Principal Pam Rasmussen (L) takes the temperature of the arriving students according to the coronavirus guidelines during the summer school sessions at Happy Day School in Monterey Park, California on July 9, 2020.
Frederic J. Brown | AFP | fake pictures
Children in the US are more likely than children in other countries to have underlying conditions that put them at increased risk of becoming seriously ill with Covid-19, complicating the debate in the US Commissioner of Administration, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, said Monday.
President Donald Trump has been pressuring American schools to reopen this fall, tweeting last week that schools in “Germany, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, along with many other countries” were “smoothly open.” But Gottlieb said Monday that it is difficult to compare the United States with most of those countries because they were able to reduce the level of daily infection to a manageable level before schools reopened.
The outbreak in the U.S., by contrast, continues to set new daily records as the Trump administration increases pressure on local officials to commit to reopening schools. The United States suffers the worst Covid-19 outbreak in the world with more than 3.3 million confirmed cases so far and at least 135,200 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
“The only country that had open schools in a context of a good degree of spread was Sweden and they all extrapolate from that,” he said in “Squawk Box.” “We didn’t study that systematically. We don’t know how many children were actually infected.”
Young people are much less likely than the elderly to become seriously ill and die from Covid-19, although some children have died from the disease. Health officials have also warned of serious complications in children that appear to be associated with the virus, as well as possible long-term health effects.
It is unclear exactly how the virus affects children and whether young people, many of whom never develop symptoms or only develop mild symptoms, play a major role in the spread of the virus. Due to limited evidence among young people, scientists have struggled to draw firm conclusions about the ease with which young people can transmit the virus to each other and to older and more vulnerable people.
Another concern to consider when deciding whether to reopen US schools and how to do it, Gottlieb said, is that young people in the US are generally sicker than those in Sweden, for example. Regardless of age, obesity, diabetes, and other more common underlying conditions in American children put them at increased risk for a serious Covid-19 infection.
“We also cannot compare the Swedish population of children with the United States,” said Gottlieb. “We have more comorbid diseases among young people in this country, more asthma, more obesity, more diabetes, so there will be a higher risk with our school-age population.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 18.5% of American children between the ages of two and 19 suffer from obesity, or approximately 13.7 million children. According to the CDC, about 6 million children under the age of 18 have asthma, and the agency notes that black children suffer from asthma at more than double the rate of white children. And the CDC says that about 193,000 people under the age of 20 in the US have diabetes.
Those risk factors along with the increasingly widespread level of spread across the country and particularly high levels of infection in a handful of so-called critical states will complicate the reopening of schools in the fall, Gottlieb said.
“I think it is going to be very difficult for certain states or certain cities to reopen on time right now, and in fact, we have already seen Arizona delay reopening its school system and may have to do it again,” he said. “It’s going to be a lot easier to open schools this fall in Massachusetts, Maryland or Michigan than it is in Miami or Houston right now.”
Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and a member of Pfizer’s boards, Genetic Testing Begins Tempus and the Illumina biotech company. She also serves as co-chair of the Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Royal Caribbean “Healthy Sail Panel”.
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