The mystery surrounding the disease and how it was transmitted only fueled anxieties. “The principal thing known about poliomyelitis is that it is one of the most baffling diseases studied by scientists, and that they really know very little about it,” the New York Times wrote.
New York City closed down, but the disease still spread throughout the East Coast, and eventually the entire nation. At least 27 states faced major outbreaks before the epidemic faded in November. Faced with the danger to school-age children, cities and towns hit hard by the disease kept schools closed when summer ended.
Even after schools reopened, some parents kept their kids at home. In New York City, for example, it’s estimated that upward of 200,000 children — roughly a quarter of the total — did not return until several weeks after the larger school system reopened. Similar conditions prevailed in other cities and towns, with even small outbreaks triggering school closures.
By the time the epidemic subsided, 6,000 children across the country had died and thousands more remained paralyzed. Most would make partial or full recoveries, though the disease returned in subsequent summers.
A century later, the economists Keith Meyers and Melissa Thomasson chose this first polio epidemic to study whether keeping kids out of school, even for a few weeks, had long-term consequences. This research, conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic materialized, was what they described as a “natural experiment” on the “effects that epidemiological induced panics and large-scale school closures have on the educational outcomes of school-age children.”
More specifically, they speculated that closures might have prompted some kids to drop out of school. Testing this hypothesis required running six different regressions that took population samples in different locales. Some of these places sustained significant outbreaks; others did not. Data on the severity of the outbreaks — specifically, polio deaths — became a proxy for delays in reopening schools.
What they found was striking. Even though schools delayed reopening for a few weeks or a month at most, the effects persisted across the lives of one group of children in particular: those who were between the ages of 14 and 17 when the epidemic hit. By contrast, children younger than 14 or older than 17 did not exhibit this pattern.
Why? At the time, the legal working age was 14. The authors speculated that when schools failed to reopen, many students went out and got a job — and never came back.
The study found that a 1% increase in the polio morbidity rate led to a 6% reduction in average educational attainment. Simply put, the bigger the polio problem in any given area — and the more disruptive the school closings — the worse the long-term effects for this particular age group. Cities and towns that escaped polio didn’t follow this pattern.