K-12: 60 Days Until Disaster

Reopening K-12 schools is a prerequisite to reopening the economy, as many working adults cannot return to work until their children are back in school being educated by teachers. Schools generally failed to prepare adequately for digital solutions over their summer off. The result is that students mostly receive substandard educational content and inadequate teacher interaction.

In addition to the quality of education, In-person school has many other benefits, including improved mental health and emotional wellbeing, equity, and access to food and shelter.

Science’s understanding of the virus continues to evolve. For example, public health experts now realize that children are as susceptible to infection as adults and that pediatric infections have a similar viral load. Children have higher rates of asymptomatic disease, making symptom-based isolation strategies ineffective because those patients do not have a reduced viral load.

Models now suggest that most schools in the United States can remain open for 20-60 days regardless of the initial prevalence of the virus, at which point they are likely to detect one or more large outbreak clusters. By that time, children will have infected their family members in communities across America. Some of those family members will die, and others will transmit COVID to another vulnerable person who dies.

Unfortunately, reopening schools for in-person classes will send transmission rates skyrocketing. Until America has a mechanism to test, isolate, and quarantine all infected individuals, resuming in-person schooling is a disaster recipe. The debate between the risks and benefits to the economy presents a false choice, as students are likely to be deprived of in-person schooling by late fall after having incurred horrific and avoidable losses at home.