The Lovett School, a private K-12 institution in Atlanta with an annual tuition approaching thirty thousand dollars, stopped holding in-person classes in March. From that point until the end of the school year, all meetings happened online. On May 17th, a hundred and sixty graduating seniors and their families observed the occasion with an automotive parade around the tree-lined, hundred-acre campus, which is situated along a picturesque bend in the Chattahoochee River, a few miles from the governor’s mansion, in the city’s tony Buckhead district. Range Rovers, Mercedes-Benzes, and a ’67 Stingray, among other vehicles, circled for about forty-five minutes. Graduates yelled out of car windows and from the bed of a pickup truck. Queen’s “We Are the Champions” blared from speakers. Faculty and administrators lined the route, handing out cookies.
About a month later, I spoke to a father who had driven around his son. “I haven’t left my driveway in twenty-one days,” he said. He and his son had both since tested positive for the coronavirus. “I had a fever for nine days,” the father told me. “I’ve been unable to play golf.” He knew just how they had got it, he insisted. It wasn’t the parade. “We got it from one of those parties,” he told me. “We know the kids who got it,” he added.
After the parade, multiple Lovett families held private parties to celebrate. One party, at a home, was attended by about twenty people. Another, in a back yard, was attended by about fifty. There were also smaller gatherings. This seemed fine at the time, the dad said. “We don’t live in New York,” he pointed out. “Our state was open.” Georgia, under a directive from Governor Brian Kemp, was the first state to allow businesses to reopen, on April 24th. This alarmed many observers; a headline in The Atlantic described Kemp’s decision as an “experiment in human sacrifice.” But, for the first few weeks, no clear spike in cases was detected. “We were no longer in quarantine,” the dad said. “They were telling people to go to restaurants, get their hair cut, get a tattoo, do things. It’s Georgia, for God’s sake.”
His family, he went on, was lucky they detected the virus when they did. “The only reason we knew he had it was because my son had what he thought was a head cold,” which he began feeling two days after the parade, “and we were going to the lake the next weekend to see his grandparents from North Carolina. We said, ‘Let’s drive by Georgia Tech and just get him checked.’ ” They did that two days after the onset of symptoms, on May 21st, the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend. The positive COVID-19 test result came back the same day and the family notified Lovett immediately. “We probably saved lives,” the father said.
That same day, Lovett’s nurse, Shana Horan, called a COVID-19 hotline operated by the Georgia Department of Public Health to report the school’s first positive test. On Friday, Lovett’s head of school, Meredyth Cole, e-mailed the senior class and their families to tell them that a graduating senior—who had stayed in a car during the parade, but “later had company over for a graduation gathering, and then traveled out of town with friends,” she noted—had tested positive. On Saturday morning, the school received an e-mail from a reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who told them that he’d been informed “by some parents” about a positive test at the school.
Cole e-mailed the rest of the student body later that day. By then, she was aware of “several” students with positive diagnoses. It was around this time that a TikTok video featuring two girls from the school, one in a Lovett sweatshirt, began to make the rounds. “Hey, yo!” one of the girls sing-raps over a beat. “Coronavirus check!” A split screen appears to juxtapose the girls before and after their test results. (In the latter footage, they’re wearing masks and brandishing sanitizer.) The loop is overlaid with the text “We jinxed ourselves, we have corona.”
On Saturday evening, a local TV station, Channel 11, reported the existence of what would soon be called the Lovett cluster. The Journal-Constitution story appeared shortly afterward, as did other local stories. The father who drove his son around at the parade told me that his son got calls from reporters with the Washington Post and CNN. Other families did, too. Some students were contacted by journalists through direct messages on Twitter. The dad blamed Lovett for the media coverage. When he called the school nurse, he said, she had asked him for various pieces of information. “We thought they were putting together the pieces for health reasons. But it turned out they were putting together the pieces for the press.” Cole told me that what the school shared with the media was “the same facts and information that we shared with our families and posted on our Web site.”
