On five-year anniversary of COVID shutdowns, schools and hospitals reflect on ever-present effects
Five years ago this week, the United States locked down to slow the spread of COVID-19. What was initially thought to be a short few weeks before children returned to school and businesses opened turned out to last for years and continues to reverberate today.
In Spokane, hospitals were overwhelmed while teachers struggled to engage their students in remote learning. Though it’s been a half-decade since shutdowns affected each aspect of public life, the isolation lingers.
‘One day at a time’ in classroom uncertainty
Wind and rain whipped the ponderosas outside Deanna Wilcox’s special education classroom at Balboa Elementary. The lights dim, she sat in a circle with her six first- and second-graders as Dr. Seuss songs played softly, kids swaying to the music as they decompressed from the day.
About four and a half years earlier, the same activity could not have looked more different – Wilcox wearing a surgical gown, face shield, two masks, gloves and her kids relegated to their own rectangles taped to the floor and spaced exactly 6 feet apart.
“It was scary. We felt like we had to wear all of that stuff to be safe,” Wilcox said. “It was just so wild, I think we were all just like, ‘One day at a time, protect ourselves the best we can.’ ”
Special education students returned to the classroom much sooner than their peers, who instead learned online.
“Nobody really knew what we were doing,” said Meredith Kushnerchuk, an interventionist teacher at Yasuhara Middle School who taught at Grant Elementary during online schooling.
Now, the gloves are off, desks shoved closer together, and Wilcox breathes easy knowing the fear of the pandemic and uncertainty of online school are behind her in many ways.
In other ways, the lingering effect of temporary school closures on her pupils and others in Spokane Public Schools is still apparent.
“Developmentally, the time they missed was kind of a critical time,” Kushnerchuk said.
Teachers see the quantifiable academic effects like rates of chronic absenteeism ballooning and statewide test scores still below pre-pandemic levels. Kushnerchuk and fellow Yasuhara interventionist Anne Deitch note an approximate year-and-a-half lag behind standards because of a half-year of virtual schooling.
Kids they teach now were in early elementary school when their schools closed, and some lack basic foundational skills: telling time, core math functions, grammar or the structure of a sentence, for example.
“Some of those key concepts in math and ELA are definitely real gaps that they’ll carry through to high school,” said Deitch, a teacher of more than 24 years. “So I do have some concerns with them, long term, with some of those kiddos.”
There’s also the palpable delay in social skills many kids have, each teacher noted. Wilcox’s students with special needs need extra instruction on personal space or sharing, even while tossing the ball around during recess.
“Your routine was staying at home and being around the same people, and maybe not even other kids,” Wilcox said.
The Yasuhara teachers attribute an increase in anxious behaviors in their middle-schoolers to pandemic-induced isolation and the rise in cell phone use in kids. Emerging from online learning, kids would still wear face masks and pull up their hoods to obscure their faces as much as possible. They’d cower in class, reluctant to raise their hands or talk to their seat partner.
“We see the need for them to get socializing, and it’s amazing how many of the kids still struggle to communicate and work as a team on a problem; it’s an area of need in general, and that could be a result of COVID,” Kushnerchuk said.
Teachers also changed in the pandemic-era disruptions. Deitch visited several of her students at their homes while school was virtual. It was enlightening to see into their realities, she said, sometimes finding her students in hoarder situations or unclean homes with animal excrement littering their floors. Now, she’s more inclined to let a kid take a nap in class knowing what they may be going through at home.
“I think that made me probably more empathetic to kids, and a lot more understanding of what their struggles really look like,” she reflected.
Each teacher said their pre- and post-pandemic experiences were in stark contrast. Kids’ engagement, academic performance, reliance on cell phones and an increasingly divisive political climate that seeps into their school all brewed a “perfect storm” that makes teaching not what it was five years ago.
“All of those little dominoes fell; COVID was what pushed those dominoes over. And now worse, we haven’t picked up all of our dominoes yet,” Kushnerchuk said. “And they may never be picked up.”
Hospitals
Nurse Kim Davisson treated the first COVID-19 patient at MultiCare Deaconess Hospital’s ICU.
With little idea of the risk she faced caring for a coronavirus patient, Davisson remained in the room wearing PPE for more than eight hours of her 12-hour shift, limiting exposure to other hospital workers.
“It was quite scary,” Davisson said. “There was no going in and out of that room. She was so sick on the ventilator I couldn’t leave.”
MultiCare ICU medical director Ben Arthurs remembers those first weeks as some of the most fearful of his life.
“There was so much unknown. The first couple waves of COVID proved to be cruel and unpredictable,” he said. “We got home at night and scrubbed our hands, and we were terrified of transmitting the virus to our kids at home. I’ve never had that experience before or since those early parts of the pandemic.”
For Arthurs, that sense of heightened fear remained at least through the virus’ delta wave more than a year later. Davisson said she does not know if the ICU has “ever gone back to the way it was before the pandemic.”
At Sacred Heart Hospital, special pathogens manager Christa Arguinchona was going through much of the same as her specialty was transformed into an overflow ICU.
“It was exhausting and unrelenting for a long period of time. And I’ve seen a lot of really sad and traumatic events in my career. But I think the thing about COVID was that it was just like that every day,” Arguinchona said.
While the hospitals were overwhelmed with patients, the Spokane Regional Health District was tasked with keeping the public updated with ever-changing guidance.
At the outset of the pandemic, SRHD epidemiologist Mark Springer believed the crisis would resemble a measles outbreak. But they soon realized the impact would be much more significant.
“We were gaming through scenarios, and they were all way too optimistic,” he said.
Many health care workers working at the height of the pandemic have left the profession – causing a nationwide nursing shortage.
“Nurses are leaving the bedside at a rapid rate,” Davisson said. “It wasn’t the hours that people put in taking care of patients. The mental toll came from so many of your patients not being there when you came into your next shift.
“It took such a strong mentality to come to work every day and wonder if your patient from 12 hours ago had died.”
Arthurs said health care workers are notably younger and earlier in their career than before the pandemic.
Patients have also changed. Many are much more health-conscious. But another subset is distrustful of the medical system in a way they never were before, he said.
“For much of those earlier days, we were taking our best guess. But later as we had better clinical evidence, it was really hard to rein in some of those early ideas that developed traction,” he said. “Even today, many conversations remain difficult because people have such firm beliefs they stand by.”
For other health care workers, the pandemic highlighted the reason they got into medicine in the first place.
“I work with amazing people every day. People go into health care because they’re passionate about helping people,” Arguinchona said. “I already knew that health care workers were resilient, but I think that commitment to patients and providing the best care that they can was what shown through during those times.”