There are lots of stories to tell about the Covid pandemic, but most of them, if you drill down, are about politics. It’s about who made the decisions, who set the priorities, who mattered, who suffered the most, and why?

Frances Lee is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and the co-author of a new book called In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. It’s a careful book that treats our response to Covid as a kind of stress test for our political system. Lee and her co-author Stephen Macedo look at all the institutions responsible for truth-seeking — journalism, science, universities — and examine how they performed.

Were they committed to truth and open to criticism? Did they live up to the basic norms of liberalism and science? Were we able to have a reasonable conversation about what was happening — and, if we weren’t, why not?

The book isn’t really an attempt to grade our Covid policies. There are no villains in their story. It’s more about the quality of the debate and deliberation that surrounded those policies. Which is more than just an academic exercise. The conceit of the book is that it’s worth knowing what broke down during our response to Covid because those same things might also break down when the next crisis arrives.

So I invited Lee onto The Gray Area to talk about what she learned and what she thinks are the most important political lessons of the pandemic. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How would you characterize the debate we had in this country about our response to Covid?

Well, it was a fast-moving crisis, and so it’s not surprising in retrospect that the debate was truncated. But it is surprising, as we looked back and did the research for this book, the extent to which the decisions that were made in the early going of the pandemic departed from conventional wisdom about how to handle a pandemic and violated recommendations that had been put on paper in calmer times about how a crisis like this should be handled.

Countries around the world sort of scrapped preexisting pandemic plans in order to follow the example set in Wuhan, and then in Italy, with Italy having the first nationwide lockdown and improvising along the way. There wasn’t a scientific basis for the actions that were taken, in the sense that there was no accumulated body of evidence that these measures would be effective. It was hoped that they would be, but there was a lack of evidence.

If you go back........

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