No schooling without safety
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention threw its onceconsiderable weight behind reopening the nation’s schools this week, leading its latest guidance on educational institutions with a statement titled “The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools This Fall.” Sadly, the meddling and manipulation that preceded the document limit its credibility and therefore its utility to districts grappling with a wrenching question.
The CDC’s second crack at the issue followed President Trump’s criticism of its initial guidance as “very tough and expensive” as well as an allout administration campaign to bully school districts into reopening on pain of losing their federal funding. The impression that the CDC is serving the interests of the president rather than the public undermines the purpose of an agency tasked with providing objective, scientifically informed guidance in a pandemic.
The federal government’s muddled advice on schools leaves state and local officials, as in other aspects of the coronavirus response, on their own. Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered schools to stay closed for inperson learning in the 32 counties on California’s coronavirus watch list the week before the CDC guidance emerged.
Trump and his CDC are partly right for the wrong reasons: Schools are among our most essential services, and closing them is a public health problem in itself. As the American Academy of Pediatrics has noted, children depend on schools not just for education and socialization but also for nutrition, social services and even safety in cases of abuse; parents and guardians, moreover, depend on them to be able to work. That is why the academy and other experts have rightly recommended that schools strive to resume inperson instruction in the fall.
While it’s clear that children seldom become severely ill from the virus, the CDC and the academy rely partly on evidence that they are less likely to contract and transmit the pathogen, which is far from settled. The results of a large South Korean study published last week found that children do in fact carry the virus; while those under 10 were about half as likely as adults to transmit it to others, 10 to 19yearolds spread it better than any other age group.
As Newsom’s order recognized, high local spread of the virus may therefore make schools unsafe to reopen despite their importance and even with distancing and other precautions. While the virus poses low risks to children, school outbreaks would soon affect staff, families and communities.
The reality is that if schools open in an unsafe environment — that is, without low infection rates and sufficient capacity to test, trace and contain new outbreaks — they will soon be forced to close as teachers and parents avoid them of their own volition. As with the rest of the economy and society, our ability to reopen schools can’t be separated from effective control of the pandemic.