COVID-19 and Impact of School Closures on the Children of the United States; a Point of View with an Empirical Analysis

Abstract

School closures due to the global pandemic of the novel coronavirus have impacted at least 124,000 U.S. public and private schools and affected at least 55.1 million students (Education Week, 2020b). As the COVID-19 hotspots continue to emerge across the United States, this study aims to understand the impact of school closures during the stay at home order on the health behavior of the school-age children as it relates to their mobility, physical activity, access to school meal services and psychological distress caused by the prolonged social distancing. The first segment of the study discusses the several aspects of social distancing and its effects on physiological and psychological health of the children. The following segment of the study presents an empirical analysis with the latest COVID-19 tracking results highlighting the different states of the USA at different stages of the novel Coronavirus outbreak. The empirical analysis is further expanded based on the publicly available state level data on school closures, childhood obesity rate and key socio-economic factors, including access to the playgrounds in neighborhood, walk score, prevalence of poverty and latest filing of the unemployment claims during the pandemic to identify the states at greater vulnerability. The concluding section discusses the need to advance the research further with future recommendations as the full impact of the pandemic continues to unfold.