The New York Times explains how China opened its schools safely. As an authoritarian state, dissent is not permitted. No one is allowed to disobey the rules. The rules are strictly enforced.
As a free society, we rely on people to exercise civic responsibility and good judgement to protect themselves and others.
When the president of the nation ridicules people who wears masks and doesn’t wear one himself, it’s difficult to promote civic responsibility.
The Washington Post reports that schools have reopened safely in Germany, with no major outbreaks of coronavirus—yet. The key to success is the rate of transmission in the community. Or so it seems. With this virus, you can never be certain of future behavior. The difference in the U.S. is that some states are making no effort to control the virus, not even mandating mask-wearing. Trump has unfortunately encouraged and modeled anti-social behavior.
When the community is safe, the schools are likely to be safe.
It’s been a month since German children began to lead Europe in the post-summer return to school, streaming back into classrooms and onto playgrounds, with little aside from masks to differentiate the scene from pre-coronavirus times.
So far, epidemiologists are cautiously optimistic. The school openings have been accompanied by some panicked closures and quarantines.
In the first week, there were 31 clusters — amounting to 150 cases — of the novel coronavirus in schools, according to Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI). At least 41 schools in Berlin were reported to have been affected in the first two weeks.
But there have been few transmissions within schools themselves, health experts say, and although the number of new daily cases in Germany has been rising, schools haven’t been identified as a driver of infections.
“It’s looking promising,” said Johannes Huebner, president of the German Society for Pediatric Infectious Diseases. “There have not been any major outbreaks yet. Single cases, but they seem to be manageable.”
While Germany’s full-throttle return to class may provide some assurance for those fretting about school returns in the United States and elsewhere, health experts note that it’s still just the early days — and they warn about extrapolating too much. They say the risk associated with reopenings has a lot to do with the levels of the virus circulating in a community.
“The important thing is you have to keep the number in the community low,” said Huebner, who is also head of the infectious-disease department at Munich’s Dr. von Hauner Children’s Hospital. “This is where the United States will have problems.”
Despite a rise in infections that Germany’s RKI said “must be taken seriously,” the 1,484 new cases reported Friday among the country’s population of 83 million compare with at least 37,876 new cases in the latest U.S. report — more than 25 times as many infections in a population just four times as large.
This valuable report analyzes how money could be better spent to protect students at school. It’s findings are stunning. We as a nation are spending vast sums on police in schools but insignificant amounts on mental health services and counselors who interact directly with students.
KEY FINDINGS & OBSERVATIONS
*Since 2018, states have allocated an additional $965 million to law enforcement in schools.
*According to a 2019 ACLU study, 1.7 million students have cops in their schools, but no counselors; 3 million have cops, but no nurses; 6 million have cops, but no school psychologists; and 10 million have cops, but no social workers.
*As of 2020, nearly 60 percent of all schools and 90 percent of high schools now have a law enforcement officer at least part time.
*The $33.2 million “school security” budget allocated for 2021 in Washington, D.C., could instead fund up to 222 psychologists, 345 guidance counselors, or 332 social workers.
*The $15 million “school security” budget approved for 2021 in Chicago could instead fund up to 140 psychologists, 182 guidance counselors, or 192 social workers.
*The $32.5 million “school security” budget allocated for 2021 in Philadelphia could instead fund up to 278 psychologists, 355 guidance counselors, or 467 social workers.
The report describes “militarized schools”:
As of 2019, there were nearly 50,000 school resource officers patrolling the hallways of America’s schools.
In schools that serve predominantly Black student populations, it is often much more than hallways that are patrolled.
For example, D.C. police are deployed to nearly all high schools to monitor cafeterias, auditoriums, hallways, stairwells, restrooms, entrances, and exits, as well as provide security for school-sponsored events. Such schools promote a learning environment that is more akin to that of a correctional institution than an educational one
Dana Milbank is a regular contributor to the Washington Post, where this article appeared:
It was a life-or-death decision, and President Trump chose . . . himself.
To end the pandemic, there must be widespread vaccination among a public already skeptical about inoculations. If Americans think the covid-19 vaccine has been rushed for political reasons, tens of millions won’t take it — and herd immunity won’t kick in.
But Trump just couldn’t help himself. “So we’re going to have a vaccine very soon, maybe even before a very special date,” he teased at a news conference Monday, suggesting vaccination could begin in October. “You know what date I’m talking about.”
Um, Halloween?
Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic
If timing a vaccine to Election Day weren’t political enough, Trump also claimed that the Obama administration wouldn’t have had a vaccine for three years, if at all, and that political benefit could “inure” to him.
Such careless, selfish talk confirms Americans’ worst fears about a vaccine. According to a new CBS News poll, just 21 percent of voters said they would get a vaccine as soon as possible, even if it were free, down from 32 percent in July. Two-thirds said they would suspect that a vaccine rolled out this year had been rushed through without sufficient testing, and only 34 percent said they trusted Trump to make sure a safe vaccine is available.
Administration scientists fought mightily Wednesday at a Senate hearing on the vaccine rollout to undo this damaging perception, caused largely by months of Trump’s public pressure on scientists.
“Please hear me now: The rigor of the scientific evaluation on safety and efficacy will not be compromised,” said Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. He urged Americans to “take the information they need from scientists and physicians, and not from politicians.”
Surgeon General Jerome Adams echoed the plea: “There will be no shortcuts. This vaccine will be safe … or it won’t get moved along.”
But senators on both sides were wary. “The president has accused FDA officials of being ‘deep state’ operatives, he’s tweeted conspiracy theories about covid-19 deaths, and he has implicitly tied vaccine development to his reelection campaign,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) observed.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said her state needs “assurance that, yes, this vaccine is going to be safe, that this vaccine has not been subject to political initiatives that would speed it up in any such way that would cause it to be less effective.”
We are interested in hearing about how the struggle to reopen amid the pandemic is affecting people’s lives. Please tell us yours.
It’s all essentially a rerun of what happened at the beginning of the outbreak. Thanks to audio recordings of Trump released by Bob Woodward along with his new book, we know that Trump on Feb. 7 privately confided that the new virus was “deadly stuff.” But instead of preparing the country for such, he publicly claimed it would “disappear” and was no worse than the flu. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward.
That, too, was a life-or-death decision, and Trump chose political expediency.
Now, weeks before the election, this administration has become a government of the Donald, by the Donald and for the Donald. The Justice Department Tuesday intervened in a defamation lawsuit against Trump brought by E. Jean Carroll, who says Trump raped her years ago. Trump’s DOJ wants the United States to be the defendant in the case instead of Trump because, it claims, he was “acting within the scope of his office as President” when he denied the assault.
Attorney General William Barr claimed Wednesday that DOJ’s action was “routine” and is “done frequently.”
Uh-huh.
Also routine: trashing the South Lawn of the White House and the Rose Garden with a political convention, appointing a big-time political donor to disrupt service at the U.S. Postal Service on the eve of an election that will rely on mail-in voting, canceling intelligence briefings for lawmakers about foreign attempts to interfere in the election, having the Justice Department back Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about antifa and election fraud, making federal law-enforcement officers serve as Trump’s political paramilitary and using the federal government to damage Trump’s political opponents and boost his business properties.
Now, Trump is trying to use a vaccine rollout to revive his political fortunes. The result is lost faith in the vaccine — which inevitably will mean more suffering and death.
“What a heartbreak that would be,” Collins told senators Wednesday at a hearing of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, “if we go through all of this, we come up with a vaccine that is safe and effective, we have already lost 190,000 people, and we can prevent many more deaths, and yet people are afraid to use it. We can’t let that happen.”
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But it’s already happening, because the head of government has spent four years demonstrating that he cares only about his own interests.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, contributes frequently here.
He writes:
If you want to get really depressed about today’s politics, look at the New York Times’ Upshot, which asked: Should Children Go Back to School? Sadly, the answer has been, “It depends in part on your politics.”
One source the Times cited was a Brookings Institute analysis of data which found that “politics, more than public health, was driving school districts’ reopening plans.” Brookings discovered:
No relationship between school districts’ plans and their counties’ infection rates. Instead, there was a strong correlation between a district’s plans and a county’s support for Mr. Trump in 2016.
We should all be horrified that President Trump and his supporters have put ideology and short term politics over the health of students. When we get through this nightmare, deep soul searching will be necessary as we ask how our politics have devolved to this point.
Below is a step towards such a reckoning. It uses Oklahoma, a “red state” in terms of Republican power, which has become a “red zone” in terms of infection spread, as a case study. White House reports that were not revealed to the public until recently, now show that Oklahoma has the nation’s 8th highest positivity rate.
Eight White House Corona Virus Task Force reports on Oklahoma’s COVID infections were finally released on August 25. As many parents send their kids back to in-person school, they now can read the full truth that could have been revealed almost two months ago about what safe reopenings would require.
