You don’t hear much about Covid-19 these days. Yes, there are still hypochondriac paranoiacs muttering about it in the pages of the New York Times and the Atlantic. And yes, people are still getting it, though at lesser numbers than in those pandemic-era days when we were conditioned to monitor case counts obsessively and to abide by overweening behavioral regulations.

It is not to demean or belittle those who suffered and died from the disease to be grateful that we have moved on from this national mode. But however far away that mode may seem now, recall that during the previous calendar year, governing authorities were still enforcing it. As recently as February 2022, Washington, D.C., was mandating a vaccine-passport system for restaurants and other businesses. Its indoor masking mandate expired only in March of that year, with schools at first notably left out.

The treatment of children, at schools and elsewhere, was a chief offense of the Covid regime. Two recent articles demonstrate that, though we have left that regime behind, its aftereffects linger. In USA Today, Nat Malkus, an education expert at the American Enterprise Institute, focused on the problem of chronic absenteeism of kids at school. Covid seriously exacerbated this perennial problem (which Malkus defines as the “percentage of students missing at least 10% of a school year”). In the more expected way, yes: Those with the disease did not show up at school, and chronic absenteeism peaked during the 2021–22 school year amid the Omicron wave. But the erratic nature of in-person education during Covid, when schools went virtual for varying lengths of time, had effects the disease itself cannot fully explain. He writes:

As the pandemic receded the following year, chronic absenteeism in 2022-23 remained 74% higher than the pre-pandemic baseline in the 28 states that have reported data.

That decrease is welcome, but it is far smaller than we would expect if coronavirus infections were the sole culprit.

What happened to make these Covid-driven changes endure after Covid itself waned? Simple: “During the pandemic, students, parents and educators became more accustomed to student absences, and they may stay accustomed to them long after the pandemic has subsided.” Staving off what is shaping up to be an injurious cultural change will require efforts from both schools and families. Otherwise, hopes of redressing the pandemic learning loss suffered by students amid their suboptimal schooling conditions will dwindle.

Another lasting cultural change that Covid-era behaviors may induce is in patterns of religious attendance. In the Wall Street Journal, deputy editorial features editor Matthew Hennessey recounts how the various restrictions on church attendance in New York affected habits of worship. He uses the example of his daughter, who has Down Syndrome. Pre-pandemic, the family had worked out a system in which she was comfortable with attending Mass in person. Now, however, after becoming accustomed to a virtual substitute, “she won’t go under any circumstances.” Hennessey argues that “the past few years have been a spiritual disaster for my family and many others”:

The habits of religious worship are delicate. Once broken, they aren’t easily patched back together. This is especially true for those who live at the margins of society, which is sadly true of the disabled.

Power-mad government officials and lukewarm church officials produced this outcome, and its aftereffects linger as well. As society has returned to normal, Hennessey writes, people have returned to church pews but not in the numbers they once did. It’s hard to make something seem necessary again when for so long there was a concession to the premise that it was not, or that other goods outranked it.

These stories attest to the lasting civic damage of Covid. Children, who were typically only mildly inconvenienced by the disease itself, became playthings of a bureaucratic hypochondria that interrupted their learning and deprived them of their social lives. They and others lost connection to the civic structures our national response to Covid seemed almost designed to target: the vast network of legible institutions and relations that were significant enough to be exposed to state notice and control. While they were enmeshed in restrictions, people who could make do without them (e.g., the wealthy) were fine. And people who existed apart from or even in defiance of them (criminals, looters, rioters) prospered. The essential civic core of the country frayed — with the notable exception of those who resisted government restrictions.

You don’t hear much about Covid these days. But you’ll be hearing about the consequences of those restrictions for a long time.