A day-long event Nov. 13 hosted by the College of Arts & Sciences focused on lessons that policymakers and elected officials could glean from academic research about the COVID pandemic to help deal with the next public health emergency.
The day ended with a public talk by Frances Lee, professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, who shared research from her 2025 book, “In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us,” co-written with Stephen Macedo, which is critical of the U.S. government’s response to the pandemic.
“Frances Lee provides a fresh voice and a helpful corrective as we look back on COVID,” said Peter John Loewen, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts & Sciences.
Lee’s book contends that rather than focusing on past research and reports about pandemics, officials embraced mass closures and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) during COVID without proof they would slow down the spread.
“Governors were the key decision-makers, deciding whether, when and how to enforce pandemic restrictions, and also eventually also supervising vaccine campaigns,” Lee said. “They were looking to the federal government for guidance, but there were not standard operating procedures for what to do.”
At the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, there was broad agreement about closures, with 43 states issuing stay-at-home orders, Lee said during the talk, but the pandemic response began to polarize along party lines in the summer of 2020, as Republican-leaning states reopened much more quickly than Democratic-leaning states, causing a “crazy patchwork” of closures across the county.
States led by Democratic governors stayed closed 2.5 times longer than states with Republican governors, she said, and there were wide variations in public school openings, with half still closed a year after the pandemic began.
“If you examine COVID deaths before the vaccines became available, there’s no noticeable evidence that the more restrictive states fared better,” Lee said. “And there was no relationship between COVID mortality and school closures.”
Lee said this isn’t evidence that NPIs didn’t work, but “we just don’t have good evidence that they did.”
And the trade-offs for this response were great, Lee contends, including:
- Federal expenditures of more than $5 trillion
- A massive spike in unemployment in the spring of 2020
- Drops in student learning in reading and math because of school closures
- An epidemic of chronic absenteeism in schools, which continues today
- The largest ever year-over-year increase in homicides
- Surges in anxiety, depression and eating disorders
- Delays in elective surgeries and health screenings
- A spike in reports of loneliness and isolation
- Costs of the pandemic fell hardest on the young, on essential workers, on people with disabilities and others who are disadvantaged
Once vaccines became available, the political divide continued, with markedly higher vaccine uptakes in Democratic states. In this case, there was a strong relationship between vaccine uptake and lower COVID mortality, she said.
“The science of pandemic management was unsettled before the pandemic, with no western plan recommending the sweeping measure that were imposed,” she said. “And even since the pandemic, there’s been very little consensus about what, aside from vaccines, actually worked.”
During the afternoon before Lee’s talk, a group of faculty from seven universities — invited by Loewen and Tom Pepinsky, professor of government (A&S) — spent the afternoon sharing their research.
They also heard from Gary Koretzky, Cornell’s interim vice provost for research, a professor emeritus of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a professor emeritus of microbiology and immunology at the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine. Koretzky played a central role managing Cornell’s campus response to the pandemic.
“This time is seared in my memory because it was incredibly intense,” said Koretzky, who led workshop participants through the process Cornell undertook to close campus in spring 2020 and reopen again that fall, one of few peer institutions to do so. “We asked a lot of people and people did what we asked.”
Along with studying what was widely known about the virus, Koretzky said a task force at the Cornell University Library scoured through the literature and he met frequently with local experts and peers at other institutions to plan for the return to campus.
“I was up every night imagining what might happen when we brought back thousands of students from all over the world,” he said. “And it was hard to get guidance because guidance was not clear.”
Koretzky and other campus leaders established a team that collectively developed a robust testing and quarantine protocol that they felt confident could protect the campus and the local community. That program required 50,000 tests to be run per week at eight testing sites across campus, using a pool strategy that first tested 5 samples together, separating them out if need be, so that results could be determined within 24 hours.
“It became part of the culture and people were proud of the fact that we were open,” he said. “And my nightmare of filling up the local hospital didn’t happen.”
After Koretzky’s talk, faculty spoke about their research into the inequalities of the COVID response; the effectiveness of wastewater testing; the general failure to establish a preparedness plan based on research; failures of communication; why misinformation flourished during the pandemic; how partisanship impacted COVID behaviors and political decision-making during the pandemic.
Loewen said he hopes the research from the event could coalesce into a publication.
“Scholars from a variety of disciplines have studied how countries and politicians responded to COVID and the widely disparate outcomes around the world,” Loewen said. “Their results highlight areas for further research and provide guidance to help us prepare for the next pandemic, and more generally to understand how democracies should act during emergencies.”