This is how Oklahomans finally got access to crucial public health information. The Tulsa World reported that on August 13, before Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx visited Tulsa, Gov. Kevin Stitt said he directed the state Health Department “to post everything and be as transparent as possible.” But, a week later, The Center for Public Integrity published a second, secret report; Tulsa Mayor Bynum thus learned that “eight White House reports had been issued. Bynum said he was only aware of one that had been previously leaked to the media.”
Dr. Birx met briefly with numerous members of the Stitt team and a few others, but without key public health leaders, such as Tulsa Health Department director Bruce Dart, Democratic officeholders, or the press, and she also met privately with Stitt. The governor said, “Overall it went really good, and she’s pleased with Oklahoma and what we’ve done so far.”
State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister posted on Facebook that Birx warned, “Oklahoma is about 4 weeks behind the South” and needs to “avoid asymptomatic spread which is happening in Southern states.” That cryptic comment didn’t make the headlines, or prompt a discussion of how would it be possible to reopen schools in counties where the virus was spreading.
Stitt characterized Birx’s advice as, “A lot of other states have shut down bars. That was a recommendation — it wasn’t a recommendation, but that was something she said, you’ve got to be ready if you see your positivities kick up that you can maybe limit bar capacity.”
Tulsa Public Radio challenged spin on the crucial question of how schools and colleges can open this month, adding, “Birx’s task force has, in fact, told Oklahoma it should shut down bars statewide, calling it ‘critical to disrupt transmission.’”
As school was starting, about 50 school sites were dealing with COVID infections; the first week of partial reopening, the number rose to over 100. If – as public health experts predict – asymptomatic children spread the virus to their classmates, teachers and school staff, and their families, parents should ask why they were not warned when Oklahoma entered the “red zone” around July 14.
Similarly, administrators can ask how they could have prepared differently for reopenings if they had been told about the effect of “community spread” on schools. The week before classes were scheduled to open, two school systems had to delay in-person instruction. Who knows how many of those wrenching adjustments will occur in the first weeks of school?
If they had known the full story presented in eight studies, many districts could have prioritized preparation for virtual over in-person instruction. Had administrators been told of the August 2 task force recommendation for a statewide mask mandate, and recommendations as early as July 5 on bars and indoor dining, would they have given different advice to their school boards on reopening? Had they known when the task force recommended that red zone counties limit social gatherings to ten people, would they have thought differently about school sports?
Administrators were already behind in preparing for school because as late as June many researchers still doubted that young people would spread the virus as much as older persons. It wasn’t until late July that experts were fully aware of the super-spreading by young people. And I would add that decision-makers should have considered the New York Times database. It estimated that on July 31 an average Oklahoma County school with 1,000 students would begin the year with 11 students with the virus.
Also, on July 23, the State Board of Education voted 4 to 3 to adopt the protocols presented by State Superintendent Hofmeister as recommendations – not mandates. Had they known what would be revealed in the recent recommendations for Oklahoma, would they have voted differently in terms of making masks mandatory in schools? Had the SDE guidelines on providing only virtual learning been discussed in communities that were fully aware of the task force’s recommendations on limiting the size of social groups, would they have thought differently about closing schools in the counties with the highest infections?
State Impact and the Oklahoman now report that only six of the 136 districts in counties at Orange Level 2 or the higher are starting the year with distance learning. The SDE can only “beg” districts to take unpopular public health actions and only 1/3rd of them mandate masks for students and teachers.
So shouldn’t the Board take another vote? And while they’re at it, they could order districts to report COVID infections to the Health Department.
Moreover, education and urban leaders, as well as state policy-makers should study the new reports within the context of perhaps a bigger threat – the reopening of colleges. Cities have no control over universities’ policies, but especially in areas that attract large numbers of college students who have failed to follow social distancing rules, cities could follow federal guidelines on closing bars and in-person dining. And if state leaders took these public health regulations seriously, they could have taken action with the hugely dangerous Weedstock concert near Oklahoma State University.
This summer’s misstatements of fact by the Stitt administration were serious because they undermined preparations for a safe reopening of schools. During a time of “alt facts,” however, it isn’t surprising that many Oklahomans didn’t demand fact checking of the governor. The release of the full facts occurs at a time when students are placed at risk, and schools will likely struggle with infections. Now that the full task force findings are released, parents, educators, and policy makers may bring a more informed mindset to their guidelines.
More importantly, though, will we take a more morally responsible look at the politics of school reopenings? Will we come to grips with the way that America placed politics over the health and safety of our kids, and pledge to never do that again?
