The new omicron variant is the most contagious variant of COVID-19 yet to emerge. Cases of omicron are doubling every 1.5 to 3 days, as the virus quickly spreads throughout the U.S. While the delta variant is still the dominant variant in this country, omicron is on track to replace it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported late today that the omicron variant is responsible for 73 percent of recent COVID-19 cases in the U.S. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines remain effective against omicron but are much less effective than with earlier variants. Evidence shows 2 doses of the mRNA vaccines are 30–40 percent effective against a symptomatic omicron infection. The 2‑dose regimen plus a booster is roughly 70 percent effective.

Fortunately, two new antivirals have been submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization. Antivirals are to viral infections what antibiotics are to bacterial infections. They effectively poison the pathogen and prevent it from replicating and surviving.

Merck submitted molnupiravir to the FDA to consider for emergency authorization on October 11, 2021—71 days ago. Randomized controlled trials show the drug prevents 30 percent of symptomatic cases from progressing to severe disease. No patient receiving molnupiravir died of COVID-19. The U.K. Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency approved its use in Britain on November 4. On November 30 an FDA advisory committee recommended its approval but the FDA has yet to act on the recommendation.

Pfizer submitted its antiviral drug Paxlovid to the FDA for emergency use authorization on November 16 after controlled trials found it to be 89 percent effective in preventing hospitalization. There were no deaths reported in any patient receiving Paxlovid.

Both drugs were so effective that trials were interrupted because it was unethical to deny the drug to the trials’ placebo arms.

The FDA has not yet scheduled a meeting of its advisory committee to discuss Paxlovid.

Days Since Merck Submitted EUA Request to FDA: 71

Days Since Advisory Panel Recommended EUA of Merck Antiviral: 20

Days Since Pfizer Submitted EUA Request to FDA: 34

U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Since October 11, 2021: 84, 156

U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Reported on December 19, 2021: 206

(Source: Worldometer)

Each day that the FDA holds American patients hostage, delaying a decision on allowing them to try these antiviral drugs, potentially 89 percent of COVID infections could be prevented from going to the hospital.

I will update these numbers regularly.

The U.S. is about to be hit by a huge wave of infections from the COVID-19 omicron variant. Though it’s unclear yet whether omicron is naturally less severe than, say, the delta variant, South African and British case data shows just how quickly it spreads, with significant vaccine evasion and widespread anecdotal reports of COVID-19 reinfections.

UK recorded daily cases, for example, have risen quickly to their highest level in the pandemic, despite not counting any reinfections as new cases. These numbers vastly understate true daily infections, because not all those infected test and therefore get processed as cases.

Four days ago, the British health minister said the government there believed new omicron infections were running at around 200,000 per day (equivalent to nearly a million infections per day for a population the size of the U.S.) And things are getting worse: omicron-specific infections are doubling in London every 1.5 days. One epidemiologist thinks England is just 5 days away from lab capacity for test results being completely maxed out, making such calculations impossible.

Already, there are pockets of rapidly rising COVID-19 cases in the U.S. that suggest omicron is taking off here alongside delta infections. Confirmed new COVID-19 cases across New England are surging. Cornell University saw its caseloads explode over the past week despite its population being 97 percent vaccinated. According to those on the ground the vast majority are mild cases, with fever and headache. This week the NFL, which mandates players get vaccinated (94.6 percent have done so), NHL (all but 4 players vaccinated), and the NBA (99 percent vaccinated) all reported large numbers of players testing positive, raising the possibility of cancelled matches. Again, most infections were asymptomatic and the rest had only mild symptoms. But these are very young populations. The speed of spread of this variant will be much more problematic once it reaches less vaccinated segments of the population or vulnerable, elderly groups.

With such a rapid transmission of the virus, even if this variant really is less severe, significant economic and public health problems will develop. As cases rise, Americans will engage in less face-to-face activity. And with more people isolating because of illness, positive test results, or encountering those who are infected, some businesses will voluntarily close, as they have in the UK. Major sports matches will get cancelled, schools will be disrupted, and shortages and delays will pile up again.

