions of vaccine doses becoming available in the coming months is far more troubling.

Pretty soon, everybody over 65 will have had the chance to have obtained a vaccine that is near perfect in preventing hospitalization and death. This population has accounted for over 80% of deaths during the pandemic. On top of this, medical professionals will have had vaccine access as well as those with medical conditions that make them more vulnerable.

At that point, there will be no realistic risk that the hospital system is going to collapse with a flood of COVID-19 patients. And those who are most susceptible to severe COVID-19 will enjoy the protection of a vaccine if they want it.

To review, the three elements discussed above, at this point, there would be no justification for any government restrictions. And there is no reason for individuals to consider the social element in determining their behavior. In normal times, whenever people hop in a car, they are risking a freak accident that can kill somebody, and whenever they leave the house during flu season, they risk spreading a potentially deadly infection to somebody else.

Thus, if you eliminate the government element and social element, we’re just left with the individual element. People who are more nervous about COVID-19, even after getting vaccinated, can continue to take whatever precautions they feel are necessary. But there is no justification for imposing restrictions on others.

It’s worth recalling that very early on in the pandemic, the Imperial College of London released a highly influential and controversial report. It said that if nothing were done in response to COVID-19, the baseline was that 2.2 million Americans could die of COVID-19. The only way to reduce that number, the study argued, was through sustained lockdowns. However, the study said that such policies “will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available.” In other words, we’re now entering a precarious phase in which public health officials and the media are sending signals that we have to go beyond what was once considered the most draconian approach possible.

As even Fauci himself has acknowledged at times, he is not the “end all.” That is, it is his job to give advice about public health, and he is focused on getting infections down to as close to zero as possible. We can debate how effective he has been in that role and how good his advice has proven. But regardless, Fauci’s role is to be myopically focused on COVID-19. Actual policymakers and individuals have to take into account his advice and balance it against other personal and societal priorities.

People need to recognize the difference between low-probability events and zero-probability events and also stop thinking myopically about COVID-19 to the exclusion of everything else that is important. Lockdowns have destroyed businesses, exacerbated mental health issues, increased suicides, led people to defer preventive healthcare, deprived children of education and socialization, and placed a back-breaking burden on working parents.

Arguing that such policies are necessary in the short-term to prevent millions of deaths is one thing. Arguing that such policies are necessary in the long-term to prevent the low probability that somebody vaccinated can infect somebody else who has a 99% chance of survival even if infected and unvaccinated is quite another. Let’s accept victory over COVID-19 and move on.

President Biden made an impassioned call for unity in an inaugural address that was praised across the media for reaffirming institutional norms. Yet within hours of being sworn in, Biden broke well-established precedents to fire a top Labor Department official at the behest of his union allies.

Almost immediately after Biden took over, administration officials gave Peter Robb, general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, an ultimatum that if he did not resign by 5 p.m., he would be fired. Robb declined to resign and was immediately let go.

Historically, the position has been considered independent, and the counsel is only replaced upon expiration of a term.

“Unions despise Robb and wanted to see him ousted quickly, even though presidents usually do not fire the NLRB’s general counsel, who acts as a quasi-prosecutor,” the Huffington Post reported. “Robb had more than nine months left in his four-year term at the board.”

In a letter explaining why he was refusing to resign, Robb wrote, “The removal of an incumbent General Counsel of the NLRB prior to the expiration of the term by a President of the United States is unprecedented since the nascence of the National Labor Relation Act (NLRA) and the NLRB. One of the key amendments to the NLRA that occurred in 1947 was to create an independent General Counsel.”

He went on to write that, “The removal of a General Counsel would set an unfortunate precedent for the labor relations of this country that will permanently undermine the structure and thus the proper functioning of the NLRB and the NLRA. In particular, such action undermines Congress’s intent that the Office of the General Counsel be independent of the Board and the Executive Branch so that the General Counsel, as chief prosecutor of the NLRA, can prosecute potential violations of the NLRA free from political influence and pressure.”

But unions had been agitating throughout the transition for Biden to oust him prematurely. The Service Employees International Union, in a December letter to the Biden transition team obtained by the Huffington Post, demanded he be fired, calling him an “extreme, anti-union ideologue.”

Though typically an unknown position out of Washington, the general counsel plays an influential role in enforcing labor law through prosecutions and settlements. During the Obama administration, the position was frequently used to pursue the interests of unions, as it did with an ill-advised suit against Boeing for opening a manufacturing plant in South Carolina.

Moreover, it may be an early sign of how Biden intends to govern — speaking publicly in lofty tones about unity, while out of the public eye, he smashes norms to further left-wing policy goals.

Credit to Huffington Post reporter Dave Jamieson for acknowledging that the firing violates accepted norms. But my guess is the rest of the media will skip the outrage cycle on this one.