The father felt that Lovett kids had been unfairly singled out. “I know that there was a Holy Innocents party, too,” he said, referring to another local private school. “A Westminster group had gone down to Pawley’s Island,” a summer-resort destination in South Carolina, “and decided they’d self-quarantine these seniors and let them have fun. Well, they came back with it. It jumped schools. It jumped friend groups. It jumped everything. And now it’s just here.”
Probably most Americans have only learned about contact tracing during the coronavirus pandemic. Though challenging in practice, it’s a simple enough idea: investigators communicate with people known to have an infectious disease, learn who they have been in close contact with while infected, then ask those in this wider group to isolate themselves until the risk of infecting others has passed. Investigations have to move quickly if the goal is to prevent the spread of the disease.
The night the Channel 11 report aired, Lynn Paxton, the top health official in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, e-mailed the county’s chief epidemiologist, Fazle Khan, and Kathleen Toomey, the commissioner of Georgia’s health department. “I apologize for disturbing you on the weekend,” she wrote, “but wanted to know if you were aware of a cluster of infections among graduating seniors at the Lovett School? It is being reported on in the press but much detail is not being given in the article.” Paxton had recently come out of retirement after a long career at the C.D.C., where she had worked on H.I.V. prevention, served as a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service, and been the Zika coördinator for the Center for Global Health. She took the job in Fulton County to help her home state fight the coronavirus. Khan told her that he had also just learned about the cluster—an on-call epidemiologist with the county Board of Health, Sasha Smith, “alerted us about an hour or so ago,” he wrote. “Had no details. I have asked her to dig a bit and let me know.” Smith followed up with her colleagues to say that she would contact Lovett’s head nurse. “Don’t waste your sleep on this,” Khan answered. It would be fine to deal with it in the morning.
Lovett’s nurse, Shana Horan, called Paxton the next day. She had been attempting to investigate the situation on her own. Fifteen people who attended the graduation parties had told Horan that they’d since tested positive for COVID-19, Paxton reported to her colleagues. Horan pulled names and phone numbers for Paxton’s team. By the end of the day, fifteen had become twenty-three. “Exciting times and a possible harbinger of things to come as people start reacting to the lifting of the shelter in place,” Paxton wrote in an e-mail, and then, in a subsequent message, “I suspect this will turn out to be bigger than just the 23 reported positives so far.” Later, she added, “This will make a nice little paper for someone once it is all over.” (“You can pull me out of the C.D.C., but you can’t take the C.D.C. out of me,” Paxton replied, when I asked her about this.)
The Lovett outbreak was the state’s first known cluster connected with a school, and many people both inside and outside of Georgia were watching to see whether the virus could be contained while something like normal life resumed. “There is going to be a lot of scrutiny of this cluster both locally and possibly nationwide since Georgia opened up early compared to other states,” Paxton warned her colleagues, by e-mail. At one point that day, she wrote to Toomey, copying the others: “I presume that the Governor is closely following, correct?” Toomey sent a one-word reply: “CORRECT!!!”
By Monday, Lovett was on CNN’s home page. That afternoon, a Fulton epidemiologist named Juliana Prieto provided scripts for contact tracers to use when calling Lovett families. “You do not have to answer any question you do not feel comfortable answering,” the scripts explained. A tracer soon reported that, of his first six calls, five went to voice mail, and the one parent he reached had “declined to talk.” That night, an epidemiologist named Carson Telford, who was helping with the tracing effort, informed his colleagues that he wasn’t having any luck either. “Only 1 parent would provide information,” he wrote. Later, Telford shared a text exchange he’d had with another Lovett parent. “I will not help you,” the parent wrote. “You are a fraud. Leave me and all the Lovett families and kids alone. Get the Lord on Board and go volunteer if you have this much time to stalk social media. The entire Lovett family is onto you and your dishonesty. You did not get our names from the nurse—that would be a violation and they would never provide that private info. Leave us alone, please.”
