The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky predicts that school reopenings in America could happen in the month of September, more than five months to go from now. She said the agency anticipates that "all our children" could now ease back and return to schools. But, is it really safe?
US COVID-19 2021: When is the school reopenings?
As of Wednesday, Apr. 7, the United States now has over 30 million cases of COVID-19. More than 500,000 patients have now died from the pandemic. Despite all these, most US states are now planning to go 'back-to-normal' by opening establishments, businesses, etc.
However, one thing that is left out is the schedule of the next school reopenings. According to Forbes, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said on Wednesday, Apr. 7, that every Americans may now anticipate that September will be the month of the school reopenings.
"We should anticipate, come September 2021, that schools should be full-fledged in person and all of our children back in the classroom," Walensky said.
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Is it safe?
When it comes to the safety of the children, the CDC director explains that a lot of things can be done, in order to protect students from acquiring the virus. Whether students will be vaccinated or not.
"We can vaccinate teachers, we can test, there's so much we can do," she added.
US COVID-19 variant: B.1.1.7
As CDC plans to commit to their September deadline, a newly-reported COVID-19 variant called B.1.1.7 was discovered. Surprisingly, experts believe that children could be the ones highly-infected by this specific variant.
"Please understand, this B.1.1.7 variant is a brand new ball game," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesotasaid on NBC's Meet the Press. "It infects kids very readily. Unlike previous strains of the virus, we didn't see children under 8th grade get infected often or they were not frequently very ill, they didn't transmit to the rest of the community."
So far, CDC has not yet given a clarification about this new variant.
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