It depends on what you count as part of the pandemic. At its core there's just the disease itself and the risk of catching it. Then there's the chance of knowing someone who has been severely ill from it, and the precautions taken to mitigate that risk. A few kids were fine with remote learning; for many more it absolutely sucked. Then there's the fact that those precautions have precluded many other activities, leaving even more time to read all the doom and gloom online. For high-school seniors (like my daughter) there's the college-admission situation which is an absolute mess right now due to two years of pandemic-related issues. Stressed out parents, cabin fever, contentious battles with friends and neighbors over vaccines and masks ... the list goes on and on.

If you interpret "the pandemic" as just that core, maybe it's a misdiagnosis. If you include all of the secondary and tertiary effects, the case is much stronger.