Washington Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Sunday that as school districts weigh whether to reopen entirely for in-person learning amid the coronavirus crisis, which continues to worsen in many states, the “presumption should be “that students return to school for the fall semester.
“Each community will have to make the determination on the circumstances for the reopening and what steps they will take to reopen it,” Azar said on “Face the Nation.” “But the presumption should be that we take our children to school.”
With the academic year slated to begin in the coming weeks, school districts are faced with the decision to allow students to return to classroom learning five days a week, switch to online learning, or adopt a hybrid model that combines both approaches. .
President Trump lobbied schools earlier this month to get them fully operational in the fall, and even threatened to withhold federal funds from those who are not. But he acknowledged last week that school districts in communities with high infection rates may have to postpone their reopening for several weeks.
On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a long-awaited guide for schools, which asked elementary and secondary schools to follow social distancing, divide students into established groups to minimize contacts with other children and recommend that students and staff cover their faces, among other guidelines. But the health agency, which strongly advocated for schools to open their doors, did not provide a benchmark on when schools should consider closing if infections increase in their communities.
When asked why that benchmark was not included in the CDC’s guide, Azar said the Trump administration “does not believe there are uniform thresholds for the reopening of schools.”
“The steps we can use that are data-driven, informed by doctors, are smart and responsive approaches that can get our children back safely and our staff to school,” he said.
More than 30 states and the District of Columbia are experiencing an increase in coronavirus infections, and Azar said the nation “faces a very serious situation with these outbreaks.”
“It is serious, but the good news is that, thanks to the president’s leadership, we have the tools to deal with it,” he said. “We have health system capacity, we have personal protective equipment.”
To mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, which has already claimed the lives of more than 146,000 people in the United States, Azar advocated that Americans cover their faces and practice social distancing and good hygiene.
For areas of the country that are considered “hot spots,” he said bars should be closed and restrict meals indoors and gatherings at home.
“We know this works,” he said. “The modeling shows that those simple steps will lead to results in terms of disease spread that are comparable to closing without all the pain of closing. And if we comply as individuals if we don’t wear our masks, we can avoid more closings. But if we don’t That will be the consequence. “
Still, delays in testing have persisted, and Senate Democrats say half of the $ 25 billion passed by Congress for testing and monitoring contacts has yet to be forced.
But Azar said the Department of Health and Human Services has sent $ 11 billion to states that have not yet used it, and asked public health laboratories to increase their capacity.
“We are certainly talking to the governors and telling them that they must use this money to get going and make that happen,” he said. “We are meeting all of their testing, supply needs. But at the end of the day, our governors have to take that initiative and run their public health labs as we improve testing, say, our commercial labs.”
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