Children in an elementary school class wear masks and sit as separate desks according to coronavirus guidelines during summer school sessions at Happy Day School in Monterey Park, California, on July 9.
Frederic J. Brown | AFP | fake pictures
Members of a leading group of infectious disease experts warned Thursday against reopening schools in Florida, Texas and other states where coronavirus cases are on the rise, saying older children are just as likely to spread Covid-19 as children. Adults.
“The simple answer is no,” said Dr. Tina Tan, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University, when asked if she would suggest reopening schools in states like Florida, Texas, California and Arizona in the near future.
“When you have such waves of disease in the community, you’re basically asking for trouble if you open schools because you bring in people from all over the community who might be exposed to it,” Tan said in a conference call. Organized by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
The southern and western states of the United States have reported weeks of escalating Covid-19 cases. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that authorities are “monitoring and acting aggressively to control the infection in Texas, Arizona, California, Florida.”
“There are sections of the country that we do not anticipate, for example, Florida, Texas, etc., but we are working with very talented people, very bright people and everything will work,” Trump said at the press conference. .
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that the state reported a record number of additional new cases and a positivity rate, or the number of positive cases to total tests done, at about 7.4% in the past 14 days, a number that “continues to rise modestly.”
“It is imperative that people pay attention to what the infection rate is in the community because that will determine whether or not it is safe to open schools,” Tan said.
Before reopening, all schools must have advance plans in case a student tests positive for Covid-19 and must consider when to close if the outbreak worsens, said Dr. Wendy Armstrong, a professor of medicine at the School of Medicine in Emory University and a member of the group’s board.
“Schools are a microcosm of their communities. They don’t operate in a vacuum,” said Armstrong. “And for schools to open safely, the spread of communities must be controlled and must not be explosive.”
While some studies have shown that children appear to be infected with Covid-19 less frequently than adults, others have shown that they can carry the same amount of the virus, Armstrong said.
She said a recently published study in South Korea indicated that while children under the age of 9 didn’t transmit the virus as often to their families, teens were at least as likely to transmit the disease as adults.
Armstrong noted that countries like Denmark and Norway allowed younger children to return to school earlier than older children, but added that the virus was better contained in those countries.
“Ultimately, the community must be responsible for its own health,” Armstrong said. “As an adult infectious disease doctor, once again, I cannot reinforce enough that adults need to do the right thing to conserve our most precious resource, which is our children.”
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