Nancy Bailey provides 91 examples of the confusion that surrounds returning or not returning to school during the pandemic. The complete lack of national leadership has contributed to the confusion. Her opening quote from Betsy DeVos, who said that the coronavirus is “a good thing” for the schools because it is forcing necessary changes; it’s a statement that ranks right up there with Arne Duncan’s ludicrous assertion that Hurricane Karina was the best thing to happen to the schools of New Orleans because it wiped out public schools and the teachers’ union and opened the way for mass privatization and Teach for America.
By the way, Nancy and I have never met, but we collaborated in writing a book called Edspeak and Doubletalk: A Guide to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling. I promise you will love it. We worked very hard to disentangle “reformer speak” from doubletalk. You can order it on Amazon for about $10. We both donated our royalties to the Network for Public Education, so you can not only have a delightful read but send a few pennies to a good cause.
The New York Daily News reported that the Trump administration has changed rules for spending federal funds on emergency spaces, which means that subways and public schools will no longer receive funds for cleaning during the pandemic.
Transit systems, schools and other public facilities in New York could soon become a whole lot dirtier because of a policy change enacted by the Trump administration that’ll strip millions of dollars in critical coronavirus aid for the state, the Daily News has learned.
It’s a gut-punch no one saw coming, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) railed Thursday.
Since the outset of the pandemic, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has helped New York and other states cover the costs of coronavirus-fighting efforts — from disinfecting schools and government buildings to stocking up on personal protective equipment for public employees.
But FEMA snuck in a rules change this week to say “the operation of schools and other public facilities” are no longer considered “emergency protective measures eligible for reimbursement,” declaring, “These are not immediate actions necessary to protect public health and safety.”
Presumably, this change will affect schools across the nation that rely on FEMA for extra cleaning.
In the South and Midwest and other parts of the nation, the coronavirus continues to spread. No one can be sure what will happen even in places where it has apparently subsided. Steven Singer warns that reckless reopening not only endangers students but tells them they are not valued.
The grownups say they need to keep the economy running, but are they risking the lives of children and teachers? When they make their decisions, are they doing it on a zoom call or in person?
He asks:
How would you feel when time-after-time the grown ups show you exactly how they feel about you, how little you actually matter, how much everything else is worth and how little they really care about you?
How would you feel if you were a little school kid getting ready for her first day of class this morning?
Would you feel safe, valued, loved?
Apoorva Mandavilli is an award-winning science reporter for the New York Times. She is a mother of two children. She lives in Brooklyn. In this article, she thinks through the pros and cons of sending her children back to school. To read the links, open the story. Yesterday, Mayor de Blasio and UFT leader Michael Mulgrew announced that the city’s public schools would open for blended learning on September 21. Orientation will begin September 16. Teachers will report to their buildings on September 8.
All summer, as information about how the coronavirus affects children has trickled in, I’ve been updating a balance sheet in my head. Every study I read, every expert I talked to, was filling in columns on this sheet: reasons for and against sending my children back to school come September.
Into the con column went a study from Chicago that found children carry large amounts of virus in their noses and throats, maybe even more than adults do. Also in the con column: two South Korean studies, flawed as they were, which suggested children can spread the virus to others — and made me wonder whether my sixth-grader, at least, should stay home.
Reports from Europe hinting that it was possible to reopen schools safely dribbled onto the pro side of my ledger. But could we match those countries’ careful precautions, or their low community levels of virus?
I live in Brooklyn, where schools open after Labor Day (if they open this year at all), so my husband and I have had more time than most parents in the nation to make up our minds. We’re also privileged enough to have computers and reliable Wi-Fi for my children to learn remotely.
But as other parents called and texted to ask what I was planning to do, I turned to the real experts: What do we know about the coronavirus and children? And what should parents like me do?
The virus is so new that there are no definitive answers as yet, the experts told me. Dozens of coronavirus studies emerge every day, “but it is not all good literature, and sorting out the wheat from the chaff is challenging,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, an expert in adolescent health at Brown University.
But she and other experts were clear on one thing: Schools should only reopen if the level of virus circulating in the community is low — that is, if less than 5 percent of people tested have a positive result. By that measure, most school districts in the nation cannot reopen without problems.
“The No. 1 factor is what your local transmission is like,” said Helen Jenkins, an expert in infectious diseases and statistics at Boston University. “If you’re in a really hard-hit part of the country, it’s highly likely that somebody coming into the school will be infected at some point.”
