Anya Kamenetz - The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Childrens Lives, and Where We Go Now

In early March 2020, Dr. Dara Kass sat down with her three children at home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and told them they were going to stay with her parents in New Jersey for a while. Think of it like summer camp, she said.

Am I going to die? seven-year-old Sammy asked.

A slender goofball who likes to sneak into his dads study to use his VR headset, Sammy had a liver transplant when he was two years old to reverse the progress of a rare genetic disorder. Dara was the donor. He still has a compromised immune system, still takes meds daily. Its not so unusual for him to ask whether something could kill him. Sammy talks about his mortalitynot all the time, but he does understand that his life is, in some way, precious, his mother says.

Dara had started to see her emergency room fill up with patients with cough, fever, and shortness of breath. Shed also seen the preliminary data from China, showing how easily the novel coronavirus spread within households.

Dark-haired, short, and straight to the point, Dara chose other peoples worst-case scenarios to be her everyday routine. She doesnt find it helpful to dwell on feelings. Shes a problem solver. She has the knowledge and research skills to fuel endless cycles of anxiety and planning, so she tries to avoid spiraling. My rabbit holes are deep, she says. But theyre not frequent, because I go places people dont even know.

But with a looming global pandemic, she had no choice. I started figuring outI started playing a game in my mind. How do you quarantine your family from you if youre positive or even exposed? And I started thinking about the floors of my house and the rooms and the bathroomsand most specifically I want to protect my youngest.

Dara decided the safest course of action was to quarantine her children with her parents in New Jersey for a few weeks while she continued to work at the hospital. I put them all together in the same house and said, OK, figure it out and Im going to worry about work.

She dropped off Sammy, ten-year-old Charlie, and twelve-year-old Hannah on Friday, March 13, and hugged them tight. Hannah put on a brave face, but she was worried. Dara couldnt say when shed see them again.

Dara worked twenty-four hours at an increasingly hectic hospital over the weekend. Monday morning she woke up feeling like shed been stabbed in the back. Her coffee tasted like hot water.

Across the country in San Francisco, eleven-year-old Jonah and his mother, Maya, walked out of a parent-teacher conference on March 12 that had actually gone well. After two years of phone calls, meetings, lobbying, paperwork, fights, and frustration, he was getting support for his dyslexia in small groups at school. His English scores were up two hundred points in the past few months. A behavioral therapist was coming to the house almost every day to help reinforce desired behaviors like sitting at dinner and taking conversational turns. His team was discussing Jonah graduating from his behavioral therapy. A handsome boy with a round face and a mop of brown curls, Jonah spoke up for himself in the meeting and was proud of his progress. Things were getting better at home too. Jonahs moods were steadier. He was less likely to explode at Mayas fianc, Robert, or at Roberts teenage son, Rust.

Robert works in health education. Lately he had been tasked with designing teaching materials about this novel virus. Basically, I spent a good part of a week with my colleagues making slide decks for students about washing your hands, staying away from people, social distancing.

Maya got an alert on her phone as she walked out of the parent-teacher conference: San Francisco public schools announced a three-week closure. It was an oh shit moment.

Im scared, Jonah told his mother at bedtime that night, in his upstairs room with a view that peeks at the Bay. He was afraid his progress would disappear without the support he was used to. That without the routine of school, recess, and friends, he would start acting, in his words, crazy.

Two days later in rural Oklahoma, on Saturday, March 14, Jeannie teared up in line at the Aldis grocery. The guy in front of her looked like he was hoarding. We call them corn-fed here, like a big farmer guy. He had a cartful of chicken and potatoes. And I thought, I really hope youre buying that for your elderly grandparents or something because you dont need to be buying all that out from under everybody else. Her cart was full, too, but then again she had five kids at home.

Beneath her resentment, Jeannie remembers a spooky, sinking feeling. I just felt like, this was not the world Im supposed to be in. Like, never in my life would I everve thought that this would be my life.

In the Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, DC, a baby boy named Patrick was cranky without his usual routine at daycare and showing physical discomfort. He was born with a genetic disorder called Noonan syndrome, which can cause heart defects, other physical abnormalities, and developmental delays. His physical and speech therapy sessions were all canceled. His older brother, Pete Jr., had cabin fever, running around the house pretending to be Batman.