For those who took anything away from the testimony of Centers for Disease Control and Protection head Dr. Robert Redfield before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis last week, it was that he wanted schools to reopen.
“I don’t think I can emphasize it enough, as the director for the Centers for Disease Control, the leading public health agency in the world — it is in the public health interest that these K through 12 students to get the schools back open for face-to-face learning,” Redfield said in the Friday hearing, according to the New York Post.
“I want these kids back in school,” he added, talking about the role schools play in issues like mental health and child abuse reporting.
“I want it done smartly but I think we have to be honest that the public health and interest of the students in the nation right now is to get a quality education and face-to-face learning. We need to get on with it.”
Media coverage of any piece of testimony tends to center on a quote like that pulled from hours of prepared remarks and partisan grilling, then subject it to microscopic analysis.
In Redfield's case, the analysis tended to favor the usual narrative: Here again was proof the Trump administration was monomaniacally focused on getting schools open because if the schools don't open, it's an admission of some sort of failure by the administration.
If you wanted to hear more about why Redfield was taking this tack -- as opposed to why a panel of socially distanced talking heads thought Redfield was taking this tack -- you would do well to watch or read his remarks from a July 14 webinar for the Buck Institute.
"I think that the cost to our nation in continuing to keep these schools closed is substantial, and I’m hopeful that resources that are necessary can be made available. That’s obviously not -- it’s way above my pay grade," Redfield said when asked about the costs associated with reopening schools.
"But there has been another cost that we’ve seen, particularly in high schools. We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose that are above excess that we had as background than we are seeing the deaths from COVID.
"We’re building evidence that really does not point to children as being a major transmission instrument for this virus, you know, whether it’s in our household context studies that we’ve done where the introduction is basically by adults," Redfield said.
However, when it came to the lethality of COVID-19 to minors, Redfield noted the data showed it was relatively low.
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