“I would lie awake so many nights mad about what was happening to us and distressed and angry at my friends,” she told me. In addition to dealing with symptoms of long Covid, she said, “my friends were gaslighting me. It really has changed me and my worldview a lot.”

New York-based historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela also experienced backlash. “Several acquaintances accused me of hating teachers and not caring about children’s health, a strange claim given I began my career as a public-school teacher [and] am still an educator,” she told me. “One friend stopped talking to me completely.” Like Schmitt, she received DMs from colleagues who were privately supportive but didn’t feel they could speak up “since the strange politics of the pandemic had made advocating for the importance of public education a reactionary position.”

University of California, Berkeley professor Mark Brilliant, a reopening advocate in Berkeley, spoke about having to reevaluate his “ideological priors” when he saw Democratically controlled states like California — where teachers unions are particularly powerful — failing to reopen schools. “Science, public education, public institutions, equity? Like if those aren’t things that mobilize people who profess to be progressive, I don’t know what are,” he told me by phone last spring. “It’s been just a source of tremendous pain, disenchantment, disillusionment that people didn’t just rise up and say, ‘No, this is unacceptable.’”