As coronavirus cases increase across the country, President Donald Trump is increasing his pressure for schools to open for in-person instruction in the fall after minimizing the risk of children spreading the virus.
“All districts should be making preparations to open,” Trump said at Thursday’s coronavirus-focused press conference. “It is something very, very important. It is not politics.”
But Trump and cabinet officials, such as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, have made several misleading claims in their speech to reopen schools, and DeVos even claims that children are “brakes” on the virus, despite officials Health officials say there is no evidence of that. On the question of whether children transmit the virus less than adults, the working group Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci have warned that the subject needs more study before drawing conclusions.
Notably absent from the podium in the last three coronavirus briefings, health care experts have been sidelined to separate media interviews to qualify the president’s misleading claims.
While serious diseases caused by coronavirus are rare among children, and those under the age of 10 do not appear to contract or spread the virus as often as adults, the question of transmission has not been answered since schools across the world country closed in March.
“There is a wide range of studies on children and the jury is not yet aware of their role in the spread of the virus,” said Dr. John Brownstein, director of innovation at Boston Children’s Hospital, professor at Harvard Medical School. and contributor to ABC News. “But I don’t think there is any evidence that they don’t play a role, it’s the amount of transmission they are capable of compared to adults that is in question.”
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There is still a lot of research to be done on how the virus affects children and how children transmit it, but there is no evidence to suggest that children are immune or can stop the disease.
“I don’t think any experts are saying that children are a dead end or that children cannot continue the chains of transmission and cannot play a role in community outreach,” said Brownstein.
The consensus among the scientific community is that the more the virus spreads in a community, the riskier it is to open schools.
Affirmation: Children do not contract or transmit viruses ‘easily’
ABC News White House correspondent Jonathan Karl pressured the president on Wednesday about the reopening of schools, noting that the “real risk” is that children may carry the virus from schools to their parents and grandparents at home. .
“Well, they say they don’t transmit very easily, and a lot of people say they don’t transmit, and we’re studying, Jon, very hard, that particular topic, that they don’t bring it home with them. Now, they don’t understand it easily,” he said. Trump.
But experts say there is not yet enough complete data to come to such a conclusion.
Even White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, whom Trump called a “tremendous woman,” has said the question of how contagious children are needs further study. Shortly after Wednesday’s briefing, in which Trump said she was “right outside,” she appeared on Fox News and was presented with the president’s claim.
“There are still open questions there, and that’s why the president concluded, ‘We are studying this very hard,'” he said.
Birx noted a study done in South Korea and suggested that children under the age of 10 transmit the virus less frequently, “but I think it needs to be confirmed here.”
That study also found that those between the ages of 10 and 19 can transmit the virus at least as effectively as adults.
“Even if children are half as likely to transmit the virus compared to adults, even in that setting, it is still important because children play a role in transmission,” said Brownstein, referring to the same study. “And once you put kids in their natural school environment, that completely changes things. You have close proximity, poor hygiene, so that could offset their potentially minor role and transmission.”
Birx also raised concerns at a July 8 briefing at the Department of Education about the possibility of the virus spreading from children to parents and older grandparents, acknowledging that “the lowest portion examined [of the population] they are under 10 years old. “
About 3.3 million adults over the age of 65 live in a home with school-age children, according to a July Kaiser Family Foundation analysis.
In an interview with the Washington Post on Friday, Fauci scoffed at a National Institutes of Health study that started in May and is expected to wrap up in December that tracks 6,000 people from 2,000 families to provide more information on child transmission. to adult.
“Because although we have some information about it, we still need more information,” he said.
In particular, the state of Arkansas reported Wednesday that children now account for nearly 18% of cases in a county, well above the national average, with the state’s Acting Secretary of Health Dr. José Romero saying: “This represents, most likely, it spread within tightly knit family units.”
Claim: If the virus is contracted, children “get better faster”
In the same response to Jonathan Karl, Trump made another misleading and uncontrolled claim about the impact the virus has on children.
“They don’t bring him home easily, and if they catch him, they get better quickly,” Trump replied.
And at Thursday’s coronavirus press conference, the president said: “Children are a small percentage, less than 1%, and even a small percentage of 1%.”
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, as of July 16, 241,904 cases of coronavirus were reported in children, and children accounted for 8% of all cases in 49 states, along with New York City, Washington, DC, Puerto Rico. and Guam, all reported by age. .
Although mortality remains much lower, with fewer than 100 childhood deaths from COVID-19 in the United States, children are not completely immune to the disease.
Fauci, in a Senate hearing on May 12, said he is “very reserved for making broad predictions” when it comes to sending children back to school.
“The more we learn, the more we see things this virus can do that we didn’t see in studies in China or Europe,” Fauci said. “I think it is better to be careful not to be arrogant in thinking that children are completely immune to the ill effects.”
Affirmation: Trump Says Administration Has ‘National Strategy’ For Reopening Of Schools
While the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have provided different levels of “guidance” to schools, the federal government has yet to issue a federal standard for reopening.
Instead, the administration has largely criticized state and local officials, as it has since the early days of the pandemic on issues such as the acquisition of equipment and medical personnel.
“We have a national strategy, but as you know, ultimately it is up to the state governors,” Trump said Wednesday.
The CDC released its long-awaited guidelines for reopening schools Thursday night.
Currently, they do not recommend that schools conduct universal symptom tests for K-12 students, but they encourage parents or caregivers to monitor their children for signs of infectious disease every day.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, in an interview last week on “Fox & Friends,” also said: “We leave localities exactly what guidelines work, because the guidelines in a state like North Dakota must have a different aspect to that of a locality “. like Miami. ”
In particular, when the White House released its guidelines for a safe reopening in May, an overwhelming majority of states moved through the phased approach without meeting initial entry criteria, despite experts warning that doing so would provoke the type of outbreaks in the United States. Currently viewing.
“Schools have to depend on the measures they can take to ensure the safety of children,” said Brownstein. “But it certainly has to be in concert with mitigation efforts in the community,” he said.
“You can safely reopen schools if there is minimal community broadcast, but it is much more difficult to do so in states like California, Texas and Florida, where there is a lot of community outreach and children could serve to amplify the broadcast,” he added.
ABC News’ Anne Flaherty and Ben Gittleson contributed to this report.
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