As Republicans contemplate their future without Donald Trump as president, the party is still very much in his control. A majority of House Republicans and several senators decided to follow him all the way over the cliff in seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election. There are few that would be willing to admit that Trump’s months of false claims that the election was stolen has anything to do with the deadly Capitol riot. And Ronna McDaniel, Trump’s choice, remains as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.

We cannot expect Republican politicians to have moral courage, which is one of the insights that helped fuel Trump’s successful rise in the party. But one would think, at some point, more members of the party would realize how damaging it would be to tie their fortunes to such an extremely unpopular figure.

Gallup, which has polled every president since Harry Truman, is out with its final poll of the Trump presidency, and it shows him to be historically unpopular.

He leaves office with a 34% approval rating as a lame duck, which is tied with Presidents George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, and just above the worst in history, Truman’s 32% during the Korean War. (President Richard Nixon had a lower approval at the time of his resignation).

This, however, is relatively good news for Trump.

Over the course of his presidency, Trump averaged approval of 41.1% — the lowest by 4 points compared with any other post-World War II president. Even Carter was at 45.5%.

Furthermore, his highest level was 49% — at a moment earlier this year, during which he briefly took the fight against coronavirus seriously. He is the first president of the polling era who has never, at any point in his presidency, had a majority of the country approving of him.

In terms of his political record, it’s worth noting that Trump was elected in 2016 against a deeply unpopular Democratic nominee after winning several swing states by a small margin. After that, it’s been all downhill. He lost Republicans the House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020. Republicans are completely out of power in Washington for the first time in a decade, and it’s largely thanks to Trump. He turned reliably Republican suburbs into Democratic strongholds simply because he turned off so many voters.

Typically, when presidents are deeply unpopular, the party cannot wait to run away from them.

Nobody, in 1974, wanted to run as a Nixon Republican. In 1981, nobody wanted to run for office as a Carter Democrat. In the 2008 election, Republicans started running away from Bush before he even left the White House. He did not even attend that year’s RNC and has never spoken at one in-person since leaving office.

Yet Republicans, who managed to win the presidency, Senate, and House, before Trump had even entered politics, are acting like the only path for them to regain power is to attach themselves to Trump like barnacles.

The challenge Republicans face, of course, is that there is a deep disconnect between Republican voters and the general electorate. Though down from the upper 80s, Trump still leaves the presidency with 82% of Republicans approving of his performance. In deep-red districts, this means those who get in Trump’s crosshairs risk a primary challenge. The problem is, just 30% of independents approve of Trump, meaning that as long as the party is tied to him, they will have difficulty winning outside of already deeply Republican areas, which they would expect to win no matter what.

So, while it might get ugly, the data are pretty clear that for Republicans to advance as a party, they are going to have to find a way to divorce themselves from Trump.

With President Trump set to leave office next week, it is naturally leading to conversations about the direction that the Republican Party will move in once his first term has concluded. While there will be plenty of debates in the coming months and years about the shape of the party, ultimately, there are three basic paths down which the party could go.

Briefly, they are:

MAGA Forever: In this scenario, a significant portion of the party sticks with Trump once he leaves office. Candidates running for office embrace him to stave off primary challenges and to coast to reelection in safe seats. Many of the candidates are ones who the Trump family has recruited or endorsed. And in 2024, either Trump himself, a family member, or another certified MAGA politician emerges as the presidential nominee. The hope would be that this could resurrect the winning coalition that vaulted Trump to victory in 2016. The thinking would have to be that opposition to President Biden, the media, Big Tech, and so forth energizes this crowd in the midterm elections and beyond. The risk of this approach is obvious — in the wake of the Capitol riot and with Trump’s approval rating dipping to as low as 29% in a recent Pew poll, the outgoing president is damaged goods. The longer the GOP remains tied to him, the more out of reach many voters who might otherwise vote with the GOP would become.

Trumpism without Trump: Under this scenario, Republicans would attempt the delicate dance of trying to extract some of the lessons from what appealed to voters about Trump while trying to distance themselves from Trump himself. Such a Republican Party may be more pugilistic than the pre-Trump party, more populist and less corporate, more anti-Trade and less driven by limiting the role of government, and so on. The hope would be that Republicans could maximize performance by appealing to many of the voters that Trump brought into the party while turning off fewer other voters no longer bombarded by crazy Trump tweets. The risk is that Republicans end up with the worst of both worlds — that they remain tainted by Trump and thus turn off many swing voters, but that without his celebrity appeal, they don’t turn out enough of his passionate supporters either. This is more in line with what happened in the Georgia Senate races.

