Pence urges restart of schools
Return needed by kids, working families, vice president says
INDIANAPOLIS — Vice President Mike Pence kept up the Trump administration’s push for reopening schools and universities, insisting Friday that it can be done safely even amid public worries about the health risks posed by the coronavirus.
Pence told an audience at Marian University in Indianapolis that having children back in classrooms was a necessary step to seeing more parents returning to jobs.
“Opening up our schools again is the best thing for our kids,” Pence said. “It’s also the best thing for working families.”
The former Indiana governor heard administrators at the private Catholic university describe their safety steps toward starting the fall semester next month.
Education Secretary Betsy Devos and Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus coordinator, joined Pence at the event.
Pence discussed the importance of in-person learning for at-risk students, citing resources for counseling and special needs and children who rely upon school lunches.
“The risk of the coronavirus to healthy children is very low,” Pence said. “It’s also important to remember that there are real costs, far beyond academics, to our kids if they’re not in school.”
In other developments:
Seeking to address newly rising infection numbers, Washington, D.C., is mandating that anyone arriving in the nation’s capital after nonessential travel to a coronavirus hot spot must self-quarantine for 14 days.
The executive order from Mayor Muriel Bowser comes days after Bowser took the step of making masks mandatory outdoors in the nation’s capital.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom pledged Friday to do more to protect farmworkers, grocery clerks and other essential workers — many of whom are Latino — from the health and economic harms of the coronavirus as the infection spreads through their communities.
“Not enough focus, candidly, has been placed on essential workers in this state,” Newsom said during his daily news conference.
New Orleans’ mayor is shutting down the city’s bars because of rising coronavirus numbers and is 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 they became “a gathering in themselves, and no mask-wearing and the like.”
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott issued an order requiring people in the state to wear masks in public to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.
Scott said that outbreaks hitting the South and West might be spreading back toward the Northeast and Vermont.
A state judge ruled Friday that New Jersey authorities can shut down a gym that has repeatedly defied Gov. Phil Murphy’s executive order to remain closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The ruling held Atilis Gym of Bellmawr, in the Philadelphia suburbs, in contempt of court.
It authorized the state health department to put locks on the doors or put up barriers to ensure compliance.