Dr. Fauci: Get the Kids in School and Keep Them There

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— OutKick (@Outkick) November 30, 2020

In what will hopefully be seen as the dwindling days of COVID-19 as the distribution of vaccines begins in the coming weeks, Dr. Anthony Fauci went on ABC News this week and reiterated his stance that schools should be open.

“Close the bars and keep the schools open,” Dr. Fauci said. “You don’t have one size fits all, but as I said in the past, the default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school and to get them back to school. The best way to ensure the safety of the children in school is to get the community level of spread low.”

“If you look at the data, the spread among children and from children is not really very big at all — not like one would have suspected,” Dr. Fauci said.

While many OutKick readers will disagree with Dr. Fauci’s assertion that bars and indoor dining should be closed, his stance on schools is one that will hopefully resonate.

The data shows that there are no known major spreads attributable to schools. It also shows that school lockdowns accelerate the learning gap between the upper and lower classes.

“Despite schools’ efforts to maintain learning activities during lockdown, our analysis reflects significant inequalities in exposure to school learning depending on family characteristics (income, level of educational attainment) and school characteristics (educational level, school sector),” according to a study from Spanish sociologists that is hosted on the National Institute of Health web site. “The absence of schooling neutralizes the benefits of socialization provided by early childhood education for the most vulnerable children. It also disrupts those processes of guidance and accompaniment which are especially important for adolescent students in their study, work and life transitions. In addition, the digital divide and visible differences in access to technological devices among students have left some children and young people without options to connect to learning for at least three months or, more probably, for six months.”

For the better part of a year now, we have been advised to listen to Dr. Fauci — and he couldn’t be more clear that schools should be open.