Most children have not yet gone back to school in the U.S. — a rite of passage that takes place from late July to after Labor Day, depending on where you live.
When they do go back to school, children will become covid-19 guinea pigs to learn more about a virus that can contaminate a classroom with a single sneeze.
“They will become part of a large national experiment, and there is little doubt the infection rates will increase,” writes Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief CNN medical correspondent.
Over the past month, the number of children infected in the U.S. has increased by 90 percent to more than 380,000 cases, according to an analysis by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association. While some of that increase may be due to increased testing, younger kids starting to emerge from their homes for the first time also played a role, Gupta wrote.
By the first week of August, 90 U.S. children had died of covid-19 — less than 1 percent of all deaths.
Gupta says he decided after much discussion with his family, consideration of all the objective criteria and assessing the situation in their own community, to keep his three daughters out of school for now.
“In the age of covid-19, it seems we are all forced to become amateur epidemiologists, while also being the best parents we can be,” Gupta wrote.
Black children are disproportionately affected by covid-19 with higher rates of infections, hospitalizations and complications. A 7-year-old boy with no pre-existing conditions recently became the youngest coronavirus victim in Georgia.
Gupta says his daughters want to go back to school.
“They are placing enormous pressure on us parents to make it so. They miss their friends, the social structure and the immersion in humanity that kids need and crave at this age. Virtual learning has played an important role for them, but it is not a substitute for in-person learning, especially for younger kids.”
At least 63 of the 101 largest school districts in the U.S. decided to start the year with virtual learning. Others decided to go in-person with virtual options.
There are 13,598 regular school districts in the U.S. as of 2016-2017, EdWeek reported. Of the 10 largest, five are in Florida. These are the 10 largest, in order:
New York City, Los Angeles Unified, Chicago, Miami-Dade County, Clark County NV, Broward County Fla, Houston TX, Hillsborough County Fla, Orange County Fla and Palm Beach County, Fla.
Schools have been testing students, scrubbing desks, laying down social distancing floor decals and providing hand sanitizer stations in line with recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gupta said students in his school will eat lunch in the classroom, and there won’t be any mass gatherings or assemblies. Libraries, gyms and cafeterias are being used creatively to obtain the necessary square footage.
“It has been a herculean effort over the past few months, but of course, none of this works if the students themselves aren’t diligent about following these practices on buses, in hallways and in classrooms,” Gupta wrote.
The largest pediatric study from China found that 90 percent of children with covid-19 develop mild or moderate symptoms, 4 percent are asymptomatic and 6 percent became severely or critically ill.
As of Aug. 6, at least 570 kids across the country from younger than 1 to 19 have been diagnosed with MIS-C, a multi-system inflammatory syndrome. About two-thirds of those children didn’t have underlying conditions before the MIS-C diagnosis.
It is true that children are far less likely to get sick from covid-19 compared to adults, but they are not immune. A recent study published in JAMA Pediatrics medical journal concluded younger children may carry higher amounts of the virus in their nose than adults.
Deciding not to send his children back to school “was not an easy decision, but one that we believe best respects the science,” Gupta wrote.
President Trump has been clear that he wants schools to open.
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“When he says open, he means open in full, kids being able to attend each and every day in their school,” Trump spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany told reporters on July 16.
“The science should not stand in the way of this,” McEnany added.
There’s just one reason Democrats and Republicans want children to go back to school, wrote Genevieve Leigh, national secretary of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality and a writer for WSWS.org.
It’s “so that their parents can return to work and restart the flow of corporate profits needed to finance the massive bailout of Wall Street and major corporations. For this homicidal return-to-work campaign to be accomplished, the virus must be normalized, along with the death that will come with it. Or, as President Trump so crudely said about the rising death toll, ‘It is what it is.'”
