Schools should open, CDC says
Revised statement stresses benefits, downplays risks
WASHINGTON — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a call to reopen schools in a statement, listing numerous benefits of being in school and downplaying the potential health risks.
The CDC published the statement, along with new “resources and tools,” on Thursday evening, two weeks after President Donald Trump criticized its earlier recommendations on school reopenings as “very tough and expensive.”
“Reopening schools creates opportunity to invest in the education, well-being and future of one of America’s greatest assets — our children — while taking every precaution to protect students, teachers, staff and all their families,” the agency’s new statement said.
Meanwhile, on Friday, public health official Dr. Deborah Birx warned in a television interview that the surge of cases in the South and Southwest could make its way north.
“What started out very much as a Southern and Western epidemic is starting to move up the East Coast, into Tennessee, Arkansas, up into Missouri, up across Colorado,” Birx told NBC’s “Today” show. She implored people to wear masks, wash their hands and keep at least
6 feet apart.
While many public health experts and pediatricians agree that returning children to classrooms is critically important, they warn that it has to be done cautiously, with a plan based on scientific evidence.
The new package of CDC materials began with a statement titled “The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools This Fall” that repeatedly described children as being at low risk for being infected by or transmitting the virus.
The package includes checklists for parents, guidance on wearing face coverings, mitigation measures for schools to take and other information that some epidemiologists described as useful.
This more technical guidance generally did not counter the agency’s earlier recommendations on school reopenings, such as keeping desks 6 feet apart and keeping smaller-than-usual groups of children in one classroom all day instead of allowing them to move around.
The guidance suggests schools take measures like keeping students in small cohorts, having one teacher stay with the same group all day and using outdoor spaces. It also suggests planning for how to handle when someone in a school tests positive, including developing plans for contact tracing.
It also includes strategies to support students of various ages wearing masks. For parents, it suggests checking their children each morning for signs of illness before sending them to school and talking to them about preventive measures.
While most research suggests that children infected by the coronavirus are at low risk of becoming severely ill or dying, how often they become infected and how efficiently they spread the virus to others is not definitively known. Children in middle and high schools may also be at much higher risk of both than those younger than 10, according to some recent studies.
The new statement came from a working group convened by officials at the Department of Health and Human Services after Trump made his critical comments. A federal official familiar with the group said it included minimal representation from the CDC, which had already written most of the other material released Thursday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency within the Health and Human Services Department, took the lead in writing the statement, which focuses heavily on the positive effects on children’s mental health from going to school.
Experts on the subject at the CDC did not have direct communication with the working group after their input on the statement was interpreted as being too cautious, the official said. Instead, the group communicated directly with the office of Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC director, which did seek input from experts at the agency.
A DIFFICULT BALANCE
In a call with reporters Friday, Redfield said he understood the “trepidation” many parents and teachers are feeling about reopening schools, and that decisions should be made based on levels of infection in each community.
The new materials, he said, were not meant to replace the CDC’s earlier guidance on school reopenings but “to really help put some more granular detail in how administrators and parents can begin to think about putting those guidelines into a practical plan.”
Still, he said, “The goal line is to get the majority of these students back to face-to-face learning.”
As the start of the academic year approaches, school districts across the country have been questioning whether to reopen in person, with distance learning or with a combination.
Some, including in Los Angeles and Nashville, Tenn., have said classes will be fully online to start; others, including in New York City, are planning a mix of in-person classes and days at home. Private schools are wrestling with the same issues.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, a private school in Washington’s Maryland suburbs attended by the president’s son Barron, said in a letter to parents that it was still deciding whether to adopt a hybrid model for the fall that would allow limited in-person education or to resume holding all classes online as was done in the spring.
Teachers union leaders said the St. Andrew’s situation should bring home to Trump how complicated reopening is for schools trying to balance the educational needs of their children and the health concerns of the staff, students and community.
“The president now has to face what every other parent in America and every other teacher in America is grappling with right now, which is: In the midst of a pandemic, how do schools keep their kids and their faculty safe?” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
AT-HOME RISKS
Redfield told reporters that while the Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for the CDC’s new schools statement, the agency believed it was important because “parents and teachers and decision-makers” needed to understand some of the negative consequences of keeping children home.
They include putting children at higher risk of “physical, sexual, and emotional maltreatment and abuse,” the statement said, adding that closing schools disproportionately harms low-income and minority children and those with disabilities.
“I don’t think as many parents realize what I’ve tried to say — there really have been substantial negative public health consequences for children not being back in school,” Redfield said.
