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I didn’t know who journalist David Zweig was until the fall of 2020, when he began to write about the suddenly urgent issue of COVID and schools. My daughter was at home, “learning” remotely. His kids were too. Though he had never focused on kids, schools, or medical writing in his previous journalism, he threw himself into a topic that was reshaping his life, producing a series of articles (published here and elsewhere) that together made a forceful case in favor of reopening schools for full-time, in-person instruction.
Though it began as a sometimes unpopular argument, by mid-2021 it would become the default view of all but the most skittish policymakers and public-health officials. Zweig’s important new book, An Abundance of Caution, published by MIT Press, is a declaration of victory of sorts — but mostly he wants to understand the colossal mistake and how it happened so that it never happens again.
“Everything related to kids strongly pointed in one direction,” he writes, revisiting the period with the spirit of a historian, trying to fathom why public-health officials and the media were so frequently suggesting otherwise, and why so many educational systems opted to stay closed for so long.
“I want people to be able to look behind the curtain and gain an understanding of what was happening,” Zweig told me, “versus what most of us were observing as regular citizens.”
The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
You wrote about this issue a lot at the time. Why, years later, did you feel compelled to write a book?
I very early observed my kids just withering away in the gray light of their Chromebooks alone in their bedrooms. And while it seemed reasonable initially to have schools closed, particularly because I’m close to New York City, soon it dawned on me that there was no long-term plan and this was not going to work.
Childhood is achingly brief, and for a little boy or girl who’s 8 years old to miss a year, or even more than a year, of the experience of putting an arm around a friend, of chatting with other kids at lunchtime, of running around in a playground with friends … the idea that that wasn’t a tremendous harm is absurd.
People are still missing the larger point here about what was lost.
The conventional wisdom was that we needed to keep schools closed until it was safe to reopen them, and even then, it could be done only in communities where the spread of the virus had abated and educators took certain concrete steps to keep teachers and kids safe. You’re saying all of that was wrong?
I recognize that intuitively many of these interventions seem like they would be beneficial. School closures in particular and then, more broadly, mask mandates and barriers on desks and six feet of distancing — but the evidence shows none of this did anything.
Europeans had announced in the spring that there was no observable negative impact to reopening schools, yet for some reason this information was ignored.
People like Randi Weingarten, the teachers-union leader, and Dr. Anthony Fauci and others continually said, We really want schools open. This is so important, but we have to do it when it’s safe. And then fake benchmarks were contrived that made it nearly impossible to open them. And fake interventions were contrived that needed to happen even if they opened. At that point, do you really want schools open?
One of your slightly counterintuitive arguments is that part of the reason many schools stayed closed is because Trump was pushing to open them.
Trump was so reviled by the left that when he announced schools should reopen, he basically ensured they would remain closed. I give a lot of examples in the book of how institutions, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, were very strongly in favor of getting kids into schools, but as soon as Trump came out in favor of reopening, they completely reversed their position. I have lots of other examples of this happening; this was clearly in opposition to Trump.
You’re also very critical of the news media and the lack of scrutiny applied to claims that keeping schools closed was the right decision. Why do you think that scrutiny was missing?
This was overdetermined — from incredible political tribalism, to the public-health Establishment perpetuating many things that were untrue, to the media not demanding evidence behind those claims. All of these things led to an environment that made it incredibly difficult to open schools in America when they had already been open in Europe.
The media reported health officials or self-styled medical pundits (either by name or oftentimes with a generic “experts say” attribution) making these claims about what was necessary to safely reopen schools, yet generally reporters did not push them for evidence or investigate the veracity of the claims. Given that many school districts were unable or unwilling to meet these bogus requirements, the “when it’s safe” qualifier — along with the avalanche of fear-based, anti-scientific reporting in much of the legacy media — ensured the public would remain misinformed and schools in much of the country would remain closed.
The history of science and medicine is riddled with examples of our intuition being proved wrong. In this case, the public was misled into believing these interventions were necessary and would yield a net benefit, which was untrue.
Yet you cite New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg calling for reopening schools. It’s not as if there were some sort of elite consensus.
It’s very, very clear that the thrust of the legacy media pointed in one direction — particularly our most influential publications. There are academic studies that back this up. Of course, there were some voices that expressed dissent, including mine. But that would be the exception, not the rule.
So the reopening debate became part of our culture wars.
Doctors at elite institutions, top university hospitals, were contacting me after I started writing articles that were challenging the Establishment position. They would say, Thank you so much. I agree with what you’re saying. I think this is terrible, what’s happening to kids. There is no evidence that this is beneficial. We have evidence that this is harmful. But all these conversations, I was told, needed to be off the record because we had an environment in our country where doctors were afraid to actually share their real view.
Wasn’t the villain the virus?
I don’t think a virus can be a villain.
One argument you make in the book is that a lot of the discourse around the pandemic had to do with equity — but closing schools was anything but an inequitable solution.
