What's with the Times lately?

I generally find Tufekci okay, but this piece is extremely revisionist.

This was my fear that'd we'd just do revisionist history with the benefit of hindsight rather than actual postmortems of the pandemic response.

She repeats the misleading snippet of Fauci's testimony regarding social distancing that he subsequently clarified in later testimony. It isn't that the six foot rule just was made up out of nowhere, nor was it his decision. The CDC crafted it based on previous research on droplet transmission.

And yes, we now have an understanding that the coronavirus is airborne and that droplet transmission was an incomplete picture. That doesn't imply social distancing isn't important - we also have an understanding that social distancing helped reduce transmission.

And yes, NIH officials were privately concerned about the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the very BEGINNING of the pandemic. But they subsequently called together a bunch of issue experts to examine the available evidence and realized those initial fears were misplaced. We know that from those very same private conversations.

She's sloppy here again with Fauci's testimony. He believes the coronavirus emerged from nature. But he concedes it is possible it came via a lab leak. And she's sloppy with discussing the coronavirus origins. A deliberately engineered virus still remains a conspiracy theory and that was what Fauci was debunking at the time.

And she gets revisionist on policies. Beach and park closures were much more the doing of government officials than public health experts. There were a lot of public health experts calling for them to be reopened at the time.

Likewise with schools, it is weird how she talks about this from the standpoint of public health. Public health experts were talking about ventilation, masking, and testing to keep schools open.

On masks, she gets revisionist as well. Government policy from the beginning was for sick people and those caring for them to wear masks. The debate was over everyone else masking amidst a very real mask shortage at the time. Hence why we eventually settled on cloth masks as a stop gap measure till the medical mask shortage ended.

Before we had a full understanding of the coronavirus transmission, we didn't know the extent of asymptomatic transmission. SARS had very little asymptomatic transmission. Most transmission was done by symptomatic individuals. For the coronavirus however we later came to realize that asymptomatic transmission was a significant driver of transmission.

What bothers me with this piece is it doesn't actually grapple with any of the contemporaneous discourse on these subjects or the uncertainty during an emergency. And bizarrely puts all the blame on public health experts and completely ignores the government (namely a government which was actively downplaying the virus at this time from the very top via President Trump).

A postmortem that doesn't actually grapple with any of that isn't actually very useful. If anything it is misleading and harmful as it won't help correct for future pandemics.