In a separate public appearance Friday, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the country should try “as best as we possibly can” to keep children in school, but stressed that protecting students and staff members “absolutely has to be paramount.”
Asked on the call about the many hot spots around the country right now and whether it would be appropriate for communities with high levels of virus transmission to open schools, Redfield downplayed the extent of local outbreaks.
“A majority of the nation right now actually has positivity rates that are less than 5%, so clearly there’s many parts of our nation that are having infection rates that would not be inconsistent with our guidance,” he said.
But of the nation’s 10 largest school districts, only New York City and Chicago appear to have achieved such low positivity rates, according to a New York Times analysis of city- and county-level data. Some of the biggest districts, like Miami-Dade County in Florida and Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, are in counties that have recently reported positive test rates more than four times as great as the 5% threshold, the data shows.
With regard to the virus surge, Birx said health professionals have “called out the next set of cities” where they see early warning signs, because if those cities make changes now, they “won’t become a Phoenix.” Arizona’s sprawling capital has suffered a severe outbreak, though Birx said Friday the federal government was seeing encouraging declines in positive test results there and in San Antonio, which like much of Texas has been hit hard.
In New Orleans, the mayor is shutting down the city’s bars because of rising coronavirus numbers and is also forbidding restaurants to sell alcoholic drinks to go.
Mayor LaToya Cantrell said Friday that some lines of people waiting to buy drinks were so long that they became “a gathering in themselves, and no mask-wearing and the like.”
The governor of Vermont, where cases have been among the nation’s lowest, on Friday issued an order requiring people to wear masks in public. “We are still in very good shape, but it is time to prepare,” Republican Gov. Phil Scott said.
Also Friday, McDonald’s announced it would soon start requiring masks in its restaurants.
NEW MASK, TESTING RULES
Elsewhere, a new rule on masks took effect in England on Friday, with people entering shops, banks and supermarkets now required to wear face coverings, while Romania reported a record for daily infections and France announced mandatory testing for arrivals from 16 countries.
People in England can be fined as much as $127 if they refuse to wear a mask. Places like restaurants, pubs, gyms and hairdressers are exempt.
French Prime Minister Jean Castex announced Friday that as of Aug. 1, travelers entering France from 16 countries where the viral circulation is strong — including the United States — must undergo a compulsory test on arrival at a French airport or port — unless they can present a negative test less than 72 hours old from their country of departure. Those testing positive must isolate for 14 days.
Health authorities say cases on the French mainland have surged 66% in the past three weeks and 26% in the past week alone. Concerns had already prompted the government to make mask-wearing mandatory in all indoor public spaces this week.
In Belgium, health authorities said a 3-year old girl has died after testing positive for covid-19 as new infections surged 89% from the previous week.
Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza on Friday ordered everyone entering Italy who had been in either Romania or Bulgaria during the past 14 days to self-quarantine. A few weeks ago, a cluster of cases was traced to an apartment complex in a town near Naples housing Bulgarian farmworkers.
In Italy, masks must be worn in shops and banks, on public transport and outdoors where it’s impossible to keep a safe distance apart.
German authorities plan to set up testing stations at airports to encourage people arriving from high-risk countries to get tested. They also will allow people arriving from other places to get tested for free within three days — though not at airports.
Friday’s decision by the health ministers of Germany’s 16 states came amid mounting concern that holidaymakers could bring the virus back with them. There also is worry that not everyone returning from a long list of countries designated as high-risk is going into self-quarantine for 14 days as they are supposed to — unless they test negative.
Russia, which had halted all international flights and shut down its borders in late March to stem the outbreak, is resuming international flights starting Aug. 1 with just three countries — Britain, Turkey and Tanzania — while the government works to expand the list.
Earlier this month, Russia didn’t make the list of countries whose citizens are allowed to travel to European Union countries.
So far, Russia’s health officials have reported more than 800,000 confirmed cases and 13,046 deaths.
And as scientists around the world search for a vaccine to halt the pandemic, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has dismissed activists seeking to oppose vaccinations as “nuts.”
Britain has Europe’s worst recorded pandemic toll at more than 45,600 deaths.
Information for this article was contributed by Abby Goodnough and Peter Baker of The New York Times; and by Geoff Mulvihill, Justin Pritchard, Dave Kolpack, Frances D’Emilio, Bob Christie, Morgan Lee, Audrey McAvoy, Jeff Amy, Gretchen Ehlke and Holly Ramer of The Associated Press.