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, healthy children were barred from school. Millions of them did not set foot in a classroom for more than a year. All along, kids throughout Europe had been learning in person since the spring of 2020. 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 the Europeans 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
1. Remote Learning While Flattening the Curve
2. GIGO
3. Red Dawn
4. More Assumptions
5. (Wrong) Lessons from the Past
6. Europe
7. The Media, Part I
8. It's Good to Feel Like You're Doing Something
9. Out of an Abundance of Caution
10. The Evidence from Daycares
11. Technological Solutionism
12. If Trump Is for It, Then We're Against It
13. Politics and Tribalism
14. The Media, Part II
15. Risk Aversion, Groupthink, and Safetyism
16. The Media, Part III
17. The Worst of Both Worlds, Part I
18. Parents Advocate for Open Schools
19. Bad Incentives
20. Rights and Responsibilities
21. The Worst of Both Worlds, Part II
22. An Absence of Leadership
23. Institutional Failure and the Success of Empirical Studies
Conclusion
Epilogue
Notes
