Schools should open in full this fall in the US

For all the death and illness the coronavirus has caused, it has done the world one great and surprising favour. It has spared our children.
“Influenza almost always selects the weakest in a society to kill, the very young and the very old,” John M Barry wrote in “The Great Influenza,” his definitive account of the 1918 pandemic. But while our current
pandemic has feasted on the old — some 80% of those killed by Covid-19 were 65 or older — it has mercifully left the young almost entirely untouched.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Covid-19 fatality rate in the US for anyone younger than 19 is so low it is calculated as 0.0%. (The “fatality rate” is the percentage of people who die after contracting a disease.) Of the more than 88,000 Covid-19 deaths recorded through May 30,15 were children between the ages of 1 and 14. Fifteen! That compares with 2,571 deaths from all causes for those ages during that same period. When you add in the next age group that the CDC tracks — 15- to 24-year-olds — the Covid-19 death toll rises to 121. That’s 0.14% of those reported Covid-19 deaths.
There are few things parents fear more than their children coming down with a terrible disease. In New York, playgrounds remain closed. Public swimming pools are not expected to open this summer. Youth sports have been cancelled. Kids still aren’t supposed to play with their friends except through Fortnite. Yet there is hardly a peep of complaint; parents seem to think this is the price their children must pay to remain safe.
Most important of all, schools have been closed. When municipalities nationwide shut down their schools in mid-March, it was entirely defensible. The initial assumption was that the virus would kill children, just as coronaviruses had done in the past. It was also assumed that even if kids were asymptomatic, they would surely spread the disease to their teachers, not to mention their parents and grandparents. Three months later, several things are clear. First, the percentage of children infected with the virus is exceedingly low, and the percentage who die from it is microscopically low. Second, the recent protests have made it plain that people view some things as more important than risking the chance of being infected. And third, remote learning is a disaster.
Combine these three factors and the inescapable conclusion is that come September, schools should start up again, more or less the way they always have, though with some accommodations that I’ll get to shortly. The risk is minimal, the importance profound.
Instead, some school systems are planning to continue remote learning into the fall. Others are contemplating having students come in shifts, with certain days designated for remote learning and other days for classroom learning. Massachusetts just issued guidelines for September that limit class size to 10 students and require that no group of 10 can interact with any other class. These ideas are simply unworkable. Anything short of full-on open schools will take a serious toll on schoolchildren, their parents and the struggling economy. If you have a child at home, you already know that remote learning can’t compare to classroom learning. In many places, lots of students simply didn’t show up online, and administrators had no good way to find out why not. Soon many districts weren’t requiring students to do any work at all, increasing the risk that millions of students would have big gaps in their learning.

—Bloomberg