https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/13/politics/coronavirus-schools-education-donald-trump-fauci/index.html
The contentious nature of school
closures -- effective in 48 states and the District of Columbia,
according to a CNN count -- exploded in a Senate hearing Tuesday after
Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul warned Fauci he wasn't the "end-all" authority on issues like when kids should go back to class.
Paul
pointed out that mortality rates for young people were comparatively
low and misleadingly suggested that outside New England, the virus had
been relatively "benign."
"I think
the one-size-fits-all -- that we're going to have a national strategy
and nobody's going to go to school -- is kind of ridiculous," Paul said.
"We really ought to be doing it school district by school district. And
the power needs to be dispersed because people make wrong predictions.
"If
we keep kids out of school for another year, what's going to happen is
the poor and underprivileged kids who don't have a parent that's able to
teach them at home are not going to learn for a full year ... I think
it's a huge mistake if we don't open the schools in the fall."
Fauci
warned Paul that the country needed to be "very careful" about
underestimating the effect of Covid-19 on young people, specifically
citing the inflammatory syndrome that has killed a number of children in
the United States and Europe.
I think Rand makes a good point. Let's say you have a small town in the midwest. Maybe CoVID visited but now it's August and it's been 3 months since the last new case was reported. But down the interstate there are still some cities dealing with new cases. Why should this small town keep its schools closed when it has no current issue?
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