[dpau]

I couldn’t find anything documented about the consequences of having schools closed, only the consequences of them being open. According to internal CDC documents, “fully reopening schools and universities remained the “highest risk” for the spread of the coronavirus” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/us/politics/trump-schools...

[leereeves]

That article actually says it's "highest risk" according to the CDC website.[1]

> Since May, the C.D.C. website [link to 1] has cautioned that full reopening would be “highest risk,”

And from that site, we can see that it's not the highest risk among all possible ways of spreading COVID-19, it's simply the scenario with the highest risk of COVID-19 spread among 3 scenarios for schools: full reopening, virtual-only instruction, or:

> Small, in-person classes, activities, and events. Groups of students stay together and with the same teacher throughout/across school days and groups do not mix. Students remain at least 6 feet apart and do not share objects

I believe the CDC director is recommending something like that middle risk plan, and saying that the risk of spreading coronavirus under this plan is outweighed by the risks of having schools closed.

1: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-...

[edoceo]

> Students remain at least 6 feet apart and do not share objects

Hahaha. Have you seen kids? Who's going to remind each kid six times a minute to maintain distance and not share?!

Source: I've spent 100s of hours in K-4 classrooms

As a parent, with enough privilege, my kid is doing remote next year.

[dpau]

The problem is that the "public health consequences of having the schools closed on the kids" have not been defined, yet alone measured, and thus we have no basis for comparison against the fairly well-established risks of opening schools. The director is making a political statement based on hunches rather than evaluating risks based on science.

[makomk]

Yeah, the CDC is basically just saying that fully reopening schools carries higher risk of spreading Covid-19 than not doing so, which of course it does. The New York Times is carefully misleading people about this for nakedly partisan, anti-Trump ends. It's not the only bit of shady narrative-pushing in that article - notice how they also initially describe this information as coming from an internal CDC document and darkly hint that Trump might be supressing it so that he could push to reopen schools, before half-admitting that the same information has been on the CDC website since May deep into the article.