STAT April 23, 2021
Leslie Bienen, Eric Happel and Monica Gandhi

The United States has exceeded 31 million Covid-19 infections (a messy data point) and is approaching 570,000 Covid-19 deaths (a more robust data point). Yet despite the abundance of data about the pandemic, the best available information is not usually what guides policymakers.

Some policies are senselessly cruel, such as keeping family members from visiting loved ones dying of Covid-19. Others heighten disparities in income, health, and education.

After nine months of observing school closures and reopenings, we identified two factors that appear to be influencing decision-makers toward making less rational, less effective school-reopening policies: overreliance on alarming “predictive” models that are not actually predictive, and media reports based on data that are poorly analyzed and then manipulated to fit...

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