Reopening Schools In September Is a Cruel Experiment
As Donald Trump keeps calling for the nation’s 124,000 public and private schools to reopen, even as he’s failed to contain COVID-19, we are about to embark on a massive, poorly controlled national experiment with the subjects being most of the nation’s 55 million school-age children, their families and their teachers.
Unfortunately, this may not go well—which helps explain why New York City is one of the few major school districts planning to open school buildings to students in September, and only on a staggered basis—and we could be facing a significant upsurge in COVID-19 cases, including in states where the outbreak seems, at the moment, relatively under control.
Early on in the pandemic, we were hopeful that children would be less vulnerable than adults to acquiring COVID-19, but already this month, significant outbreaks were seen at a children’s summer camp in Georgia, as well as cases identified in recently opened schools in Indiana, Georgia, and Tennessee. And a just-released study from South Korea confirmed that children can be as susceptible to being infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus as adults.