Although data suggests that cases in South Africa have for now peaked, with medics anecdotally reporting milder symptoms and shorter hospital stays among those affected, it is not clear yet how transferable or enduring those lessons will prove. South Africa has a younger population, is in summer, and recently had a very large delta wave that afflicted vulnerable populations. The growing consensus seems to be that omicron may, at best, only be moderately milder than previous variants. Hospitalizations always lag infections, much more so if the spread of the variant occurs in younger populations first. And some early data suggests that omicron increases the chance of someone double vaccinated and infected requiring hospitalization by 6 times.

Piece this all together and the sheer number of infections we could face here would likely lead to significantly more pressure on American hospitals, particularly when the virus reaches unvaccinated pockets of society. Even aside from the death and suffering this will produce, high case numbers could disrupt the operation of “essential” industries due to labor shortages as people isolate.

What are the implications for COVID-19 policy? Once infections start rising, there’s a risk governors will simply reach for the old playbooks. But the UK experience suggests that mask mandates are little more than a band aid, given the variant’s high transmissibility. Cornell’s experience, and that of the professional sports leagues, suggests the case for vaccine passports has never been weaker. Moreover, the case for vaccine mandates, already on shaky ground for moral and practical reasons, grows even shakier. While boosted vaccination remains the best personal defense against serious infection or death, omicron’s evident transmissibility among the vaccinated weakens the communitarian argument for compelling the vaccine hesitant.

‘Suppression’ in the form of spring 2020-style stay-at-home orders, nonessential business closures, and school closures are unlikely to be effective, even in theory. Given how easily this variant appears to spread, ‘flattening the curve’ today will just lead to a bounce back in infections after reopening, even more so than has happened in the past. Prolonged lockdowns with no end goal to avoid this would create untold social harm.

Public health experts think the current mRNA vaccine boosters work well to protect most people from severe omicron infection. That, plus a phenomenon called “original antigenic sin” or immune imprinting, make the development of an omicron-specific vaccine currently unnecessary and possibly unhelpful. It’s therefore not clear what holding back this wave via society-wide suppression measures would even achieve. With mounting evidence of COVID-19 animal reservoirs, it is absurd to reimpose policies that, for the past two years, assumed the virus would go away once nearly everyone was vaccinated. The virus is endemic. Policy must confront that reality.

So what can be done? At a personal and business level a lot of people have and will change their behavior to avoid infection or spreading the virus. In the run up to the holidays, individuals might start to prioritize what social gatherings they attend, lest an infection caught at one meeting means they can’t attend more important events later. Given healthcare pressures, people might avoid unnecessary trips to hospitals, or activities that might heighten that possibility, such as extreme sports or other risky activities.

In the policy space, there’s some obvious low-hanging fruit. Boosters reduce the omicron risk. Yet today just 42.2 percent of Americans over 50 have received three shots. Public health messaging should urge their take-up and reiterate the risks associated with non-vaccination, especially among the elderly and obese. Where possible, shots should be administered outdoors or in very well-ventilated spaces, to avoid vaccine sites becoming inadvertent hotbeds of infection.

There should also be more urgency in getting supplies of antivirals to the public. The FDA should immediately approve Pfizer’s Anti-COVID-19 pill Paxlovid and Merck’s molnupiravir and consider purchase agreements to ensure mass production.

Effective antivirals are difficult to develop. Analogous to antibiotics that kill bacteria, antivirals kill viruses. Merck’s pill, if taken early, snuffs out 30 percent of cases by causing lethal mutations in the replicating virus. It was submitted for FDA approval on October 11. The U.K approved its use November 4. Even after an advisory panel recommended its approval, FDA regulators have yet to decide. Paxlovid inhibits an enzyme the virus needs to replicate within the host cell. It is 89 percent effective—against omicron as well—in clinical trials; so effective that the FDA-overseen trial was interrupted because it became unethical to deny the drug to participants in the placebo arm. Pfizer asked for approval November 20. From the FDA so far: “crickets.” With it clearly established that vaccines don’t provide 100 percent protection and the omicron virus spreading staggeringly quickly, the FDA should move post haste to get these COVID killers out to the population.

By the time omicron sweeps widely through the population it might not make much difference, but the FDA should approve more rapid tests to lower their cost and broaden their availability, with better guidance about how to use them at home and in business settings. For those with very mild symptoms, at–home tests are a clear improvement on “seeing how you feel” or taking your own temperature for avoiding transmission to others. Those in client-facing in-person roles that encounter large numbers of people should be advised to use rapid tests regularly. Obviously, those who work or live among vulnerable people, especially caregivers in elder homes, should test frequently too.

