COVID-19 Pandemic - Never forget that “The pandemic did such-and-such” is always a euphemism for “The lockdowns did such-and-such.”

See, that's a completely valid alternate interpretation. Remote learning exacerbated the performance differences between haves and have-nots, the South is generally poorer, so they had a more intense drop for a shorter period that gave the same slippage as a less intense drop for a longer period elsewhere. What we don't need is some doofus like the tweet spouting off "Closures did it!" without any actual data supporting that.

If it was a matter of lockdown, US states with shorter lockdown periods would have had smaller drops and those with longer lockdown periods would have had greater drops. That's not the case.