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Kate's avatar

Thank you so much, Kelley, for compiling these, most of which I had not seen before. I remember reading the Osterholm and Hamblin pieces in early 2020, and then watching the baffling about-face afterwards. I have always wondered what exactly happened that caused this radical change of mind. I still don't know for sure. I'm not prone to conspiracy theories, so I'm inclined to ascribe the ensuing insanity to an unfortunate confluence of misguided experts in positions of power, blind faith in said experts on the part of politicians and the media, corporate leaders who saw business opportunities in this experiment, and mass formation psychosis in the face of a collective reminder of everyone's mortality, which we as a society had come accustomed to ignoring. The fact that the average person appears to be extremely poor at critical data analysis and risk assessment didn't help either.

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Restore Childhood's avatar

Thanks for sharing this, Kelley! And especially for referencing Jennifer Nuzzo, who was the first scientist I read in the NY Times telling us that we didn't need to close schools. She also published a July piece https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/opinion/coronavirus-schools.html (though I don't agree that we should have closed bars either).

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