Beyond that, until we are much more confident about this variant being less lethal or have antivirals widely available for vulnerable, elderly populations, it might be worth providing guidance that these groups consider shielding — i.e. socially distancing — for a short period. Given the high transmissibility of this variant, a sharp wave among the non-vulnerable population could quickly mitigate risks for these groups after the infected in less vulnerable populations have recovered.

This sort of “focused protection” is obviously very difficult to achieve in hospitals and made less sense in 2020 when vaccines were soon to be made available. But with the prospect of a sharp wave anyway and vaccines already available, protection targeted at those still vulnerable makes more sense today. The authors of the ‘focused protection’ plan were right that more could be done to protect nursing homes, in particular. Deliveries of N‑95 masks and rapid tests, as well as funds to facilitate live-in care or reduce the number of staff working at multiple homes, are still sensible ideas.

Finally, state governors should avoid using laws to ban measures that businesses might voluntarily adopt to mitigate risk or to reassure their customers. As more information comes in about this variant, entrepreneurs, companies, and hospitals will experiment with new ways to adjust to the new context. They can do so more effectively if politicians avoid meddling in their conduct.

In short, the policies and guidance above amounts to finding new ways to live with an adapted virus. Living with the virus means being smart, acting quickly to this altered threat, and taking sensible steps to mitigate risks that do not have costs that obviously exceed the benefits. Living with the virus does not mean pretending there’s no pandemic or that the omicron variant has not changed the situation. It requires rediscovering how to pursue happiness in a world full of ever-changing risks.

The main weapons against COVID-19 are the vaccines developed by Moderna and BioNTech after a decade of their research into mRNA technologies. That research was supported by more than $3 billion of private angel investment and venture capital.

Democrats and Republicans both support medical research funding, and Republicans tout the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed. But governments were not the key to mRNA development. Instead, we can thank the leaders and scientists at Moderna and BioNTech and the suppliers of private capital to them, as I discuss here and here.

The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley discusses mRNA, Moderna, and BioNtech in a new piece. She focuses on the “vast promise of mRNA technology” beyond COVID-19. Numerous companies are developing mRNA vaccines for influenza, which are expected to be more effective than current vaccines. And Finley reports, “Moderna is also advancing vaccines for other infectious diseases, including Zika, HIV, Epstein-Barr, CMV, human metapneumovirus, parainfluenza virus and respiratory synclinal virus.”

There are many applications of mRNA technologies beyond infectious diseases. Finley says these may include regenerating heart tissue for patients with heart failure, addressing aging-related diseases, and stimulating the production of cartilage to ease arthritis. And she notes, “Autoimmune diseases … are another promising area of research. BioNTech this year published a study that showed an mRNA vaccine has potential to treat multiple sclerosis without suppressing the immune system like existing therapies do.” And there is cancer, which is BioNTech’s main focus. The company “has 21 mRNA products in its clinical pipeline that use 11 different approaches to killing cancer cells.”

These revolutionary developments are not being led by governments, but by biotech and pharmaceutical companies. The government can help by minimizing taxes and regulatory burdens. Capital gains taxes are crucial, as I discuss here. If investors in biotech are not allowed to keep a substantial return on their rare big wins, they will move their money to safer and lower-tax investments.

The largest factor producing rising living standards over the long run is technological progress and innovation. Startups and young growth companies funded by private capital make a huge contribution to innovation, which policymakers should keep in mind when considering all changes to tax and regulatory policies.

We can see with mRNA that a small number of determined investors, scientists, and entrepreneurs can make a major advance that may generate massive benefits to society years down the road. That is why it would be very short-sighted to raise taxes on capital gains. The same is true of raising taxes on business capital investment, which embodies much of our innovation and technological progress.

As policymakers consider the various tax increases in the Democratic reconciliation bill, they should know that the large and long-term benefits of mRNA-type advances are generally not captured in economic models used to judge tax-policy effects. Let’s not undermine medical advances that will benefit all of us—let’s keep taxes low and the breakthroughs coming.

Political polarization hinders progress against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Political polarization may explain why, after former President Trump called the off-label use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine a “game-changer” in the battle against COVID-19 (randomized controlled trials found that is not the case), public health officials and the mainstream press appear uninterested in the off-label use of any other drugs as therapeutics against a COVID infection.

