The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis

Everyone could see that kids played a role in disease transmission. No one imagined they would have the effect that they had in the Glasses’ model. That didn’t mean the model was right; but it might be. “It showed me where to dig,” said Carter. “I said, ‘I’m going to dig deep right here. Is there something about kids and schools that I don’t know enough about and haven’t thought about?’ ” To Carter, digging meant gathering data, and no place on earth collected as much of it as the United States government. In federal databases, he discovered that the majority of Americans employed by state and local government were employed in education, and he thought, No wonder those unions are so powerful. He learned that there were more than one hundred thousand K–12 schools in the country, with fifty million children in them. Twenty-five million rode a bus to school. “I thought, Holy crap, half the kids in the U.S. hop on a school bus.” There were seventy thousand buses in the entire U.S. public transportation system, but five hundred thousand school buses. On an average day, school buses carried twice as many people as the entire U.S. public transportation system. A lot of the talk in the White House pandemic planning room had been about grown-ups: how they worked and traveled. “We’d been talking about the New York subway and the DC Metro,” said Carter, “but for every person hopping on public transportation in one day, there are two kids taking the school bus.” How kids got to school...

The Forgotten Density of Childhood: How Schools Became Perfect Engines for Disease Spread