Divorce with Trump: This could take a number of forms. The most dramatic would be that Senate Republicans end up deciding to join Democrats in voting to convict Trump and bar him from ever running from office again. Short of that, it could also mean a willingness of an increasing number of party members to criticize Trump without fear of retaliation. The hope would be that doing this would put some of the suburban districts back in play, which would be one of the easiest paths Republicans would have to retake Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024. Ideally for Republicans, they could win back at least some of these suburban voters without turning off a critical mass of Trump supporters. For this to happen, there may have to be significant enough opposition to the Biden administration among MAGA-types that they are even willing to vote for more milquetoast establishment-friendly Republicans. The risk, of course, is that there is a more permanent cultural shift in the suburbs away from Republicans and that Republicans are unable to win back enough votes in them to offset an exodus of disgruntled Trump voters, whipped into a fury by Trump and his allies over the betrayal and abandonment of MAGA.

There are, of course, many subcategories and nuances to all of these directions. And in practice, it may be a mixture of several of them, with some candidates embracing Trump and others seeking more distance. But, broadly speaking, these are the choices facing Republicans.

After a frustratingly slow start, it appears that the pace of vaccinations has rapidly picked up in the United States and is closing in on the target for daily doses that had been set by both the Trump administration and the incoming Biden administration.

To be sure, there’s a long way to go. The U.S. has only given first doses to about 3% of the population, well short of the most ambitious estimates as to what it would take for herd immunity, let alone the 80% to 85% Dr. Anthony Fauci standard.

However, as this chart from Our World in Data shows, things have definitely been trending in the right direction over the past week, with daily doses administered having more than doubled. Finally, an upward sloping curve to get excited about.

But even this chart understates the progress because it’s the seven-day average, which is at over 700,000. On Wednesday, the U.S. hit 951,000. That’s great news considering the Trump administration’s target of about 30 million a month, and Biden’s goal of 100 million doses in 100 days would come out to about 1 million per day.

At this point, the U.S. has only administered about 10 million of the 29 million doses that have been distributed to states, or about one-third. So there’s a ways to go before we run into any sort of issues with vaccine availability. At the moment, the issue is getting people appointments rather than the supply of vaccines.

Hopefully, as the ability of states to administer vaccines accelerates, the number of vaccines can be replenished fast enough to keep up with demand. Regardless, this is an encouraging trend, as other trends, such as the mounting death toll, are quite discouraging.

If Congress cannot get its act together in time to impeach President Trump for inciting a violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol to pressure lawmakers into overturning the election results, then they should take their time and do it right.

That means they should allow time for a full investigation of his actions on the day of the deadly siege, including answering the question of why the National Guard was not allowed to be deployed. A full process would also look closely at his behind the scenes efforts to overturn the results of the election.

There are four basic arguments people have made for impeaching Trump again.

The first is that he needs to be removed from office immediately, because every moment he maintains the power of the presidency, he is a threat to the republic and to global security. But if Democrats wanted to act urgently under the “every second counts” theory, they should have moved swiftly on Thursday to vote to impeach him and send the articles over to the Senate.

Instead, Democrats have been taking their time, trying to talk about the 25th Amendment option that is unlikely to happen, and that ultimately punts to Vice President Mike Pence. Now, the earliest they’d be acting on impeachment would be sometime this week, meaning at most, the Senate would have a matter of days before Trump leaves offices to remove him.

In other words, this first argument likely no longer holds.

The second case in favor of Trump’s impeachment is that in his current position, he could spend the rest of his presidency inciting more mob violence. This I find least compelling. Trump, with or without Twitter, would have plenty of ways to communicate with his followers about theft and fraud and keeping up the fight were he not in office. And were Congress to take the extraordinary step of removing him with just days to go, it would create another “showdown” event and another grievance to supercharge those of his supporters who tend toward violence.

To be clear, I am not saying that Congress should be intimidated by the mob to not take action it otherwise deems appropriate. My point is that one cannot expect impeachment to reduce the opportunity for Trump to incite violence or the motivation for the violent ones among his supporters to carry out more attacks. So violence prevention is not really a convincing argument to do it.

Another argument is that convicting Trump in an impeachment proceeding would bar him from ever holding federal office again. This would certainly be a gift to Republicans, who now have to contemplate the possibility that given his rabid base of support, he could haunt them in the 2022 and 2024 elections. While Trump would be unlikely to win a general election again, he certainly would still be formidable in a GOP primary were he not barred from running. So they could have to wait until 2028 to have another crack at the White House as long as he is in the picture.

