Sal Discusses the Safety of Reopening Schools on the Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer

Doctor, when the CDC Director, Robert Redfield, says these new guidelines are meant to facilitate the opening of schools around the country, not keep them closed. Based on your reading of these new guidelines, do you think they accomplish that goal?

Well, Wolf, they sound different from the guidelines that were released before. And I kept on thinking, what is it that's so different? And what's different is the tone, because what I'm used to seeing from the CDC is leading with the science and the facts. And these guidelines sound like they're cherry-picking data to make a specific policy point. And that's really concerning, because what we need from the CDC is not a justification of why children should be in school. We all know that; we all want that. But we want the CDC to lay out, what are the criteria that we need to meet? For example, we need to test positivity less than 5%, a consistent, 14-day decline in the number of cases. Something like that. And also, here's a checklist of what schools have to do in order for schools, for them to reopen safely, in person. That's not what the CDC really has laid out. And I really worry, if we can't trust that what comes out from them is based on science and not politics, then who can we trust?

Yeah, that's a real serious potential problem out there. Sal, you just had an excellent interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, yourself, and you asked him about bringing teachers and the students back to school. Let me play this clip. Listen to this.

When you talk about forcing teachers to come back to school, you better be careful about that, and make sure you pay attention to A, keeping them safe, and key, keeping them healthy.

Sal, I want you to elaborate a little bit on that for us. What are some of the best practices that Dr. Fauci outlined?

Yeah, well, first of all, just to completely agree with what was just said. What I think we're talking to school district leaders around the country, and what they're craving is just very clear guidelines. What is the per capita incidence rate, and for each of those levels, what is the appropriate action? And there's good groups, like the Harvard Global Health Initiative Institute, that have been doing very clear guidelines. And Dr. Fauci did seem to say that those types of guidelines are what folks could index on. And the timing is super important, 'cause we're only four to six weeks away from school starting, and school leaders really even haven't had a chance to think about how the instruction's going to happen, 'cause they don't know how it's going to be structured. In terms of what we just heard from the statement about teachers, I did ask him very directly, should teachers be forced to go back? And he seemed pretty empathetic with the situation, especially for older teachers, teachers who might have some other health circumstances, that they shouldn't be forced to go back to school. We talked about social distancing, but once again, it would be valuable to get very clear guidelines of what's good and what is not. And also, there's interesting ideas of maybe leveraging outdoor classrooms. There's a South Korean study talking about over 10 years old, versus under 10 years old. What can we do with say, kindergarteners or first graders, outdoors? Some type of clear guidance along those lines would be super valuable.

You're absolutely right. Dr. Wen, even as the White House pushes a complete return to schools, a key member of the coronavirus task force, Dr. Deborah Birx, is cautioning that it's unclear how rapidly young children, even under the age of 10, can transmit the virus. So we know this one study that Sal was referring to, in South Korea, said that children over 10 transmit the virus as quickly and as thoroughly as adults do. What additional evidence would you like to see on that critically important front?

Yeah, so that particular study from South Korea, it actually only looked at symptomatic people. So we don't know about asymptomatic transmission, and since 40%, or even more, of cases are transmitted by people without symptoms, we really don't know whether asymptomatic children, young children, can transmit just as much as older people too. I think also, when you look at the studies done of children, they have all been in countries where the transmission rate is really low, and so we really have no idea what it's going to look like in the US, if kids are going back in places where there are active surges. And I'm afraid that this looks like an uncontrolled environment, where our children, and our teachers, and their families, are guinea pigs.

You know Sal, in your interview, Dr. Fauci also spoke about the potential downsides of relying on face shields in schools, rather than requiring students and teachers to wear masks. I want to play this clip, watch this.

My staff just brought this in. (laughs) - There you go. - This was a great- - That's exactly what, yeah. - Like that? Yeah. - Good look. - So this is good, yeah. This is good for droplets, 'cause it'll block it. The only trouble is if you have any degree of aerosol, what's happens, is that all of this, see, it can go right in like that. That's the problem, you see? So these are good for droplets, but you have to be careful if there's a degree of aerosolization.

So if you wear a face shield, Sal, you should also still wear a mask, I guess that's what he's suggesting. But for younger children, especially, it would be helpful to see the teacher's face. If face shields aren't very protective in a classroom setting, and everyone has to wear a mask, which they clearly do, what impact is all this going to have on the critical issue of learning?

It's going to have a huge impact. Just from the school closures that have already occurred, over the spring, a lot of researchers think it's going to be as much as a year of learning loss. 'Cause not only were kids not learning, they were also forgetting; they were atrophying. And basically the conversation with Dr. Fauci, even if one of either the Moderna, or one of the vaccines become successful, and we're able to start deploying them in January, you're still not going to get to herd immunity, get them all deployed, until several months later. It's a major public health issue to be able to get hundreds of millions of vaccines out. And so this is going to be this entire school year in some form of socially-distanced or hybrid learning. And so, it's going to be a really, really tough year. And the biggest fear is, it's going to drive more inequity. All of our children, my children, I think, are just going to be fine, but there's a lot of kids who don't have the supports, who don't have the access, and they're also going to be going to schools that might not have the resources to be able to provide them adequately. So it's going to be a tough year.