When will schools reopen? It depends on where you live, who’s in charge and whether they believe Anthony Fauci.
Officials in 21 states have ordered or recommended that all schools — many of which have been closed for at least a month already — stay shuttered throughout the end of the 2019-2020 school year, according to a tally kept by Education Week. Two more states are closed “until further notice,” while other states have varying opening dates, some of which have been pushed well into May. Tens of millions of students are at home, attempting distance learning with varying degrees of success.
President Trump has said repeatedly he wants to open the country for business as soon as possible, often mentioning May 1 as a goal. Yet epidemiologists are warning that the coronavirus, which has already killed more than 22,000 people in the United States, will be a threat to public health for many months. And Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and who has become the medical community’s leading spokesman on the pandemic, has suggested that schools may be able to open in the fall if current efforts to “flatten the curve” are successful. He was nothing if not indefinite.
“You know, it is unpredictable, but you can get a feel for it if we start talking about the things where the curve goes down,” Fauci said at a recent White House briefing. “How we respond and what kind of a rebound we see or don’t see, I think is going to have a lot of influence probably more immediately on things like summer camps than it does in the fall.” (Trump on Sunday night retweeted a call for the CONTINUE READING: When will schools reopen after the coronavirus? - The Washington Post
