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With hindsight being 20/20, it’s easy to second guess—or worse—decisions that were made during the onset and through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. From mandatory work- and school-from-home directives to social distancing, masking up and eventually vaccines, it was a time fraught with evolving opinions and, in time, policies that shifted away from national orders to become more state-specific.

What went well and what could have been done better is a simplified distillation of the book, , by Princeton University Professor Stephen Macedo, who was the first guest to kick off the new season of the Presidential Speaker Series.

Following introductory remarks from President Eduardo Peñalver, the talk was moderated by David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik, the duo behind the podcast, which recorded Macedo's visit for a podcast episode. The talk centered on taking a critical look at COVID-19 policy, what worked and what went wrong based on evidence, not emotion.

Launched in 2023, the Presidential Speakers Series brings nationally known thinkers and academics to campus to discuss freedom of speech, viewpoint diversity and campus discourse. The series aims to provide a forum where complex and sometimes uncomfortable ideas can be examined respectfully.

Macedo, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton, discussed how when it came to policy around handling the pandemic, blue states didn’t get everything right and red states did not do everything wrong.

A running theme of the discussion was about how we didn’t really debate or examine the tradeoffs in the decisions being made when it came to policy. Specifically, Macedo cited the huge cost of shutting down the economy and the lingering impacts on mental health from being isolated including the toll on young people.

The conversation also focused a lot on the overall failures of U.S. institutions, including journalists who, Macedo believes, painted a much darker picture of the pandemic then their international counterparts. While not suggesting that COVID was not hugely consequential in the lives of many, Macedo posited that the reporting was driven from emotion over facts, adding to the political polarization that permeated the country as the pandemic persisted.

“Things that should have been debated should have been debated but things were wrongly branded as misinformation and in April 2020 the metaphor of war became the driving conversation,” he said. The expectation was that “all of society, all of government, all of institutions were on the same side as part of a shared national strategy. And this wasn’t subject to criticism.”

He touched on how non-pharmaceutical interventions like hand washing and social distancing were deemed effective in combatting the virus—and reducing its spread—before vaccines were available but argued that there is no solid evidence of their impacts in reducing the mortality rate.

An area where Macedo believes the country as a whole erred was in the closing of schools without considering the collateral costs such as the rise in mental health challenges for many youth and potentially creating learning barriers for students who weren’t equipped to learn remotely.

“Of course, COVID was a very bad pandemic and the panic was real,” he said. “But we didn’t understand the virus. We didn’t learn more from how it was being handled in other parts of the world,” citing limited or drastically shortened closings for schools and businesses in other countries, as well as limited lockdowns. He also feels there were not enough protections put in place for essential workers, including gig workers.

“There was a failure on the part of many institutions.”  

Listen to the full of the talk with Stephen Macado, “Did Blue City America Get COVID Wrong, Too?”

Next Up
The upcoming guest of the Presidential Speaker Series is Sam Sawyer, S.J., president and editor-in-chief of America magazine, 5-6 p.m., October 15. Learn more and RSVP for this talk.