A classroom at Pio Pico Elementary School in Santa Ana, Calif., July 8.
Photo: Mark Rightmire/Zuma PressSchools should open in the fall. It’s critical for meeting the educational and social needs of children. But local officials should have the discretion to take tailored actions to help keep children safe. One thing about Covid-19 is clear: We don’t fully understand its severity and transmission. At various turns, we’ve both underestimated and overestimated the virus.
The debate over schools has been swept up in a political maelstrom. Reopening schools will draw more controversy if people believe their school district was forced into opening. I’ve talked to Republican and Democratic governors about their strategies. The commitment to reopening is universal. Their approach is appropriately varied to local conditions.
The main risk is transmission inside school buildings, but there are ways to reduce the chance of a big outbreak. Germany and Norway reopened schools with stringent precautions such as distancing and masking. But when Israel reopened schools, large outbreaks followed.
In my home state, Connecticut, K-12 students will be required to wear masks. Many districts are attempting to change the structure of the week to make classrooms less crowded. New York City and other districts are contemplating staggered schedules, in which students would spend some days in the classroom and others at home.
The use of hand-washing stations will be routine. Desks will be farther apart. Teachers should be given protective equipment. Colleges are using pooled testing of students and teachers to reduce risk, and this practice could be adopted widely. These measures are costly, and districts will need financial and technical support. Reopening schools will also require keeping outbreaks under control. It would be more difficult to reopen safely in Florida right now than Massachusetts. Prevalence matters.
Some will ask why it’s worth bothering with all these precautions. These critics argue that children are virtually impervious to catching and spreading the virus and rarely get seriously ill even when infected.
The evidence is varied. Many studies do show children are less susceptible to catching and spreading the virus. Less than 10% of reported infections in Germany, Italy and the U.S. have been in people under 18. It’s possible that because children typically get milder cases of Covid, they are less likely to spread the virus through sneezing and coughing.
Yet some studies have found that children may be as likely as adults to become infected, partly because kids have more close contacts. And virus levels in their respiratory droplets can be just as high as for adults. The evidence is still emerging, and credible studies can be marshaled to support both more and less caution.
Then there is the question of severity. When children are infected, there is wide agreement that they are less likely to get seriously ill compared with adults. But lower risk does not mean no risk.
The number of children hospitalized with serious Covid in the U.S. is small. But the largest study of 2,100 pediatric Covid patients from China found that 5% of children developed severe disease with low blood oxygen; 0.6% became more critically ill with respiratory failure, shock or multiple organ dysfunction. Researchers in the U.S. are also investigating a rare inflammatory syndrome related to infection that can make children seriously ill and damage their hearts.
In arguing that Covid is benign in children, some compare it with the flu, which in 2018-19 tragically claimed about 480 children’s lives in America. Yet that year flu caused 11.3 million cases of symptomatic illness in children. The rates of Covid infection are likely much lower, as children were deliberately shielded from much of the risk. We don’t know what the data would look like if the novel coronavirus spread as widely in children as the flu. We should adopt reasonable measures in schools so that we never have to find out.
Dr. Gottlieb is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, 2017-19. He serves on the boards of Pfizer and Illumina and is a partner at the venture-capital firm New Enterprise Associates.
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Schools Can Open Safely This Fall - The Wall Street Journal
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