Researchers at Harvard and elsewhere had the bright idea of cross-checking insurance claims for COVID made by a given household with the birthdays of the members of that household, wondering if there might be a correlation. Wouldn’t you know it, they found that claims were nearly a third more likely in high-risk communities within two weeks after a family member’s birthday — with a particularly strong correlation within two weeks after a child’s birthday.

The evidence suggests, in other words, that a lot of Americans were making exceptions to pandemic precautions to give their little ones a fun birthday during an otherwise miserable year. With predictable results.

What’s really interesting is that it wasn’t just red-staters who were doing it, though. The same Democrats prone to finger-wagging about masks and distancing were, it appears, bending the rules when it came to their kids’ birthdays just as much as Republicans were.

Birthday parties, of course, often involve groups huddling in close quarters, perhaps to watch a child blow out candles on a cake…

So much behavior around the pandemic — including mask use and the uptake of vaccines — appears to differ by people’s political party. But the study found that birthdays led to increased Covid infections by similar levels in Republican and Democratic areas of the country. This suggests that although Democratic-leaning households may have been more likely to wear a mask while walking the dog, they may have differed less than Republicans in their comfort having a trusted friend over to visit.

“There was definitely this element of your home is a safe place and therefore when you have your friends and family over in your home, it just doesn’t feel risky,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, who described the paper as “creative” for finding an unusual way of capturing disease transmission that is otherwise hard to measure.

Another risk factor for household gatherings, I’d expect, is time. In a retail space, where you’re shopping or eating, you might be there for less than a hour. Whereas a dinner party or birthday party held at home could run for several hours in the same room, with frequent talking and laughing among the guests, giving one infected attendee a better chance of infecting everyone else.

I wonder how many left-leaning parents who supported school closings out of an abundance of caution invited their kids’ classmates over last year for birthdays. Although, actually, that might not have been extremely risky if it were just the kids since children seem to be less infectious than adults. It was the parents tagging along with their kids to the parties who were the chief vectors of transmission, I’m guessing.

The birthday data is a point in favor of believing lockdowns weren’t necessary (or weren’t as necessary). But there’s also new data suggesting they weren’t as psychologically damaging to Americans as we all feared they’d be at the start of the pandemic. They were an economic catastrophe but the country’s mental health seems to have held up better than expected:

But as spring turned to summer, something remarkable happened: Average levels of depression, anxiety, and distress began to fall. Some data sets even suggested that overall psychological distress returned to near-pre-pandemic levels by early summer 2020. We share what we learned in a paper that is forthcoming in Perspective on Psychological Science.

We kept digging into the data to account for any anomalies. For example, some of the data sets came disproportionately from wealthy countries, so we expanded our geographic lens. We also considered that even if the pandemic didn’t produce intense, long-term distress, it might have undercut people’s overall life satisfaction. So, members from our team examined the largest data set available on that topic, from the Gallup World Poll. This survey asks people to evaluate their life on a 10-point scale, with 10 being the best possible life and zero being the worst. Representative samples of people from most of the world’s countries answer this question every year, allowing us to compare results from 2020 with preceding years. Looking at the world as a whole, we saw no trace of a decline in life satisfaction: People in 2020 rated their lives at 5.75 on average, identical to the average in previous years…

We were surprised by how well many people weathered the pandemic’s psychological challenges. In order to make sense of these patterns, we looked back to a classic psychology finding: People are more resilient than they themselves realize. We imagine that negative life events—losing a job or a romantic partner—will be devastating for months or years. When people actually experience these losses, however, their misery tends to fade far faster than they imagined it would.

The authors chalk that up to a “psychological immune system” in which the mind is “infected” by despair following a shocking event but then quickly begins to form coping mechanisms to recover. Another possibility is that the despair caused by widespread illness, job loss, and isolation was offset to some degree by the unexpected benefits of social distancing, like families spending more time together and becoming closer. Whatever the explanation, it’s a weird but true fact that suicides actually dropped during the pandemic from 2019. What the long-term psychological fallout might be due to schools and businesses closing is anyone’s guess, but the expected collapse in life satisfaction across the population just didn’t happen. (No doubt thanks in part to Uncle Sam tossing buckets of cash at people who were laid off.)

We shouldn’t draw firm conclusions, though, since the experiment’s not over yet. The teachers unions are already making noise about the Delta variant and what it might mean for another round of school closures this fall, especially if younger kids can’t or won’t get vaccinated by the time schools reopen in September. Read Jim Geraghty for a preview of Parents vs. Unions, The Rematch.