For example, impressive data from randomized controlled trials show the off-label use of the off-patent (therefore cheap) antidepressant fluvoxamine (brand name “Luvox’) appears highly effective in preventing COVID infections from progressing to hospitalization or death. Yet it has garnered little attention from public health officials or the press

A tweet by Andy Swan went viral yesterday informing people that the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines “anti-vaxxer” as:

: a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination especially : a parent who opposes having his or her child vaccinated

It was later pointed out by Rob Gavagan on the same Twitter thread that Merriam-Webster has been using this definition since 2018. Therefore, the definition was not the result of COVID politicization. Nevertheless, it is clearly inaccurate and can only pour more fuel on the political fire.

It is wrong to imply that anyone opposed to the state forcibly vaccinating individuals, or anyone disagreeing with any of the official public health recommendations regarding vaccination is an “anti-vaxxer.”

What about the members of the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine Advisory Committee who were not in favor of vaccine boosters for everyone over 18 in the general population? Were they “anti-vaxxers?” Or what about the many renowned experts—many of whom advise federal and state public health officials—who support vaccination but believe people with infection-acquired (“natural”) immunity may not need boosters or may need only one dose of the two-dose vaccine regimen? Do they meet Merriam-Webster’s definition of “anti-vaxxers?”

The New York Times reported there was a debate among members of the FDA’s Vaccine Advisory Committee over recommending vaccinating children aged 5–11 against COVID:

During a long debate before the vote, some committee members questioned whether every child in the age group really needed the vaccine or whether it should be limited to those at high risk of severe Covid-19 — an easily identifiable group, with underlying conditions such as obesity or other risk factors.

Dr. James E.K. Hildreth, the president and chief executive of Meharry Medical College, said that since many children between 5 and 11 may already have some immunity after contracting the virus, the need to vaccinate broadly in the age group might be less urgent.

“It just seems to me that in some ways we’re vaccinating children to protect the adults, and it should be the other way around,” he said. “I do believe that children at highest risk do need to be vaccinated. But vaccinating all of the children to achieve that just seems a bit much for me.”

And I recently wrote that vaccinations are the most effective harm reduction tool in the COVID pandemic toolbox. I have also written why I believe it is both morally and practically wrong for the state to mandate vaccinations. I am not an “anti-vaxxer.”

One can be pro-vaccine yet against mandatory vaccination. And one can be pro-vaccine and hold more nuanced views than the regulators do regarding who should get vaccinated.

Science is a process, not a religion. It requires constantly challenging long-held beliefs and assumptions. Injecting politics and dogmatism threatens scientific integrity. Merriam-Webster can undo an unintentional disservice to the scientific community by correcting its definition of “anti-vaxxer.” 

A Food and Drug Administration Advisory Panel just approved, narrowly, the Merck antiviral drug Molnupiravir. This is just step one. We now have to wait for the FDA to decide on emergency use authorization.The U.K. approved Molnupiravir on November 4.

Merck applied to the FDA for approval on October 11. Vaccines are the best long-term defense against COVID-19, but antivirals are the best first-line defense, especially when new variants can develop that escape the immunity provided by vaccines. Rather than wait weeks for the vaccine to take effect, antivirals—like antibiotics—work immediately to kill the pathogen.

The FDA’s bureaucratic foot-dragging must stop, especially with politicians considering reinstating lockdowns and bans on elective procedures.

Pfizer submitted its antiviral, Paxlovid, to the FDA on November 20. Let’s hope the FDA is quicker on Paxlovid—especially since the clinical trials were so impressive that, for ethical reasons, Pfizer interrupted the trial and immediately sought emergency use authorization.

The “Path out of the Pandemic” will be paved with employer mandates, President Biden announced in September. But this week, a key part of the Biden plan hit a major speed bump in federal court. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed implementation of the administration’s vax-or-test mandate for private-sector companies with 100 or more employees, citing “grave statutory and constitutional issues” with the edict.

As my colleagues have explained, there’s ample reason to question the legal basis for the president’s latest power grab. I want to focus on a different question here: is the juice worth the squeeze? “Vaccination requirements should not be another issue that divides us,” Biden implored in a recent speech. But it’s been obvious from the start that his private-sector mandate would further fan the flames of our already rage-addled COVID politics. The question is whether it will accomplish much of anything else.

