A Bad Decision?

Did America make a mistake by not keeping K-12 schools open during the COVID-19 pandemic?

A new book, authored by David Zweig, titled An Abundance of Caution, suggests so.

Last week, The 74 posted an article highlighting the story:

“Just a few weeks into the COVID pandemic, veteran New York journalist David Zweig began looking into the evidence behind universal school closures.”

“In early 2020, the findings suggested that children were essentially unaffected by the virus and  minimally contagious when they caught it. He envisioned a magazine piece arguing for reopening schools, and began pitching it to major outlets.”

“No one was interested.”

“Eventually, WIRED agreed to run it, and as he reported it, the evidence only seemed to build. In New York City, just seven out of more than 14,000 deaths at the time were reported in people under 18. He remembers thinking: ‘This is a major, major story.’ As the magazine took its time with edits, he was in a panic, ‘waiting to get scooped’ by other media.”

“It never happened.”

“He soon realized that most major outlets had little curiosity about the science – or lack of it – underlying COVID remediations.”

“His piece, ‘The Case for Reopening Schools,’ appeared in mid-May and instantly went viral. But its premise – that the U.S. was following ‘a divergent path’ on reopening – got lost in the larger debate swirling in major media. And Zweig, a former magazine fact-checker who had always entertained the notion that health authorities and journalists in legacy media took science seriously, began to wonder what he’s missed.”

“A year later, with his two kids still not back to school full time despite mountains of evidence that it could be done safely, his sense of who the ‘good guys’ were had been thoroughly shaken. Social isolation, masking and hybrid schooling were taking an enormous toll on his kids and millions of others nationwide, even as most schools in Europe opened early and stayed open, often without the dogged reliance on masking and distancing that American schools employed.”

“’The sense that all of this suffering for them and millions of other kids was for naught consumed me,’ he writes. ‘I could not silence the voice in my head that this was gravely stupid.’”

“By 2021, he was testifying as an expert witness before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on reopening schools, as well as a Houst subcommittee on the pandemic.”

“Five years after the first school closures, [Zweig’s Abundance of Caution] looks back on what he considers the questionable deliberations surrounding COVID at almost every level. While it take the pandemic as its subject, Zweig notes that the book is about something much broader: ‘a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.’”

“He finds bad decisions everywhere, with experts basing assertions about the virulence of the virus on flawed prediction models that themselves were based essentially on guesswork. Media outlets, he alleges, routinely overhyped the seriousness of the virus, despite evidence that children were not major carriers – and schools didn’t drive transmission.”

“The media perseverated on the effectiveness of remedies like masking, social distancing and isolation, Zweig finds, despite thin evidence that any of them made a difference. For months, they credulously transcribed experts’ predictions, often relying on the loudest, most overwrought voices, who often brought questionable credentials to the task. In one instance, an expert quoted on reopening was actually a consultant for smokeless tobacco companies.”

“Lawmakers dropped the ball as well, he says, prioritizing – perhaps even fetishizing – ‘safety’ over normalcy, even when there was little evidence for keeping schools closed beyond the few weeks in which public health experts urged Americans to ‘flatten the curve’ of COVID cases.

“Zweig has found a receptive audience for his reporting on the center-right – the book this week was excerpted in the conservative online publication The Free Press – but his work has also bolstered arguments in left-of-center publications, from Vox and The Atlantic to New York magazine and The New York Times.”

…

Tomorrow we’ll investigate a recent New York Times article considering whether the decisions Zweig criticizes might be made differently today.

Til tomorrow. SVB