What I'm Reading: Pushing back on pandemic revisionism.

Pandemic revisionism has been on my mind lately. It seems that many people incorrectly believe we didn’t achieve much, despite our efforts. How quickly we forget. The horrors of New York City in the early days of Covid-19 reflected a virus spreading without mitigation. Virtually everywhere other than New York City experienced Covid-19 dramatically differently—that is, other US cities encountered the novel coronavirus in the context of serious efforts to contain it. That’s why truckloads of dead bodies didn’t become a fixture anywhere outside of New York City’s early outbreak.

I’m not alone in worrying that people have forgotten all of this. Lately, New York Times writer David Wallace Wells has been using his column to interview some pandemic experts around this topic. His interviews with two colleagues with whom I have collaborated, Dr. Katelyn Jetelina and Dr. Michael Mina, are highly recommended reading for anyone interested in what lessons from the pandemic we should have learned—and these go beyond the usual platitudes.

So for this installment of “What I’m Reading,” I’m sharing another Wallace Wells interview. In this interview, Wallace Wells interviews the authors of a new book entitled “The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind.”

This is no ordinary interview. Wallace Wells clearly read this book and identified within it a key—and devastating—contradiction in its reasoning. Here is an early excerpt from the interview:

In the beginning of the book you write, in what almost feels like a thesis statement for the book: “A central tenet of this book is that we could not have done better, and pretending differently is a dangerous fiction, one that prevents us from taking a much needed look in the mirror.”

This claim, that the U.S. could not have done any better, runs against your other claim, that what we observed was an American failure. It is also a pretty extreme claim, I think, and I wanted to press you on it in part because it is, in my view, undermined by quite a lot of the work you do in the book itself.

Would the U.S. not have done better if it had recognized earlier that the disease spread through the air rather than in droplets? Would it not have done better if it hadn’t bungled the rollout of a Covid test in the early months? You write at length about PPE shortages and the problems of coordinating care between hospitals in the early months — would the country not have done better if it had addressed those problems quickly, or not suffered from them to begin with? Disparities in health care access — is it a dangerous fiction to think we might address that? You guys are big champions of Operation Warp Speed — would it not have been better if those vaccines had been rolled out to the public in nine months, rather than 12, getting shots into the arms of the vulnerable elderly before the first big winter surge? —David Wallace Wells, The New York Times.

Indeed, how can someone say we failed and also say that we could not have done any better?

I’m fascinated by this interview on two counts.

First, Wallace Wells surgically dissects a bizarre but increasingly popular viewpoint espoused in the book; that we did too much and that the benefits were nowhere near sufficient to justify them.

My view: Early on, we didn't have control of the situation and we had no choice but to do a lot; big, blunt instruments like staying home for weeks at a time. In the future, we could achieve more with less. But in early 2020, it was not apparent how to do that. Also, things like shelter-in-place to “flatten the curve” while we ramped up testing capacity and bought time for a vaccine saved hundreds of thousands of US lives, if not more. So, we did achieve a lot, which is something people seem to forget. The question of which mitigation actions were “worth it” (and when) requires much more ink. That is a question that I plan to spend a lot of time on in the coming years, because I still think most people—experts included—haven’t figured it all out yet.

Second, I think Wallace Wells is among a rare group of journalists in that he asks tough questions, but does so in good faith. He’s not “just asking questions” to create doubt and gotcha journalism. Rather, he’s pursuing insight and attempting to move our thinking forward. In the case of this interview with Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean, that required a bit of intellectual vivisection.

To whet your appetite a bit, please enjoy this moment:

Nocera: Do we really want to argue about this for the next 20 minutes? I feel like I’m on the witness stand.

Wallace Wells: Well, you did write a book on the subject.

Yes! If writers are going to publish a book based on flawed reasoning on a topic which literally concerns the lives of millions of people, they should have to answer for their sloppiness.

Here again is the link to this deeply satisfying interview. Too often, journalists don’t push back against bad or poorly reasoned ideas from their “expert” sources. That Wallace Wells does reflects a combination of preparation/care, and a philosophical willingness to be more than a passive vessel for the views of the subjects being interviewed. It also reflects a somewhat unusual circumstance—as far as I can tell—in which a columnist (i.e., a newspaper writer who is permitted and even expected to have a viewpoint, rather than maintain the veneer of neutrality required of a dispassionate beat journalist) is using his allotted space to conduct pointed Q&As. I haven’t seen a lot of this, but it seems effective. These are frank conversations that need to be had.

The common thread in Wallace Wells’s interviews as of late is a careful and thoughtful pushback against pandemic revisionism—that is, people remembering things wrongly—and deep interrogations into what we can actually learn and apply going forward. This is exactly what should be doing so that we are more prepared next time.