On the questions of how often children become infected, how sick they get and how much they contribute to community spread, the answers were far more nuanced.
Fewer children than adults become infected. But childhood infection is not uncommon.
In the early days of the pandemic, there were so few reports of sick children that it was unclear whether they could be infected at all. Researchers guessed even then that younger children could probably catch the coronavirus, but were mostly spared severe symptoms.
That conjecture has proved correct. “There is very clear evidence at this point that kids can get infected,” Dr. Ranney said.
As the pandemic unfolded, it also appeared that younger children were less likely — perhaps only half as likely — to become infected, compared with adults, whereas older children had about the same risk as adults.
But it’s impossible to be sure. In most countries hit hard by the coronavirus, lockdowns and school shutdowns kept young children cloistered at home and away from sources of infection. And when most of those countries opened up, they did so with careful adherence to masks and physical distancing.
Children may turn out to be less at risk of becoming infected, “but not meaningfully different enough that I would take solace in it or use it for decision making,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
In the United States, children under age 19 still represent just over 9 percent of all coronavirus cases. But the number of children infected rose sharply this summer to nearly half a million, and the incidence among children has risen much faster than it had been earlier this year.
“And those are just the kids that have been tested,” said Dr. Leana Wen, a former health commissioner of Baltimore. “It’s quite possible that we’re missing many cases of asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic children.”
In the two-week period between Aug. 6 and Aug. 20, for example, the number of children diagnosed in the United States jumped by 74,160, a 21 percent increase.
“Now that we’re doing more community testing, we’re seeing higher proportions of children who are infected,” Dr. Ranney said. “I think that our scientific knowledge on this is going to continue to shift.”
Children do become sick with the virus, but deaths are very rare.
Even with the rising number of infections, the possibility that panics parents the most — that their children could become seriously ill or even die from the virus — is still reassuringly slim.
Children and adolescents up to age 20 (definitions and statistics vary by state) represent less than 0.3 percent of deaths related to the coronavirus, and 21 states have reported no deaths at all among children.
“That remains the silver lining of this pandemic,” Dr. Jha said.
But reports in adults increasingly suggest that death is not the only severe outcome. Many adults seem to have debilitating symptoms for weeks or months after they first fall ill.
“What percentage of kids who are infected have those long-term consequences that we’re increasingly worried about with adults?” Dr. Ranney wondered.
Multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a mysterious condition that has been linked to the coronavirus, has also been reported in about 700 children and has caused 11 deaths as of Aug. 20. “That’s a very small percentage of children,” Dr. Ranney said. “But growing numbers of kids are getting hospitalized, period.”
Children can spread the virus to others. How often is still unknown.
Transmission has been the most challenging aspect of the coronavirus to discern in children, made even more difficult by the lockdowns that kept them at home.
Because most children are asymptomatic, for example, household surveys and studies that test people with symptoms often miss children who might have seeded infections. And when schools are closed, young children don’t venture out; they tend to catch the virus from adults, rather than the other way around.
To confirm the direction of spread, scientists ideally would genetically sequence viral samples obtained from children to understand where and when they were infected, and whether they passed it on.
New York City has delayed the opening of schools by 10 days to give teachers and principals more time to prepare and to avert a possible teachers’ strike.
Under pressure from schools and advocates, the federal government has agreed to make it easier for schools to feed poor children.
“I keep saying to people, ‘It’s so hard to study transmission — it’s just really, really hard,’” Dr. Jenkins said.
Still, based on studies so far, “I think it still appears that the younger children might be less likely to transmit than older ones, and older ones are probably more similar to adults in that regard,” she said.
Sadly, the high numbers of infected children in the United States may actually provide some real data on this question as schools reopen.
So what’s a parent to do?
That’s a tough one to answer, as parents everywhere now know. So much depends on the particular circumstances of your school district, your immediate community, your family and your child.
“I think it’s a really complex decision, and we need to do everything we can as a society to enable parents to make this type of decision,” Dr. Wen said.
There are some precautions everyone can take — beginning with doing as much outdoors as possible, maintaining physical distance and wearing masks.
“I will not send my children to school or to an indoor activity where the children are not all masked,” Dr. Ranney said.
Even if there is uncertainty about how often children become infected or spread the virus, “when you consider the risk versus benefit, the balance lies in assuming that kids can both get infected and can spread it,” Dr. Ranney said.
For schools, the decision will also come down to having good ventilation — even if that’s just windows that open — small pods that can limit how widely the virus might spread from an infected child, and frequent testing to cut transmission chains.
