Full Description
A searing indictment of the American public health, media, and political establishments decision-making process behind pandemic school closures. An Abundance of Caution is a devastating account of the decision-making process behind one of the worst American policy failures in a century the extended closures of public schools during the pandemic. In fascinating and meticulously reported detail, David Zweig shows how some of the most trusted members of society from Pulitzer Prize winning journalists to eminent health officials repeatedly made fundamental errors in their assessment and presentation of evidence. As a result, for the first time in modern American history, millions of healthy children did not set foot in a classroom for more than a year. Since the spring of 2020, many students in Europe had been learning in person. Even many peers at home in private schools, and public schools in mostly 'red' states and districts were in class full time from fall 2020 onward. Whatever inequities that existed among American children before the pandemic, the selective school closures exacerbated them, disproportionately affecting the underprivileged. Deep mental, physical, and academic harms among them, depression, anxiety, abuse, obesity, plummeting test scores, and rising drop-out rates were endured for no discernible benefit. As Europe had shown very early, after they had sent kids back to class, there was never any evidence that long-term school closures, nor a host of interventions imposed on students when they were in classrooms, would reduce overall cases or deaths in any meaningful way. The story of American schools during the pandemic serves as a prism through which to approach fundamental questions about why and how individuals, bureaucracies, governments, and societies act as they do in times of crisis and uncertainty. Ultimately, this book is not about COVID; it s about a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part I: Seductive Models: February and March 2020
1. Remote Learning While Flattening the Curve
2. GIGO
3. Red Dawn
4. More Assumptions
5. (Wrong) Lessons from the Past
Part II: The Illusion of the Precautionary Principle: April through June 2020
6. Europe
Deep Dive: Peanuts, Lemons, and Evidence-Based Medicine
7. The Media, Part I
8. It's Good to Feel Like You're Doing Something
9. Out of an Abundance of Caution
10. Ignoring Daycares, and the Continued Refusal of Evidence
11. Technological Solutionism
Part III: Tribalism, Public Health, the Elite, and the Media: June through August 2020
12. If Trump Is for It, Then We're Against It
13. Politics and Tribalism
14. The Media, Part II
Deep Dive: It's "Basic Physics"--Mitigation Misinformation, and the Case of HEPA Filters
15. Groupthink
16. The Media, Part III
17. The Worst of Both Worlds, Part I
18. Bad Incentives
Part IV: Progressive Dogma and Narrative Control: Fall 2020 and Beyond
19. Parents Advocate for Open Schools
20. Rights and Responsibilities
21. The Worst of Both Worlds, Part II
Deep Dive: Harms of School Closures
22. An Absence of Leadership
23. Institutional Failure
24. Unlikely Heroes and the Eventual Acceptance of Empirical Data
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