Color me skeptical: even if it survives its legal challenges, the scheme looks like something designed by a mad social scientist hellbent on further politicizing public health: loose enough to fail at achieving its aims, but just coercive enough to infuriate broad swathes of the public.

For years, the theory was that vaccine hesitancy was mainly a problem of information: give people the good news and they’ll queue up for the jab. But as Sabrina Tavernise explains in the New York Times, recent research suggests it’s more complicated. When epidemiologists joined with social psychologists to study the issue, “what they discovered was a clear set of psychological traits offering a new lens through which to understand skepticism.” Among those traits is one dubbed reactance, a deep-seated aversion to loss of threatened freedom. “According to this model,” the APA Dictionary explains, “when people feel coerced into a certain behavior, they will react against the coercion, often by demonstrating an increased preference for the behavior that is restrained, and may perform the behavior opposite to that desired.” It’s a healthy impulse in general—though emphatically not in this particular case.

Like it or not, though, mandates can backfire because people don’t want to be told what to do, particularly by someone they hate—and a good many in the target group hate the president more than they hate their boss. Add to that the fact that what the press has been calling a “vaccine mandate” is actually a “test or vax mandate.” Under the proposed emergency temporary standard, workers determined to avoid the needle will have an out that allows them to keep their jobs. For many high-reactance, Biden-hating vaccine skeptics, that’s going to look like the most attractive option.

True, opting out won’t be free: the ETS requires workers who forgo vaccination to mask up in the workplace for as long as the rule’s in effect. Moreover, the rule allows management to make vax-resistant employees pay for the cost of weekly testing. If rapid tests were cheap and ubiquitous, as they are in much of Europe, that wouldn’t be much of a disincentive. As it stands, though, tests currently run anywhere from $7 to $15 a week, if you can get them. The FDA has so thoroughly botched rapid-test development that this may be the rare case where bureaucratic incompetence at one end of the administrative state accidentally improves performance of a separate, ill-considered regulatory scheme.

If the mandate manages to survive legal challenge and if the costs of testing and masking prove high enough, then it will have some positive effects in terms of vaccine uptake. A Goldman Sachs analysis published in September estimates that all of the Biden mandates—including those for health care workers and federal contractors, where there’s no testing opt-out—might raise vaccine uptake by as much as 3.6 percent.

At this point, however, over 80 percent of American adults have had at least one COVID shot, the Delta wave has crested, and extraordinarily effective therapeutics, cutting the risk of serious illness by 89 percent, are coming online. Are the marginal public health benefits from the employer mandate enough to make it worth tolerating a massive new presidential power grab guaranteed to make our increasingly toxic politics still crazier?

The extent to which tribal signaling has infected the COVID debate is enough to make even a hardened cynic despair. Red state vaccine hesitancy needlessly and tragically exacerbated the pandemic’s toll through 2021; meanwhile, much of Blue America seems bent on embracing a permanent state of emergency: the Rest of Your Life to Slow the Spread. The technological miracle of the vaccines has finally reduced COVID to “just the flu,” making a return to normalcy possible. Yet as Richard Hanania sums it up, “we’re split between those who reject the solution and those who accept it but want to ruin life forever anyway.”

I’ve been thinking lately about a smartass comment I saw on Twitter, to the effect that we should have called one vaccine the Trump jab and the other one the Biden shot, and thereby made our moronic tribalism work for us for a change. Just picture the ad campaigns:

“Don’t be a soyboy: level up with #MAGAVax—it’s got what yer T‑cells crave!”

and

“Get the Bidenjab: builds your #Resistance—and it’s gluten-free!”

I can’t help thinking that would have been a smarter policy than what the allegedly serious people came up with.

When COVID-19 struck the United States in March 2020, private schools appeared to be in very precarious positions. Largely reliant on voluntarily paying families, a combination of forced online – and hence degraded – instruction, and an economic downturn likely to hit families’ wallets hard, appeared to be an existential threat to many schools. As Cato’s COVID-19 private school closure tracker, and a quick survey we conducted at the start of the 2020–21 school year indicated, American private schooling did, indeed, suffer.

After the first few months, however, things started looking up. As the 2020–21 school year progressed, and private schools were much more likely to open for in-person instruction than public, news reports of families moving their children out of public and into private institutions started percolating up. We also saw schools, and larger organizations such as Roman Catholic dioceses, reporting influxes of students. There were, however, no national data available to confirm whether these were representative of a larger trend.