Teachers and school nurses will also need protective equipment, Dr. Jenkins said: “Good P.P.E. makes all the difference, and school districts must provide that for the teachers at an absolute minimum.”
As long as these right precautions are in place, “it’s better for kids to be in school than outside of school,” Dr. Jha said. “Teachers are reasonably safe in those environments, as well.”
But community transmission is the most important factor in deciding whether children should go back to school, researchers agreed. “We just can’t keep a school free from the coronavirus if the community is a hotbed of infection,” Dr. Wen said.
One of Trump’s newest and most influential advisors on COVID has urged Trump to emulate the Swedish model, keeping the economy open while waiting for the population to develop “herd immunity.” The advisor, Dr. Scott Atlas, denies that these are his views, but his advice mirrors them. Trump has said repeatedly that the pandemic will magically “disappear,” which might happen at some point. But how many lives will be needlessly lost while waiting for that magic moment? The United States has 4% of the world’s population, and nearly one-quarter of the world’s infections. Trump’s laissez-faire approach to the pandemic has not slowed its spread. There is a human cost to putting the economy over health and safety.
One of President Trump’s top medical advisers is urging the White House to embrace a controversial “herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.
The administration has already begun to implement some policies along these lines, according to current and former officials as well as experts, particularly with regard to testing.
The approach’s chief proponent is Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist from Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, who joined the White House earlier this month as a pandemic adviser. He has advocated that the United States adopt the model Sweden has used to respond to the virus outbreak, according to these officials, which relies on lifting restrictions so the healthy can build up immunity to the disease rather than limiting social and business interactions to prevent the virus from spreading.
Sweden’s handling of the pandemic has been heavily criticized by public health officials and infectious-disease experts as reckless — the country has among the highest infection and death rates in the world. It also hasn’t escaped the deep economic problems resulting from the pandemic.
But Sweden’s approach has gained support among some conservatives who argue that social distancing restrictions are crushing the economy and infringing on people’s liberties.
How does immunity against coronavirus work? New research shows how antibodies can block infection.
That this approach is even being discussed inside the White House is drawing concern from experts inside and outside the government who note that a herd immunity strategy could lead to the country suffering hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lost lives.
“The administration faces some pretty serious hurdles in making this argument. One is a lot of people will die, even if you can protect people in nursing homes,” said Paul Romer, a professor at New York University who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2018. “Once it’s out in the community, we’ve seen over and over again, it ends up spreading everywhere.”
Atlas, who does not have a background in infectious diseases or epidemiology, has expanded his influence inside the White House by advocating policies that appeal to Trump’s desire to move past the pandemic and get the economy going, distressing health officials on the White House coronavirus task force and throughout the administration who worry that their advice is being followed less and less.
Atlas declined several interview requests in recent days. After the publication of this story, he released a statement through the White House: “There is no policy of the President or this administration of achieving herd immunity. There never has been any such policy recommended to the President or to anyone else from me.”
White House communications director Alyssa Farah said there is no change in the White House’s approach toward combatting the pandemic.
“President Trump is fully focused on defeating the virus through therapeutics and ultimately a vaccine. There is no discussion about changing our strategy,” she said in a statement. “We have initiated an unprecedented effort under Operation Warp Speed to safely bring a vaccine to market in record time — ending this virus through medicine is our top focus.”
White House officials said Trump has asked questions about herd immunity but has not formally embraced the strategy. The president, however, has made public comments that advocate a similar approach.
“We are aggressively sheltering those at highest risk, especially the elderly, while allowing lower-risk Americans to safely return to work and to school, and we want to see so many of those great states be open,” he said during his address to the Republican National Convention Thursday night. “We want them to be open. They have to be open. They have to get back to work.”
Atlas has fashioned himself as the “anti-Dr. Fauci,” one senior administration official said, referring to Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease official, who has repeatedly been at odds with the president over his public comments about the threat posed by the virus. He has clashed with Fauci as well as Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, over the administration’s pandemic response.
Atlas has argued both internally and in public that an increased case count will move the nation more quickly to herd immunity and won’t lead to more deaths if the vulnerable are protected. But infectious-disease experts strongly dispute that, noting that more than 25,000 people younger than 65 have died of the virus in the United States. In addition, the United States has a higher number of vulnerable people of all ages because of high rates of heart and lung disease and obesity, and millions of vulnerable people live outside nursing homes — many in the same households with children, whom Atlas believes should return to school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 