Personal information about students is shielded by strong federal privacy laws, dictated by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA. But schools are allowed to share details that have been classified as “directory information”—and there are, in any case, exceptions that can be made in the case of public-health emergencies. Up to this point, Paxton’s team had asked only for the phone numbers of the affected families, and Lovett had provided them.
According to one estimate, Fulton County, which has more than a million people, needs nearly two thousand contact tracers to do the job effectively. It has a few hundred. But the sheer number of tracers is not the only important factor, according to Kwonjune Justin Seung, a strategist and policy expert at Partners in Health, which has assisted the contact-tracing effort in multiple states. Seung’s own work is focussed on Massachusetts, where he’s based; when someone from his group makes a call, the number shows up as “MA COVID Team,” he said, so that it doesn’t look like “a robocall or some scam.” It took Seung’s team a month to figure out how to do that, he added.
If the subjects of a contact-tracing investigation do not believe that the investigators are who they say they are, the investigation will go nowhere. Even if that trust is established, the subjects of the investigation have to believe that coöperating is worth it. Some people worry that public-health officials will share information with their employers, and they will lose their jobs. Others fear that officials will report them to ICE, and that they will be deported, or have their immigration status revoked. Some people worry that officials will talk to the media and that they will lose other kinds of status.
Bill Henagan served on Lovett’s board of trustees for twelve years, until 2018, and has two sons who went to the school. When I asked him about the outbreak, he mentioned a scandal from a few years back, involving middle-school sexting, which also hit the press. “One year, it was Lovett’s turn. The next it was Westminster’s. Then it was Pace’s turn,” he said. Like the other Lovett father I spoke to, he noted that other schools had had parties, too. The question, he said, was “Which school is gonna have the public outbreak where a lawyer gets involved and it hits the newspaper?” Parents and administrators at these schools learn to fear that sort of thing. “Shutting down and not helping with contact tracing, that was a surprise to me,” Henagan added. He attributed part of the response to the upper-crust neighborhood: “It’s probably more of a Buckhead issue.”
It took only a day for Carson Telford to decide that what the investigators were doing wasn’t working. “Our current contact tracing strategy is ineffective,” he wrote his colleagues. “The public is unwilling to provide information over the phone to a stranger whose identity they cannot verify.”
Meredyth Cole, Lovett’s head of school, believed that the tracers’ scripts were partly to blame. She suggested that they not mention Lovett specifically. Paxton thought this request was about protecting the school’s reputation. “Being associated with a cluster was bad for the brand,” she told me. “I think that’s the word that they used: bad for their branding.” Cole insisted that wasn’t her concern. She had heard about families receiving calls from people who weren’t part of the investigation and who were asking “questions about Lovett and the graduation,” she told me; she thought that “not leading with ‘Are you a Lovett student?’ might provide a better response.” Lovett’s director of communications said that the issue was to make sure that “those who were contacted did not feel like they were in trouble or being ridiculed in any type of way.”
Several days into the investigation, Fazle Khan, the chief epidemiologist, wrote to his colleagues. “Nobody is to mention the name of the school on their own,” he informed them. He added, “We have been asked to be sensitive about this.” Minutes later, he wrote, “This has suddenly become politically charged. That’s why I was waiting for signal from above.” Paxton told me that she did not know what “signal from above” Khan was referring to; the health department declined to make Khan available for comment.
Despite the change to the script, it soon became clear that phone calls would not be sufficient: the tracers were not making enough progress. “It was almost like the clock was being run out,” Paxton told me. “That’s when we discussed, ‘Do we just send these quarantine orders out to the entire class?’ ” This would have involved hand-delivering letters to the homes of every graduating senior, possibly with the help of the sheriff’s office—“kind of the nuclear option,” Paxton said. A county attorney explained to the team that, while they could ask Lovett for addresses, “the school will probably not divulge that information without an order.” A Lovett official told me, “Their initial request was for phone numbers only, and we complied with that. Several days later, we were asked for addresses for the entire Class of 2020 graduates, which we were advised by counsel to not provide.” Khan e-mailed Paxton that “the Sheriff’s office has a way of finding addresses.” But showing up at the doorsteps of the mansions of Buckhead could easily backfire, and it may have been too late already.
