The situation clearly called for a centralized plan by the national government focused specifically on ventilation, with oversight and expertise deployed to that end and intense pressure applied to get things completed as fast as possible (kind of like how New Dealers built dams in the Pacific Northwest). Well-publicized grants to every school, with clear requirements and detailed instructions about proper installation, might have done it.

We didn’t do that — or anything close. It’s a perfect microcosm of the broken American state. When the polity is crying out for bold leadership and nationwide coordination on something incredibly important and time-sensitive, we had feds handing money to the states, who hand it to local districts, who aimlessly spend it on more or less whatever they feel like. Some do the right thing, most don’t, or simply can’t.

All this makes the current hysteria over school reopenings rather mysterious. We didn’t see this kind of frenzied hyperbole over ventilation a year ago, when it might have been useful. Instead there’s this manic insistence that we can too jam the kids back into school without worrying about it or making any serious preparations first — and not for the first time. As Rachel Cohen wrote at The American Prospect in October 2020, Oster in particular has been pushing this line for most of the pandemic.