President Donald Trump says school closure will cause "more death" as he urges states to reopen schools in the fall amid the US coronavirus outbreak.
Trump said that the risk of patients becoming ill and dying from Covid-19 falls with age. However, a pre-existing illness such as obesity and diabetes contributes to the risk of death among Covid-19 in patients of all ages, including the young, according to White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci. Children in the US have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and some were hospitalized and even passed away.
“The lower they are in age, the lower the risk,” Trump said during a news briefing in the White House. “We have to remember that there’s another side to this. Keeping them out of school and keeping work closed is causing death also. Economic harm, but it’s causing death for different reasons, but death. Probably more death.”
Trump asked Democrats to work with Republicans for the passage of the latest coronavirus relief bill. This involves $105 billion to aid schools with reopening for in-person classes in the fall. However, democratic leadership suggests that the bill leaves critical aid measures Democrats included in the $3 trillion relief package they proposed in May.
The president warned that if some state or local officials would not reopen schools, he believes the school funding must be given to parents instead. Trump made a previous threat that he would withhold federal funding from schools that would not operate in the fall.
“We say if a school doesn’t want to open or if a governor doesn’t want to open, maybe for political reasons and maybe not but there is some of that going on, the money should go to the parents, so they can send their children to the school of their choice,” Trump said Thursday. “If schools stay closed, the money should follow the students so families are in control of decisions about their sons and daughters, about their children.”
In the New England Journal of Medicine, professor of education at Harvard, Meira Levinson, and infectious diseases scientist Dr. Muge Cevik and epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, wrote that reopening schools in the US requires communities to make efforts in managing outbreaks.
“Any region experiencing moderate, high, or increasing levels of community transmission should do everything possible to lower transmission,” they wrote. “Such measures along with universal mask wearing must be implemented now in the United States if we are to bring case numbers down to safe levels for elementary schools to reopen this fall nationwide.”
Experts believe that the local leaders should be the ones to decide whether to reopen schools. They also note that schools will need additional funds in order to retrofit classrooms and common areas to make social distancing possible.
“We should try the best as possible to get the children back to school and the schools open for the simple reason that the secondary, unintended consequences of having children not being able to go to school has ripple effects for the family that might have deleterious effects that really override the so-called safety benefits,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s premier infectious disease specialist, during a livestreamed event with Democratic Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama.
