Developments
The Biden administration announced Thursday that new sanctions against Myanmar will target military commander Min Aung Hlaing and his deputy Soe Win, four members of the State Administration Council, as well as the spouses and adult children of those being sanctioned. The move will prevent the generals from accessing more than $1 billion in Myanmar government funds held in the U.S.
New Zealand has suspended all military and high-level political contact. European Union foreign ministers will meet Feb. 22 to review the bloc’s relations. The U.N. Human Rights Council has scheduled a special session on Friday to consider the crisis, and the leaders of Malaysia and Indonesia called for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to convene a special meeting.
Many of the common preconditions to opening schools — including vaccines for teachers or students and low rates of infection in the community — are not necessary to safely teach children in person, a consensus of pediatric infectious disease experts said in a new survey.
The 175 experts, mostly pediatricians focused on public health, largely agreed that it was safe for schools to be open for elementary students for full-time and in-person learning now. That is true even in communities where COVID-19 infections are widespread, as long as basic safety measures are taken. Most important, they said, were universal masking, physical distancing, adequate ventilation and avoidance of large group activities.
The experts were surveyed by the New York Times in the last week.
“There is no situation in which schools can’t be open unless they have evidence of in-school transmission,” said Dr. David Rosen, an assistant professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Washington University in St. Louis.
The risks of being out of school were far greater, many of the experts said. “The mental health crisis caused by school closing will be a worse pandemic than COVID,” said Dr. Uzma Hasan, division chief of pediatric infectious diseases at RWJBarnabas Health in New Jersey.
For the most part, these responses match current federal guidance, which does not mention vaccines, and reflect significant scientific evidence that schools are not a major source of spread for children or adults. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to release new recommendations today on how schools can safely operate, and the Biden administration has prioritized opening schools.
But the expert consensus in the survey is at odds with the position of certain policymakers, school administrators, parent groups and teachers unions. Some in these groups have indicated that they do not want to return to school buildings even next fall, when it’s likely that teachers will be able to be vaccinated, though not most students. Some districts have faced resistance to reopening, particularly in large cities, where teachers have threatened to strike if they are called back to school buildings.
And some experts concurred that open schools pose risks, particularly to the adults working there, and said many parts of the country had not yet controlled the virus enough to safely open.
“Just because school opening isn’t causing higher levels of community transmission doesn’t mean that there isn’t individual risk to teachers and staff,” said Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and a visiting professor of health policy at George Washington University.
About half the nation’s students are still learning from home, and while a majority of districts are offering at least some in-person learning and more are trying to reopen this spring, many are offering students just a few hours a day or a few days a week.
Limiting time in school increased other risks, some said, including depression, hunger, anxiety, isolation and learning loss.
“Children’s learning and emotional and, in some cases, physical health is being severely impacted by being out of school,” said Dr. Lisa Abuogi, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at the University of Colorado, expressing her personal view. “I spend part of my clinical time in the ER, and the amount of mental distress we are seeing in children related to schools is off the charts.”