Like many paediatricians, Dani Dumitriu braced herself for the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus when it first surged in her wards. She was relieved when most newborn babies at her hospital who had been exposed to COVID-19 seemed to do just fine. But hints of a more subtle and insidious trend followed close behind. Dumitriu and her team ... had more than two years of data on infant development since late 2017, they had been analysing the communication and motor skills of babies up to six months old. Dumitriu thought it would be interesting to compare the results from babies born before and during the pandemic. The infants born during the pandemic scored lower, on average, on tests of gross motor, fine motor and communication skills compared with those born before it. It didn't matter whether their birth parent had been infected with the virus or not; there seemed to be something about the environment of the pandemic itself. Lockdowns ... have isolated many young families, robbing them of playtime and social interactions. Stressed out and stretched thin, many carers also haven't been able to provide the one-to-one time that babies and toddlers need. Worryingly, [biophysicist Sean] Deoni has found that the longer the pandemic has continued, the more deficits children have accumulated. "The magnitude is massive " it's just astonishing," Deoni says of the findings, which are now under revision in JAMA Pediatrics.