A local TV station aired a segment on the reluctance of Lovett families to coöperate with the health department, noting that the three Buckhead-area Zip Codes around the school had recently reported the three highest-percentage increases in new cases in all of Fulton County. On June 2nd, Sasha Smith, the on-call epidemiologist working with the Board of Health, e-mailed Fazle Khan, asking for “an update on the number of COVID-19 positives that are associated with The Lovett School.” More than two weeks—the time a typical tracing investigation takes to complete, Paxton told me—had now passed. Khan replied to Smith, “There is no straight forward answer to this.”
That same day, Thornton Kennedy, whose son had graduated from Lovett a few weeks before, published a column in the Northside Neighbor, a small paper that serves upscale communities in north Atlanta. Kennedy, who’s in his mid-forties, is a seventh-generation Atlantan, and a Lovett alum. Like many Lovett families, the Kennedys have been well off for a long time: Kennedy’s great-great-great grandfather, George Adair, has been credited with starting the first real-estate firm in the United States, at the end of the Civil War. Adair was also a slaveholder and a friend of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. When I first spoke to Kennedy, he had just been texting with city-council members in Sandy Springs, just north of Atlanta, about the possible renaming of a street called Lake Forrest Drive. The origin of the street’s name was not entirely clear, but Kennedy, who called himself “as middle-of-the-road as you can get,” politically, figured it needed to be changed. “We get to fight the good fight,” he told me, referring to old Atlantans hoping to move the city forward from past sins. (My family has also been in Atlanta for seven generations.) Kennedy was the only parent of a graduating senior whom I could find who was willing to talk on the record about the outbreak without remaining anonymous.
In his column, Kennedy took issue with the public narrative of the Lovett cluster. He was mainly bothered, he told me, by the “stigmatization” of the Lovett kids. “There was a negative connotation aimed towards these kids and this school, in particular,” he said. He went on, “The stereotype of these spoiled kids is that the rules don’t apply to them. To me, that’s every teen-ager that’s ever walked the face of the earth.” He offered a personal story to make this point. “When I was in high school, someone told me that if you did a hundred miles per hour through the toll at Georgia 400, they couldn’t read your license plate,” he said. “So every time I went through that toll in my Honda Accord, I was doing a hundred. The car was literally shaking. I could have killed countless people. But every time, as soon as I saw it, I jammed the accelerator and held on for dear life.” He added, “And I never got a ticket.”
If Lovetteers had thrown a few parties to celebrate an important milestone, Kennedy wrote in his column, then big deal. “I imagine it happened at a few schools,” he wrote. “Everything is opening back up, and these teenagers have been sheltering in place along with the rest of us since mid-March.” Although the press had not named any students, Kennedy felt that “the damage” was done. “Summer opportunities have been withdrawn,” he wrote in his column. “Everyone seems to be pointing fingers along predictively political lines. The lives of these graduates, already upended, were in complete chaos.”
Kwonjune Justin Seung, from Partners in Health, told me that, speaking generally, he felt sympathy for the “unfairly demonized” people who make headlines for not coöperating with contact-tracing investigations. In some cases, he said, the same people who hang up on epidemiologists will pick up the phone to call everyone they know who they might have infected, doing some unofficial contact tracing themselves, and showing a concern for their communities. (One father I spoke to described such behavior among Lovett families.) “I mean, why do we know about their outbreaks?” Seung went on. “Often, it’s because they tested themselves. In a place like Georgia, that means spending hours in line and encouraging their friends to get tested.” He continued, “So, on one hand, you get frustrated with them: ‘How come you just don’t give me the list of names?’ But, at the same time, there’s a lot of other gatherings out there where people don’t get themselves tested, so you never know that there was a mini-outbreak.”
