I recently wrote this post on some of the problems with Covid doomers, which included specific examples of poor and misleading analysis from some of the leading voices within the movement. As luck would have it, one of those people wrote something even more dishonest than what I shared before, to the point that I felt like briefly remarking on it.
In that piece, the author comments on a recent piece in the New York Times on increased school absences. The high-level summary is that persistent absences among children enrolled in public schools roughly doubled from 2019 to now. The NYT piece itself is largely an overview of a study from AEI, so it admittedly lacks the rigor and depth of the original study. But what's odd is that Doubleday's post doesn't seem to engage with the underlying study much if at all, leaning instead on a) a single, personal anecdote, b) a drive-by reading of a few points from the NYT article, and c) a bunch of poorly-supported conjecture.
One of the main points Doubleday makes is as follows:
"It is truly astonishing and staggering that major news outlets are getting away with inventing ideological explanations for what is a clear, national and international expression of increased rates of illness. It’s particularly bizarre because this ideological explanation- that parents must for some reason value school less now- is attended by neither data nor even anecdotal evidence. Does it accord with anyone’s experience that parents are taking school “less seriously”?"
There's a couple problems with this interpretation of the NYT article. First, inasmuch as these increased absences are an "expression of increased rates of illness," the article does indeed address this with data. It links directly to this information from the CDC that shows persistent absence (defined there as missing 15 or more days in a year) has increased roughly 2 percentage points since 2019. This may appear alarming at first, and it almost certainly reflects increased disease burden during this time, but a few caveats are needed. First and most obvious, 2 percentage points is a small fraction of the 15 percentage point difference from the AEI study. Doubleday never appears to notice this discrepancy, let alone try to explain it with anything other than her usual single-minded refrain. Second, the year with the 2 percentage point increase (2022) not only contained the first Omicron wave (which may have infected three quarters of all children) but a temporary increase in disease burden from immunity debt. Kids were simply sick a lot in 2022, which makes sense as it was the first year with minimal restrictions since the start of the pandemic. Finally, I admit I have no hard data on this, but it certainly feels like the pandemic made people more willing to stay home when they're sick or contagious, even for things other than Covid. A certain amount of increased absences, at least for this very specific reason, is probably a good thing.
I previously remarked that this sort of analysis implicitly denies the benefits of acquired immunity (you see this directly here, in her apparent misunderstanding of what "immunity debt" was and why it wouldn't apply to us anymore in 2024). This piece goes a step further in appearing to deny the possibility of psychological effects. When the NYT article tries to address potential psychological reasons for the increased absences, Doubleday pushes back:
"Quoting a psychologist as your first resource to analyze widespread absence also points to an institutional bias toward casting these absences as the result of poor decisions made by parents, rather than reflective of material conditions imposed on the public."
While I am obviously a big fan of materialist analysis, this misses the mark. Claiming that psychological explanations for things are just a neoliberal misdirection not only disregards an entire field of science, it ignores a very real condition (PTSD) that appears to be a logical explanation for at least some of what ails us. All of this quite frankly anti-intellectual rhetoric and ideology comes together in this paragraph:
"The story here is that COVID was prematurely declared over; that there is no long-term immunity; that kids are thus stuck in a carousel of constant reinfection; that that constant reinfection is harmful. It’s a much more straightforward story than “at some point during the lockdowns there was a mass psychological shift away from schools as a priority and therefore individual adults are choosing to keep individual kids home to do….something but don’t ask us what.” At the Times, the urgency of exculpating the failed pandemic reopening strategy combined with a neoliberal worldview that consistently blames individuals for social problems has birthed an absurd narrative that cannot withstand even the mildest scrutiny."
Again, I cannot stress enough that our society absolutely does blame individuals for structural problems...that is a real thing and it is bad. But I simply do not see that happening here. The NYT article is no stunning piece of journalism, but it appears to understand that this is not a case of lazy or irresponsible parenting:
"For a smaller number of students at the school who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, the reasons are different, and more intractable. They often have to stay home to care for younger siblings, Ms. Miller said. On days they miss the bus, their parents are busy working or do not have a car to take them to school."
In the end I am not sure what else to say. Treating Covid as an existential problem in 2024 ignores not only the established sciences of immunity and psychology, but also serves to downplay the problems that have existed since long before Covid (which are almost certainly contributing to the additional stresses we have seen since Covid began). In this way such a single-track mind is not only wrong but is also counter-productive. After all, the pre-pandemic baseline of ~15% of children being regularly absent from school appears to be the more persistent and enduring problem here. Seems like it would be hard to meaningfully address that if all you're focused on is the past.
