Fmr FDA Chief: We Should ‘Take Every Precaution’ on Reopening Schools, Think of Teachers as Front-Line Workers
Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb advised caution on the reopening of schools on Face the Nation Sunday morning.
Gottlieb spoke with John Dickerson about continued covid concerns around the country and said, “The question is, can the combination of some limited mitigation, some targeted mitigation, like keeping bars closed, keeping certain indoor congregate venues that aren’t really pivotal to the economic activity of a region closed with universal adherence to masks or greater adherence to masks, is that enough to keep the virus out?”
At one point Dickerson brought up the upcoming school season, asking, “What’s your feeling about what should be done and how close are we to actually doing that?”
Gottlieb said he thinks “we should try to open the schools” but cautiously:
“We should lean forward here because of all the reasons why it’s important to get kids back into the classroom. Here in Connecticut we probably will have the opportunity to open schools. The positivity rate’s very low. They have good testing and tracking in place, but we need to prevent outbreaks in the schools. There’s a lot we don’t know about this virus. The virus probably hasn’t infected that many kids relative to flu certainly, and so we don’t want to see this become epidemic in children. I think this is complicated by the fact that there’s information on both sides of this debate to really sort of inform the debate and harden positions. We’ve seen schools open in other countries successfully without outbreaks, albeit with a lot of precaution put into place. And we’ve seen summer camps open here with pretty dense outbreaks. There was a report out of the CDC in Georgia where a summer camps opened. Fifty eight percent of the campers were tested, I think 76% were infected. We saw schools open in Israel that triggered large outbreaks in those schools and may have been behind a resurgence in the epidemic in that country. So there’s anecdotes and experiences on both sides of this debate, I think, to counsel enough caution that if we do reopen schools, and I think we should try to, and I think many parts of the country will have that opportunity, we should take every precaution to try to prevent outbreaks.”
He added that includes protecting teachers, who should be thought of “as front-line workers in these situations and given proper protective equipment and ways to keep themselves safe in the classroom.
You can watch above, via CBS.
