Schools need to remain open, even amid the surging coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Thursday.
It’s important to be sensitive about the safety and the health of the children, he said, but it’s also important to keep children in school, Fauci told CNN’s Chris Cuomo.
“You want to make sure you're sensitive and you do whatever you can to protect the children and protect the teachers because then indirectly you're protecting other people,” Fauci said. “Having said that, my feeling is the default position (is) keep the schools open, if you possibly can.”
New York City just closed down its school system to in-person learning and others have, too, as coronavirus cases spike again.
Fauci said he and many of his colleagues believe schools need to remain open despite the pandemic.
Part of the problem in trying to have a uniform policy for handling US schools during the pandemic is the vastness of the country and the cultural and geographical differences, the White House Coronavirus Task Force member said. Earlier Thursday, the task force held its first public briefing since July and members stressed that the official federal policy is to keep schools open.
Fauci said the patchwork of policies seen across the US, with some school systems closed and others open, does not help.
“Everybody's got to be in it together. You’ve got to pull together. We can't have people doing this this way, that that way. It doesn't work,” he said. “We've got to do it in a unified way,” he added.