The irony here is that the left fashions itself as the champions of the underprivileged. These are the people who advocated so hard for school closures, which immediately, overtly, and predictably exacerbated the inequities between underprivileged kids and kids with more resources. This is a really important point. It was obvious, it was predictable, and that’s exactly what happened.
The reason given for doing this was that underprivileged kids were oftentimes believed to be at greater risk from the virus, or their families at greater risk, but there was never any evidence that school closures were going to reduce the likelihood of transmission.
Sure enough, that is what the evidence showed very early and continued to show throughout the pandemic.
What specifically made remote learning so bad?
That’s not how children are intended to learn, sitting alone in a room for hours and hours on the screen, for days and then weeks and then months on end. We’re social creatures. We’re meant to interact with each other in person, and remote learning just exacerbated the infiltration of technology in our lives.
And there were many, many children in our country who didn’t have access to remote-learning tools to begin with. Millions of kids don’t live in a safe or suitable home environment, or they have special learning, physical, or neurological challenges that make remote learning impossible.
A kindergartner cannot be expected to learn how to read alone. I mean, I could go on and on.
Do you think educators were not entirely honest about how long schools would stay closed, or did they just genuinely not know?
Most of my lens in the book is trained on the public-health Establishment and the media because without those two institutions perpetuating a series of falsehoods, the teachers unions could never even have begun making the various demands regarding things that needed to be done in order for schools to open.
If we paid teachers more, if schools had working HVAC systems and didn’t have overcrowded classrooms, wouldn’t that have made it easier to reopen?
There are plenty of schools throughout Europe in old buildings packed with students, and they observed no increase in community rates because of it.
In the book, I quote an extraordinary manifesto from the L.A. teachers union, which had this fantastical list of demands, including things like special taxes on millionaires and billionaires. There needed to be all sorts of social programs. You couldn’t have charter schools. It was just massively disingenuous.
I’m sorry, but a shitty bathroom with crumbling tiles has nothing to do with the spread of a highly contagious respiratory virus.
What do you think is the lasting damage done by school closures?
A lot of attention rightfully has been paid to statistics regarding learning loss, and it is unambiguous that it is directly connected to the proportion of time kids were locked out of school. So that’s super-important, but there are so many harms that can’t be quantified. There are millions of kids around the country who were quietly robbed of their future — and it’s impossible for us to understand the scope of the damage simply by looking at, you know, test scores. And none of it brought any benefit.
Do you think the fact that there was no real accountability has been broadly harmful to our society?
I don’t really know what accountability looks like because the harm that occurred was not something where people were necessarily breaking the law.
You have this very pleasant scene in the book in which you and other dads are sitting and drinking beer in an empty parking lot. Wasn’t there genuinely a moment when we could have used the pandemic not just to drink more beer with our neighbors, fun as that was, but really to do things differently? Did we miss an opportunity?
Lord knows, I tried. There was a wonderful article in the New York Times about kids during the tuberculosis epidemic, when they did outdoor schooling. There were these sepia-toned photos of kids sitting on the roofs of buildings.
I tried to get that going here in my town; this was like in the summer of 2020, saying, Look, I recognize you’re afraid to open the schools. Let’s do outdoor classes. It’s been done in the past. There was word spreading that these large outdoor tents were being bought up by all the private schools, by rich districts. There was this scramble in my mind. I’m like, We have to hurry. Let’s get these tents. Let’s do this.
Even the people who were very afraid of COVID, almost all of them acknowledged that being outdoors was virtually zero risk. This was a way for kids to be able to be back at school with their peers. And I was met with just a brick wall. There was just literally nothing we could say that they wouldn’t have some absurd response for it. For example, one of the reasons given for why we couldn’t have outdoor classes was that some kids might have allergies. Another one was, Well, there’s no security. Kids might run away. Then they said it was a fire hazard. And that’s when I kind of lost my mind. I was like, A fire hazard outdoors? It didn’t — there was nothing, nothing we could say or do.
And that’s when I realized they didn’t care about having kids in school. It’s just impossible, the amount of bureaucratic calcification, the way schools seem to run, from the administrators. Almost none of them are leaders. No one wants to be first on anything. Everything is, Well, let’s wait and see what other people are doing. So why didn’t we take this opportunity to make them better? We couldn’t even get them to do an outdoor classroom.
How do you think the social effects of school closures will continue to reverberate through American society?
It was just such a radical policy decision that we put into place. I don’t think there’s been sufficient attention paid to this. But given how extraordinary this was, to some extent, people just kind of memory-holed it. Things like 9/11 or the Iraq War, things like the 2008 financial crisis or Enron, those involve villains that the left can easily vilify, whereas the villain in regards to this stuff was the Establishment.
Are you optimistic that officials will handle the next pandemic better when it comes to school closures?
I think a significant portion of the public just simply won’t tolerate it the way they did last time.
