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December 1st, 2025 (Permalink)

Book Review: An Over-Abundance of Caution

Quote: "…[T]he long list of claims, the filibuster of excuses about why schools could not open that were made repeatedly by politicians, union leaders, influencers, the media, and health authorities―and others in the medical field who had no expertise on viral transmission or mitigation, but whom journalists treated as experts anyway―was a systematic fiction. Even more than two years later, in the fall of 2022, after the reckoning of abysmal academic outcomes from school closures became an acceptable admission in polite society, many epidemiologists, other public health professionals, and pundits simply framed this as the unfortunate consequence of a wrenching decision between saving lives from COVID or harming kids by keeping them out of school. But this damned if you do, damned if you don't narrative was a false binary, representing a fundamental misunderstanding about the lack of benefit of school closures. Much of Europe, and many areas of the US where schools were kept open the longest in aggregate, suffered no greater numbers of cases, or subsequent morbidity and mortality, than areas where schools were closed the longest."1

Title: An Abundance of Caution

Subtitle: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions

Author: David Zweig

Date: 2025

Summary: This book tells the story of only one aspect of the coronavirus pandemic, namely, the effect of the virus on children and the misguided efforts to protect them by closing schools.

Review: There will be another pandemic, probably sooner than expected, and little has been done to prepare for it. The first step in doing so is to review what happened, and especially what was done wrong, during the last one. We probably won't make exactly the same mistakes again since it may be an influenza virus, or some other kind of virus, rather than a coronavirus, that causes the next one. But if we don't understand how those mistakes came about, new mistakes will be made in the same old ways.

I was already familiar with much that Zweig covers in this book, and even wrote about some of it at the time2, but one thing still surprised me: how early in the pandemic the basic facts about the coronavirus and its effects were known. This was a triumph for the science of epidemiology, but a miserable failure of journalists and public health authorities to communicate those facts to the public. In this book, Zweig exposes that failure by thoroughly documenting what was known about the coronavirus and when, as opposed to what was said about it by politicians and reporters. He explains:

…[N]early all of the evidence I present in this book was known in real time or in advance. The single most important myth that this book seeks to debunk is the notion that various interventions―most specifically related to schools and kids―were reasonable of even necessary to be employed because "we didn't know" at the time about their lack of benefit, or the relatively benign course for children from the virus. On the other side of the coin, it was similarly false to say "we didn't know" about the harms that would accrue from these largely ineffective interventions.3

Throughout the pandemic, we were often told to "follow the science", yet government bureaucrats and journalists repeatedly failed to tell us where the science was headed. As a result, ineffective and harmful measures, such as school closings, were taken.

Here, based on this book and my own research, and illustrated with some quotes from the book under review, are what I think were the primary sources of error during the pandemic:

I believe this is the first time I've recommended a book as "Recommended Reading", since usually I just recommend articles and essays, but that shows just how important this book is. Zweig obviously put an enormous amount of time and energy into it, and I think that the book deserves at least a little of our own effort in return.

Nitpicking: This is an important book but not a perfect one; of course, no book is. One of Zweig's greatest strengths is, perhaps, his greatest weakness, namely, his thoroughness. Zweig marshalls so much evidence in favor of his thesis that it's overkill―not in the sense that it undermines his own argument, but that it's just too much. Zweig makes his point seven ways to Sunday, when six would have sufficed. If you're not convinced by the arsenal of evidence that Zweig presents here, then nothing will convince you; whereas, if you're as convinced as I am, the excess can become tedious7.

I'm not suggesting that you use its length as an excuse not to read it, rather that you don't need to read the whole thing to get its benefits. In particular, there are three sections in the book labelled "Deep Dives":

  1. Peanuts, Lemons, and Evidence-Based Medicine

    This section is a history of some previous medical mistakes; specifically, about peanut allergies, scurvy, and in what position babies should sleep. I didn't need any convincing that medical experts are fallible, but I still found the section fascinating.

  2. "Basic Physics"―Mitigation Misinformation, and the Case of HEPA Filters

    This section is primarily a debunking of the unfounded claim, made repeatedly by the teachers' unions, that schools shouldn't open until they had expensive ventilation systems using HEPA filters, which would have taken months if not years to implement. I found this section less interesting than the previous one.

  3. Harms of School Closures

    Unlike the previous two "deep dives", this one is directly related to the main thesis of the book. However, of all the policies adopted during the pandemic, this is the only one that seems to be now widely admitted to have been both unnecessary and harmful―see the quote at the beginning of this review. So, if you're already convinced that closing schools harmed children, you might just as well skip this section, which makes terribly depressing reading. In contrast, all those politicians and teachers' union officials who pushed for school closings and resisted their reopening should be forced to read it.

I've nitpicked the book above, not because I want to discourage you from reading it, but because I want to encourage you. There is an almost overwhelming amount of important information in this volume, and I don't want you to use that as an excuse to avoid it. In addition, the emotions that the book may evoke―the regret, anger, even guilt―may also at times feel overwhelming. But we need to face the facts, as unpleasant as they may be, about what went wrong during the last pandemic if we're not to go through an even worse future one. If you should open the book and find yourself feeling overwhelmed, keep in mind that you can skip the "Deep Dives" without losing track of the book's main thread.

Recommendation: Highly recommended, but with the proviso that you needn't read the whole thing.

Notes:

  1. ↑ Pp. 520f. Paragraphing suppressed. Citations to just page or chapter numbers are to the electronic edition of the book reviewed.
  2. ↑ The following is not a complete list of entries dealing with the pandemic, but some of those dealing with its effect on children or the closing of schools:
  3. ↑ Pp. 806f.
  4. ↑ Pp. 68f. See also:
  5. ↑ P. 578.
  6. ↑ Pp. 577f. Paragraphing suppressed.
  7. ↑ In his "Acknowledgments", Zweig writes: "Without Susan [Buckley] this book would be 1,000 pages, so anyone reading this owes her a thanks as well." Thanks, Susan! My electronic copy of the book is actually over a thousand pages, so I assume he is referring to the paper version.

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