‘Can you assure anybody of anything?’ Trump says about school safety amid coronavirus
President Donald Trump, who is pushing for schools to reopen during the fall amid the coronavirus pandemic, said he couldn’t assure that schools will be safe.
“Can you assure anybody of anything?” Trump said on Thursday at a press briefing.
Trump also said — without citing any evidence — that young children are “almost immune” to the virus.
“I do say again, young people are almost immune to this disease. The younger the better,” he said during a White House briefing. “They’re stronger. They have a stronger immune system.”
Children and babies can get COVID-19 but “adults make up most of the known cases to date,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, said during an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday that kids over 9 years old can spread the disease as easily as adults.
“It’s been shown that children from 10 to 19 can transmit the virus to adults as well as adults can,” Fauci said.
A study published in JAMA Pediatrics in late July found that children had similar or even higher levels of coronavirus in their nose as do adults, raising possible concerns about their ability to spread the virus, McClatchy News reported.
Trump previously threatened to cut funding if schools don’t reopen this fall, The New York Times reported. He also slammed the CDC for its “very tough & expensive guidelines” that tell schools to “to do very impractical things.”
“We have to remember that there’s another side to this,” Trump said during the Thursday press briefing. “Keeping them out of school and keeping work closed is causing death also. Economic harm, but it’s causing death for different reasons, but death. Probably more death.”
Trump said earlier in July that he would pressure governors to reopen schools this fall, CNN reported.
The CDC has released guidelines favoring reopening schools.
“It is critically important for our public health to open schools this fall,” CDC Director Dr. Robert R. Redfield said in a statement. “School closures have disrupted normal ways of life for children and parents, and they have had negative health consequences on our youth. CDC is prepared to work with K-12 schools to safely reopen while protecting the most vulnerable.”
The guidelines said children are less likely to be impacted by severe symptoms of COVID-19 when compared to adults.
“Children appear to be at lower risk for contracting COVID-19 compared to adults. To put this in perspective, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of July 17, 2020, the United States reported that children and adolescents under 18 years old account for under 7 percent of COVID-19 cases and less than 0.1 percent of COVID-19-related deaths,” the guidelines state.
However, some children appear to be at greater risk if they catch the coronavirus.
Research has shown that children with certain disabilities such as cerebral palsy or autism have a higher mortality rate from the coronavirus than children without those conditions, McClatchy News previously reported.
Children have been diagnosed with multisystem inflammatory syndrome, in which the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestial organs become inflamed. It’s thought to be possibly linked to COVID-19, according to the CDC.
Earlier in July, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that public schools won’t fully reopen this fall, reducing attendance to one to three days a week, The New York Times reported. New York City comprises the largest district in the country.
More than 4.4 million coronavirus cases have been confirmed and more than 152,000 people have died from the virus in the U.S. as of July 31, according to Johns Hopkins University.
This story was originally published July 31, 2020 at 11:33 AM with the headline "‘Can you assure anybody of anything?’ Trump says about school safety amid coronavirus."