At yesterday’s White House Coronavirus Task Force news briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked a question many parents and children have been wondering: When will schools reopen? Here’s Fauci’s coronavirus school update.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ said we should look to the curve of COVID-19 for answers, as well as our response to these changes.
“You know, it is unpredictable, but you can get a feel for it if we start talking about the things where the curve goes down,” Fauci said. “How we respond and what kind of a rebound we see or don’t see, I think is going to have a lot of influence probably more immediately on things like summer camps than it does in the fall.”
Most schools across the country shut down in March as a preventative measure against spreading coronavirus. So is there a potential reopening time for which we can hope?
“I fully expect — though I’m humble enough to know that I can’t accurately predict — that by the time we get to the fall, we will have this under control enough that it certainly will not be the way it is now where people are shutting schools.”
Big Changes
School won’t be the same as it was before, Fauci said, pointing to the fact that COVID-19 won’t just disappear. Certain steps we’re currently taking — identifying, isolating, and contact tracing the virus – will remain ongoing. Likewise, Fauci said that by the fall, “…we’ll have a better feel with the antibody test about what the actual penetrance of this infection was in society.”
Fauci then posed some rhetorical questions this information raises:
- How many people have actually been infected?
- Who’s protected? “If you have antibodies it’s very likely that you’re protected,” he added.
- Who’s vulnerable?
- Do you treat vulnerables different than you treat the people who are protected?
Bearing these considerations in mind, Fauci concluded, “All of these things are going to go into the decision of just how much back to the original way we’d like it to be in the fall. Bottom line is no absolute prediction, but I think we’re going to be in good shape.”
Coronavirus School Update: Source
White House Coronavirus Task Force Briefing 4/7/20
CNN