Like last year, Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom has conducted a survey to gauge trends in private school enrollment. We randomly selected a nationally representative sample of private schools and asked them if their enrollments had increased, decreased, or not changed between the end of the 2020–21 school year and the start of 2021–22, and by how many students. We also asked if they had seen their enrollments increase, decrease, or stay the same over the course of the 2020–21 school year, to assess if anecdotal reports of movements to private schools over the previous school year were part of a trend.

Enrollment Findings

Our results suggest that anecdotes of enrollment gains during the last school year were indicative of a larger trend, and that private schools gained students between the end of the 2020–21 academic year and the start of 2021–22.

Looking at enrollment over the course of the 2020–21 school year, 35 percent of the 68 schools that provided data reported increases, 38 percent stood pat, and 27 percent recorded losses. That suggests that enrollment gainers outnumbered losers over the course of the year, though our survey has a high +/- 12 point margin of error. We did not ask schools for specific enrollment change numbers from the beginning to the end of the 2020–21 school year.

To assess schools’ enrollment changes between the previous school year and the new one – basically, change over the summer – we asked for changes both including pre‑K and excluding pre‑K students. Our primary interest is K‑12 enrollment, but the financial health of a school with pre‑K is, of course, impacted by pre‑K enrollment.

Looking at schools with pre‑K students (57 institutions) and their enrollments including pre‑K, 53 percent saw increases, 32 percent no change, and 16 percent decreases. Because the sample is smaller than the all-school sample, the margin of error is +/- 13 percentage points. For all schools – 68 institutions – and excluding pre‑K enrollments, 47 percent reported increases, 27 percent no change, and 27 percent losses.

In terms of the number of students gained, when examining schools with pre‑K and including pre‑K students, the mean school that provided data (54 schools) saw an increase of about 13 students between the end of 2020–21 and the start of 2021–22. The range was from a loss of 50 to a gain of 99.

For schools with and without pre‑K, and not including pre‑K for schools with it, the mean change was a gain of 7 students, ranging from a loss of 30 students to a gain of 90. Sixty-six schools provided that data.

To put these numbers in some perspective, in the fall of 2017 – the most recent year with national data – the average private school, including pre‑K students in schools that also had at least one grade kindergarten or above, enrolled 176 students. A gain of 13 students would be a 7 percent enrollment increase, and 7 students a 4 percent increase.

Pandemic Closures Estimate

In addition to our enrollment findings, we were able to estimate possible permanent closures at least partially connected to the effects of the pandemic. This has a much lower margin of error, +/- 3 percent.

Of 800 randomly selected schools, we were able to obtain at least some type of contact information – website, email address, telephone number, or ground mail address – for 764 institutions. Of those, 37 declined the survey, and we sent surveys to 585 schools electronically and 144 by ground mail. Six ground mail surveys bounced back for which we were unable to find additional contact information. Through our searches for contact information, we discovered 26 closed schools, and we failed to contact 10 schools which we subsequently discovered could possibly have been reached. One of those ten had declared that it would close but subsequently announced it would remain open. Finally, one school informed us it had closed via its survey response. That resulted in 791 schools for which we had some information, and put total closures, based on federal data collection in fall 2017, at 27 confirmed, plus 6 possible based on ground mail bounce-backs.

How many closures could reasonably be attributed to the pandemic? What follows are low, high, and middle estimates.

We were able to determine the specific closure year for 16 schools, and only 5 occurred in 2020 and 2021. Of those five, we were able to confirm that COVID played a role in the closure decision of one. For the remaining four, one was confirmed as not COVID-related and three were indeterminate. The low-end estimate of closures, based on closures confirmed as connected to the pandemic, is just one, or 0.13 percent of our sample of 791 schools with contact information or confirmed closure statuses. Nationally, that would translate to 41 schools, which falls well below the count of 144 confirmed closures on our COVID-19 closure tracker.

For the high-end estimate, we have 33 confirmed or possible closures, out of which 12 were confirmed as happening outside of the pandemic year or as not connected to COVID-19. The remaining 21 represent 2.65 percent of our sample, extrapolating to 862 schools nationwide.

