ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Schools statewide must fully reopen in a few weeks despite a continued, record-breaking rise of coronavirus cases in Florida.
Gov. Ron DeSantis maintains it will be safe for students to return to classrooms in August. He doubled down on that assertion this weekend and again during a press conference Monday, saying the risk is “incredibly low.”
“What harm is going to be done by continuing to keep them out of school,” DeSantis said Saturday during a press briefing in Bradenton, adding he’d feel comfortable sending his own children back to school if they were old enough.
“The risk of corona—fortunately for students—is incredibly low and the CDC will show the statistics, under 18, much more likely to be hospitalized for seasonal influenza than this (COVID-19).”
Dr. Claudia Espinosa, who specializes in pediatric infectious disease at USF Health, says she’s worried the situation is being viewed too simply.
“The reality is that kids do have less infection and the symptoms are less severe than the adults, but we cannot generalize,” she said. “It doesn’t mean they are not getting sick. They still get sick, they still can get severely sick, and they still can die.”
Florida's agricultural commissioner Nikki Fried blasted the governor on Monday, saying his highly-promoted "Three C's" method to slow the spread of coronavirus in the state—avoid closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings—describes a classroom.
"An actual 'C' that all of our children and teachers should avoid, but that you’re forcing them into," Fried tweeted.
Over the weekend, and again during a press briefing Monday in Miami, DeSantis said science is “pretty clear” young students are not likely to be the ones spreading the virus.
“I think it’s been found over and over again as people have looked at and studied this, particularly in Europe, that school children are not vectors for this,” DeSantis claimed Saturday.
Espinosa confirms such studies (here's another) do exist but they are far from conclusive.
“There are several studies that have shown that kids are not transmitters of the disease like adults are, but that doesn’t mean they don’t transmit it at all,” she said.
More work must be done to definitively prove kids are truly harmless, Dr. Anthony Fauci said last week. Currently, the National Institutes of Health is tracking thousands of participating families to determine if children who get the virus spread it to other family members.
World Health Organization officials warned Monday that although children with coronavirus tend to have milder symptoms, there's still a lot doctors and scientists don’t know about the long-term health impacts of coronavirus on kids.
“The studies that have been done are with observational data,” Espinosa said. “We are all trying to do this on the fly, we haven’t had time to design a perfect study to show that—the perfect study is not out there, the solution is not that simple and not all kids can be put under the same umbrella.”
DeSantis said he fully supports giving families the option to keep their kids at home to do virtual learning if they don't feel comfortable sending them to school.
President Donald Trump last week threatened to withhold federal funding from states that don’t reopen schools.
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