The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday he would be “absolutely” comfortable with his grandchildren heading back to school despite the coronavirus pandemic.
Dr. Robert Redfield said he would only be hesitant about one of his 11 grandchildren, a grandson who has cystic fibrosis.
“But my other 10 grandchildren — of those, eight of them are school age — I’m 100 percent that they can get back to school,” Redfield told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“I think it’s really important to get our schools open,” he said, echoing President Trump’s repeated demand that schools reopen for in-person learning.
Redfield asserted that more than the economy was at stake.
“It’s not public health versus opening the schools or the economy — it’s public health versus public health. I think there really are a number of negative public health consequences that have happened to our K-12 [students] by having schools closed,” he continued.
“So it’s so important now to work together with school districts to figure out how they can take our guidelines and operationalize them in a practical way and to do it in a way that is safe.”
The CDC chief’s comments came as coronavirus cases in children were rising steadily and approaching the level of patients 65 or older, according to internal FEMA memos obtained by ABC News.
And children ages 12 to 17 appear to become infected at a higher rate than younger kids.
Many school districts have already announced that they would defy Trump’s directive despite threats that they would lose federal cash.
California will restrict most districts to distance learning, and other states have followed suit for fear of worsening the pandemic and exposing students, staff and their families to the virus.
Redfield also called face masks the “most powerful tool” against the coronavirus, which has infected 3,819,139 Americans and killed 140,630 as of Tuesday evening, according to the CDC.
“This is the greatest public health crisis that our nation has faced in more than a century,” Redfield told the network.
“If all Americans would embrace that [masks] as part of their personal responsibility to confront this outbreak, we could actually have a very significant impact on the outbreak that we’re seeing across the country in the next four, six, eight, 10, 12 weeks.”
But he stopped short of calling for a national mandate, which Trump has also rejected.
“Some governors have done it, obviously with mandates. Other governors have done it through example. I think our key is just to let the American public know how important this is,” he said.
Vice President Pence, head of the Coronavirus Task Force, said on July 8, that the CDC was going to release to new guidance the next week on how to safely reopen schools after Trump ripped the current guidelines as too burdensome and expensive.
A day later, Redfield said they weren’t revising the guidelines, but would be releasing additional “reference documents” for schools, documents that have not been released as the new school year approaches.
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