Toppo asks the key question: “By May 2020, schools in The Netherlands, Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and more than a dozen other nations had reopened, with evidence mounting that COVID wasn’t even a modest risk to children. At a European Union conference, researchers reported that reopening schools there brought no significant increase in infections. Why weren’t we in lockstep with Europe?”
“A uniquely acrimonious and tribalist political environment in America is one large reason,” Zweig responds. Schools seemed set to reopen in fall of 2020. The American Academy of Pediatrics was all for it. Then, on July 6, President Trump tweeted: “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL.” Four days later, the pediatricians reversed course and opposed reopening.
Trump hatred “so dramatically distorted the lens through which they were seeing the world that they conducted themselves in a fashion that was completely disconnected from reality,” says Zweig, who once considered himself on the the left.
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A substantive analysis of Dane County Madison public Health’s mandates and outcomes is long overdue.