I asked Kennedy if he had specifics about the cluster. “I’ve mostly just heard rumors,” he said. “Innuendo, things like that.” His son had attended a graduation party, but he wasn’t clear on the details. The heart of the matter, he remained convinced, was innocent and well-intentioned fun. When we first spoke, in June, he told me that his daughter, who transferred out of Lovett last year, had recently contracted COVID-19 after going to the beach with some friends, which he and his wife had advised that she do “very carefully.” (His daughter has since recovered.)
Paxton told me that a private physician had been working for some of the Lovett parents and not coördinating with the health department, but she couldn’t tell me more about this doctor, and neither would anybody else. “None of the same rules apply to these people,” a friend who lives in the area surrounding Lovett told me, a week or so after I talked to Kennedy. By then, new cases of the coronavirus had begun to really climb in the state—roughly two thousand were being confirmed each day. “We’re talking about kids who drive Range Rovers and Mercedes to school, spreading the virus with abandon and living their best life, having to face zero consequences, not participating in the tracing effort,” the friend added.
Khan sent an update to Meredyth Cole on June 5th. “We are already almost three weeks away from the time of potential exposure in mid-May and might have passed the critical period of transmission of infection,” he wrote. “Yet the possibility of carriage and transmission of infection remains.” The letter noted that there were still seventy-five cases and contacts associated with the Lovett cluster that Khan’s team had been unable to reach. “We would advise that all those that we were not able to reach get tested,” Khan wrote. He shared a draft of a letter that recommended testing and listed nearby testing sites. Cole did not reply. Khan e-mailed again five days later. “We need your assistance in finishing up the work,” he wrote.
I asked Paxton whether she thought that people who are well off are less likely to coöperate, perhaps believing that they can handle everything privately. She replied that there are many reasons that someone might resist coöperating. I also spoke with Michael Reid, a professor of medicine who runs the contact-tracing effort in San Francisco. He mentioned “a kind of graduation party” in that area, after which a kid tested positive—the kid’s father, when contacted, “was very reluctant to give the names of other kids in the graduation party,” he said. Reid, too, was reluctant to draw sweeping conclusions, though he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that there was “more diffidence to engaging with contact tracing” among wealthier people, who, as he put it, “have more agency, compared to communities that are just overwhelmed by this disease and want to do everything they can to stop its spread.”
In the end, a number of Lovett families were never reached. Seung told me that the critical window for an investigation is about five days. After that, he said, “you might catch some of them, but others have already been infected, and you’re really trying to figure out what you can learn from this episode. How big was it? How many people got infected? What really went wrong at this school gathering? Why is it hard to find everybody?”
By early July, there were more than a hundred and fifty thousand reported cases of COVID-19 in Georgia, and the number was increasing by more than three thousand a day. Paxton told me that directors of contact-tracing efforts elsewhere in the state were “encountering the same kinds of things” she faced when attempting to trace the Lovett outbreak. And “Lovett,” she said, had “kind of become a code word.” She explained, “One of the other district directors was reporting a cluster investigation that wasn’t going as smoothly as she wanted, and she characterized it as, ‘Oh, yes, it’s Lovett Part 2.’ So it got into our lexicon.”
“It’s not just Georgia,” Paxton went on. “Everywhere there are difficulties.” A report in the Times noted that “contact tracing, a cornerstone of the public health arsenal to tamp down the coronavirus across the world, has largely failed in the United States.” By July, new hospitalizations in Georgia were surging; some state hospitals began to run out of available I.C.U beds. On July 16th, Governor Kemp announced that he was suing the mayor of Atlanta for issuing a citywide order that mandated the wearing of masks. (A judge sent the suit to mediation; Kemp recently dropped it.) That same day, the Journal-Constitution reported an outbreak among staff at the Ansley Golf Club, an exclusive club in downtown Atlanta, which required masks only upon entry, and which had kept open its restaurant and “men’s grill.” One member of Ansley told me, “It’s safer out on the golf course right now.” Some sixty-seven employees had tested positive, leading the club to close. At least one Lovett family with a 2020 graduate belongs to Ansley; at least three other Lovett alumni are also members there. Paxton told me she had “no indications that the cases are related.”
