President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he will send 125 million reusable face masks to schools across the US as they assess whether reopening is safe this fall amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“We have to open up our schools and open up our businesses,” Trump said during a White House press conference on the coronavirus. He pointed out that all school districts must have places for resuming physical classes for students “as soon as possible.”
“To support the reopening of America’s schools, we provided $13 billion in elementary and secondary schools towards the CARES Act and CARES Act funding,” he told reporters. “We will provide up to 125 million reusable masks to various school districts around the country.”
Trump also presented new suggestions for reopening schools, such as educating all students, teachers, and staff about coronavirus symptoms and encouraging them to frequently wash their hands.
According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the US has the worst outbreak in the world. The coronavirus infected over 5 million cases so far and killed at least 165,328 as of Wednesday. Researchers emphasized that the role of children in spreading the infection remains uncertain.
Trump repeatedly called for the reopening of schools in the fall regardless of the rate of the outbreak in the US. He stressed that keeping schools closed “is causing death also.”
“The lower they are in age, the lower the risk,” Trump said on July 30. “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 also warned that school funding must be given to parents or other school districts if state or local officials do not reopen schools.
Meanwhile, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced last week that all school districts across the state have been allowed to reopen for the fall semester.
Cuomo also said on Monday that in-person education can happen because school district planning does not permit students to be near “hundreds of people the way you would be in a museum.”
In a museum or mall, “you’re walking past a continuous group of new people,” he said. The schools will “take protections, they are in an isolated place [and] in controlled circumstances.”
President Donald Trump previously said that coronavirus does not have much of an impact on children as he pushed for the reopening of schools in the fall.
He said that children can “throw it off very easily.”
“They may get it, but they get it and it doesn’t have much of an impact on them,” he said. “For whatever reason the China virus, children handle it very well.”
“It’s going away. It’ll go away. Things go away. No question in my mind that it will go away,” Trump said during a White House press briefing.
