CDC issues student safety guidelines
Left out: Metrics for when to close schools
New Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines call for students to wear masks, wash their hands frequently and socially distance to protect against COVID-19.
What they don’t do is say when schools should not be open at all.
A key consideration for school administrators, CDC said, was COVID-19 transmission rates in their communities. But the CDC guidance offered no specific metrics for what transmission rates would require specific actions.
The agency suggested parents label face masks with marker and have children practice putting them on and off without touching the cloth. They should make a labeled, resealable plastic bag to store the mask at lunchtime.
The guidelines also say people who had mild to moderate COVID-19 can come out of isolation after 10 days and don’t need to be retested before going back to work. If patients had a fever, it needs to be gone for at least 24 hours.
The CDC, the nation’s top public health agency, has faced considerable pressure from President Donald Trump and others to get schools reopened. Public health experts have pushed back. Community transmission levels of COVID-19 are key to reopening schools, they say, and in many parts of the country they continue to rise even as officials plan for school reopenings.
“It is critically important for our public health to open schools this fall,” CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said in a statement.
“I know this has been a difficult time for our nation’s families. School closures have disrupted normal ways of life for children and parents, and they have had negative health consequences on our youth. CDC is prepared to work with K-12 schools to safely reopen while protecting the most vulnerable,” he said.
The new CDC documents link to guidelines from May 27 that offered levels of mitigation required at different levels of COVID-19 transmission in the community, from “no to minimal community transmission” to “substantial, uncontrolled transmission.” However, neither gave specific numbers or percentages of positive tests for any of those levels.
In communities where there is substantial, uncontrolled transmission, schools should work closely with local health officials to decide whether schools should close, the CDC said.
A USA TODAY analysis on Thursday showed the country’s biggest school systems are in far worse shape than they were this spring. Eleven of the 15 largest U.S. school systems are in communities adding COVID-19 cases at more than three times the rate they were in the two weeks ending May 1.
The guidelines come as a group of more than 150 health professionals urged a sweeping shutdown, with the nation’s non-essential businesses closing and restaurant service limited to take-out. People should stay home, going out only to get food and medicine or to exercise and get fresh air, said the letter, spearheaded by the nonprofit U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
“If you don’t take these actions, the consequences will be measured in widespread suffering and death,” according to the letter addressed to Trump, federal officials and governors. In other developments:
Gary Tibbetts, a staff member for Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., died of COVID-19 in a Florida hospital, the congressman announced Friday. Tibbetts is the first congressional aide known to have died from COVID-19.
Authorities faced with limited space to store bodies awaiting autopsies are now bringing in a refrigerated cooler to help as the coronavirus pandemic surges in Hinds County, Mississippi.
Despite President Donald Trump’s pleas for schools to reopen, his son’s private school in the Maryland suburbs will not be welcoming students back fully onto its campus in the fall.