While barring him from office is a compelling argument for those of us who would like to see the Republican Party move on from Trump, it doesn’t grapple with the fact that even after the deadly mob attack we saw on Wednesday, there’s a good chance Trump would be the 2024 nominee if he ran. It’s the underlying demand for a Trump figure that really needs to be addressed, and if anything, the impeachment of the most popular Republican among Republican voters would likely only increase the populist rage against the establishment and the sense of betrayal of his supporters. Again, this should not prevent action that would otherwise be justified, but it also does not address the root problem of Trumpism and could actually make it worse.

That brings us to the other, more straightforward, and strongest argument in favor of impeachment. And that is that Trump should be punished for what he did, and we should make sure to send the signal to anybody who would consider acting in a similar manner that there would be severe consequences to doing so.

Given that this would apply whether or not impeachment is concluded before he leaves office, if Congress cannot move quickly enough to remove Trump, it would be better to wait and make sure it is done properly. Creating the precedent for a rapid-fire impeachment could have troubling implications for the future and would raise due process concerns. Again, that might be something you’d be willing to risk to save the country from weeks of his presidency. But if it’s a matter of days, it becomes more questionable.

So if Congress loses the chance for speed, which it likely already has, it would be better if they took their time and did a thorough inquiry of what happened. For instance, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has said members of Congress were desperately calling for the National Guard to be deployed, but it took hours for him to get the approval to send them. A more thorough investigation would look into the role Trump played in this.

But it would not be limited to the assault on the Capitol. An investigation could also look at Trump’s actions in the months leading up to the attacks to overturn the results of the election. For instance, the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House pressured Atlanta’s top federal prosecutor to resign because he wasn’t doing enough to probe Trump’s unproven election fraud claims.

We also have the audio of Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he tried to intimidate him into finding enough votes for him to win the state.

My guess is that a thorough investigation would probably reveal many other cases of improper and possibly illegal behavior by Trump.

There is a further benefit to waiting. With Trump out of office and thus with limited powers of retribution, people in the know may be more willing to come forward and to provide a full and honest accounting of what happened when they do. Furthermore, with Trump no longer able to deliver any sort of policy wins to them, Republican Senators may be more willing to vote based on the evidence rather than out of pure partisan considerations.

As I’m writing this, I see that House Democrats may already be considering the delayed approach. House Majority Whip James Clyburn said they might wait until after Biden’s first 100 days to deliver articles of impeachment to the Senate.

The bottom line is that if a quick strike is off the table, they may as well take their time and do it right.

On Friday, Time magazine made the utterly boring choice of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as its “Person [technically People] of the Year.” But as far as I’m concerned, the people of the year in 2020 were the children.

I know, it sounds cheesy, but hear me out.

The year 2020 was an absolutely devastating one for the United States, with a death toll that is now exceeding 9/11 on a daily basis. The year has also brought many heroes, including the front-line medical workers and the scientists responsible for the incredibly quick development of vaccines that should hopefully save hundreds of thousands of lives and get us back to normal by this time next year.

But no group in America has been forced to make more dramatic sacrifices to their lives relative to the actual health risk to themselves than our children. So far, there have been 92 coronavirus deaths 14 and under out of over 60 million people, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s a ratio of about 1.5 deaths out of a million.

Yet, in many parts of the country, children have been forced to give up so many of the things that brought them joy. They have been kept from grandparents; they have been prevented from seeing their friends; they have missed out on Little League and other team sports; they have been prevented from going into indoor playspaces and even sometimes blocked from going to outdoor playgrounds; they weren’t able to use public pools in the summer; they haven’t been able to go to birthday parties or have their own; they have either been prevented from going to school or have had to sit through classes wearing masks all day.

And that describes the more lucky of them, the ones living in economically and socially stable families. For those living in poverty or in dysfunctional families, school is their only outlet to be children and to have responsible supervision. Though there have been reports suggesting a huge spike in child abuse during the pandemic, the truth is, we may never know because, without teachers and other social workers who are able to monitor children outside of the home independently for signs of abuse, many such cases will be unreported.

There are two other aspects of the pandemic that I believe have been especially unfair to children.

One is that they have had no sense of agency. Even with all the lockdown rules in place, adults have had some leeway to decide how strict they are going to be in following COVID-19 protocols. Even heroic medical workers, at some point, decided to pick that profession. But children have had all sorts of decisions thrust upon them without any say in the process.

The other factor to consider is the extent to which time accelerates as we get older. Try to think back to how long the five-year period between kindergarten and fifth grade seemed at the time. Then, compare it to the 22-27-year-old stage of your life, or 37-42, or 51-56. It’s pretty clear that human perception of time goes more quickly the more years we have behind us. A child who is 4 probably has limited memories of what life was like before the pandemic hit, and even for older children, what seems like a bad year for adults probably feels like an eternity.

What we did to children this year fills me with a mix of sadness and anger. They were forced to give up pretty much everything they knew for a disease that they would likely not even notice even if they got it.