For the middle estimate, we include schools that could have closed due to COVID-19, but adjust the two big clusters – 9 Google-reported closed and 6 mail bounce-backs without other contact information – to the proportion of schools we could confirm closed due to COVID and for which we know closure years. One out of 16 schools for which we had closure years was confirmed closed due to the pandemic, or 6.25 percent. Applying that to nine Google closure reports and six bounce backs yields 0.94 schools, or essentially 1 school. Adding that to one confirmed COVID closure, one email reported closure, one telephone reported closure, and three possible COVID closures in 2020, yields seven schools. That translates into a COVID closure rate of 0.88, or 287 schools. Based on our tracker of confirmed closures, this seems like the most reasonable estimate.

Methodology

We selected 800 schools from the federal government’s Private School Universe Survey, which contains 22,838 schools that had at least one grade in the K‑12 range. The Private School Universe survey, importantly, does not have data for about 10,000 private schools which did not complete their surveys. The federal government pegs the full private school population at 32,461. We found contact information or confirmed closure status for 791 schools. We sent surveys to schools with useable contact information, and which did not decline our survey if we contacted them by telephone asking for an address. Schools that received the survey electronically also received several reminders to reply. The survey was conducted between September 7, 2021 and October 15, 2021, and included a small incentive to respond: a free Cato Pocket Constitution. Schools for which we only had physical addresses received a hard copy survey with a pre-stamped return envelope and no reminders to reply. Those completers also would receive a Pocket Constitution.

Shortcomings

The biggest concern with our results is the small response of 69 total schools that provided full or partial enrollment information. That creates a large +/- 12 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level. It is somewhat surprising based on our response last year, in which we received 62 useable responses. That is only a 7 school increase despite doubling our initial sample: from 400 to 800 schools. Our response rate was only 8.5 percent, versus 16 percent last year. We also conducted our survey over a longer period of time this year, employed an easier-to-use electronic format, and offered a small gift that we did not have last year.

Based on the breakdown of schools by type, our sample appears only roughly proportionate to the overall population of private schools. Christian, non-denominational schools constituted 13.2 percent of our respondents, versus 14.0 percent of all private schools in 2017–18. Catholic schools were 11.8 percent of our sample but 21.7 percent of private schools in 2017–18. Non-religious schools constituted 22 percent of respondents, versus 33.6 percent of all private schools.

One possible explanation for our decreased response rate is that last year private schools were more eager to tell their story as they faced potentially daunting enrollment losses, and hoped to be incorporated in federal COVID-19 relief proposals. Our questionnaire was also a bit longer this year, with the added question about enrollment changes over the course of the previous year.

In addition to our small response, there may be fundamental differences between schools that received our survey electronically and by ground mail. From 585 surveys sent electronically we received 54 responses (though one with no data) for a 9 percent response rate. Of the 144 schools sent via traditional mail, 18 responded, for a 13 percent response rate. We also received 10 bounced back mail surveys.

There are also limits to the federal database from which we drew our sample, which while large, only contains data for schools that responded to the federal government’s survey. The remaining roughly one-third of schools may differ in fundamental ways from those that answered. Also, the last year with data is 2017, so any schools that opened since then would not be included.

New Private School “Health” Tracker

The federal government, given its established data collection, is best positioned to report comprehensive information on private schools. That said, Washington does not update its data in a timely fashion; 2017 was four years ago.

To help fill the gaps between comprehensive surveys, and to keep a permanent finger on the pulse of private K‑12 schooling nationally, today Cato CEF launched a new Private Schooling Status Tracker. The new tracker is an adaptation of our COVID-19 Permanent Private School Closures tracker, which, our evidence suggests, has outlived its usefulness, not having registered a new COVID-connected closure since July.

The new tracker displays dashboards for announced private school closures as well as openings for roughly the current academic year, starting with any announcements on or after August 1, 2021, and ending July 31, 2022. We will restart the dashboard at the beginning of each school year, but the page contains links to full Google docs, open to the public, of all closures and openings we have recorded since the start of our tracking in March 2020. The new tracker also displays the basic findings of our enrollment survey for the current school year.

Like our survey, our tracker is not comprehensive: Opening and closing numbers are overwhelmingly derived from media reports, and not only might not every closure be reported by the media, we might not see every report. We welcome any reports of school openings or closings from the public, which can be sent to Center for Educational Freedom Director Neal McCluskey.