https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/20/opinion/listen-science-reopen-schools/
Quote:
President Trump recently took to Twitter to demand that the country's schools reopen in the fall. He has framed the conversation as one that pits fear-mongering Democrats opposed to in-person schooling against Republicans committed to reopening the economy. As public health professionals and parents of school-age children, we urge the country: Ignore Trump.
Instead, listen to the science, which says that schools can and should reopen for in-person learning with appropriate risk reduction strategies, while officials also implement aggressive steps to keep community transmission low.
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Prolonged time away from schools has led to months of lost learning and widened gaps in educational achievement, especially for some students of color and those in lower income households. Adding months more to this toll will be an educational disaster that some children may never recover from. School closures also threaten some children's safety, due to increased child neglect, hurt children's mental health, and keep many from getting enough to eat.
The harms of school closure are clear. What about the risks of reopening?
Multiple studies show that children are not only less likely to become seriously ill from COVID-19, they are also only half as likely to get infected in the first place. Overall, the rate of infection requiring hospitalization among US school-age children (5 to 17) since the beginning of the pandemic though July 4 was roughly 1 in 20,000.
What about the risk to teachers and staff? Again, listen to the science. A report led by the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Obama concluded that children appear less likely than adults to transmit COVID-19 to others unlike other viruses like influenza though this evidence is still limited and preliminary. Studies examining schools with known cases of COVID-19 have shown low transmission rates for instance, in one case, just two students and no teachers infected out of 863 close contacts. Others show zero confirmed infections even among teachers and students who sat in the same classroom with a symptomatic child.
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