On July 22nd, an interview with Kemp appeared in the Marietta Daily Journal, which serves the area where many Lovett families reside. When asked about the persistence of the virus in the state, Kemp blamed, among other things, parents throwing back-yard graduation parties for their children. (He also speculated that the protests against police brutality could have played a role.) “Tossed under the bus by our own Guv’nah,” Thornton Kennedy texted me, when I asked him about the comment. I asked Kennedy about the Ansley Golf Club. He belongs to a different club, he said, the Piedmont Driving Club, a few miles away. “But for the grace of God,” he texted, “the P.D.C. could be next.” On a recent visit to the P.D.C., I spotted some seventy kids and parents clustered around the pool, behaving much the same as they did in summers past, playing tag and other games, shouting and singing, not a mask in sight. A White House report released at the end of July noted that Georgia was “experiencing widespread community spread without evidence of improvement,” and that Georgia’s new case rate and test-positivity rate were both nearly twice the national average. The state’s testing output, meanwhile, was just a third of the national average. Among Georgia’s “red zone” areas, according to the report, was Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Alpharetta: the Lovett zone.
On July 30th, Lovett held an actual graduation, with caps, gowns, and diplomas, at the school’s football stadium. Distancing was observed; students and “most attendees” wore masks, according to a story a few days later in the Journal-Constitution, which noted that the school was awaiting confirmation of a report that a student who had been at the ceremony tested positive for the coronavirus. A week and a half later, a Lovett official told me that “there may have been a Lovett graduate in attendance” who was tested beforehand and subsequently received a positive result. The school had still not “received any official notification of a positive test by an event attendee nor any department of health,” the official explained. This week, Lovett students in grades six through twelve began a staggered return to campus; this semester, the school is taking a “hybrid” approach to classes, combining remote and in-person instruction.
Crystal Watson, a professor with the Center for Health Security, at Johns Hopkins, told me that contact tracing is “more of a nuanced tool to prevent further outbreaks, once we have cases relatively under control. And right now there isn’t much control of the epidemic happening in Georgia.” In early August, I asked Cody Hall, Kemp’s press secretary, whether effective contact tracing remains possible in Georgia, as schools open with in-person teaching and case numbers continue to climb. “Based on what the Department of Public Health has told us, the increased cases certainly make contact tracing more difficult, which is why they are working to onboard hundreds more contact tracers in the next few weeks,” he replied. Hall added that executive orders by Kemp allowed “districts the authority to craft mitigation efforts that best fit their local communities.” The wearing of masks remained “strongly encouraged,” but not mandatory.
The same day, Georgia notched its two-hundred-thousandth case, and a photo from a reopened public school in Georgia’s Cherokee County, Fulton’s neighbor to the northwest, went viral: dozens of smiling seniors posed for a class picture, in a tight cluster outside of their school, without masks. Eight days later, the school was closed until the end of the month, after fourteen students tested positive for the coronavirus. In a letter about the closing, the county’s superintendent emphasized transparency “beyond any requirements by the Department of Public Health.” (It seems possible that public schools in the Atlanta area have learned something from what happened at Lovett—spokespeople with both Fulton County Schools and Atlanta Public Schools told me that FERPA laws allow them to share student addresses, as necessary, in the case of a public-health emergency.)
In his interview with the Marietta Daily Journal, Kemp had said, “We just got to hit reset, get everybody to hunker down here for four weeks.” That was nearly four weeks ago. Georgia has since reported ninety-one thousand new cases of the virus. “I’m about to send Thornton off to college in the middle of this,” Thornton Kennedy texted me, referring to his son. The younger Kennedy is headed to school in Maryland. “It’s not great there, either, but their Governor seems to be a little bit more functional, more competent than ours,” he went on. “So we’ll see.” He added, “I’m just glad Thornton survived high school.”
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