CDC Director: Schools ‘one of the safest places’ for kids during COVID

Last week, Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said schools are one of the safest places for kids during the COVID pandemic. Mercer Island MD Dr. Gordon Cohen joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss this statement and how another study said lockdowns may not be the right approach.

“If you look at the numbers, the numbers actually will show you that kids really have very, very minor infections,” Cohen said, agreeing with Dr. Redfield. “It appears that there’s not even 100 deaths in the country in school-age children. The ones that have succumbed to the disease have had serious comorbid problems, and in many cases may not have even been in school anyway.”

“So I think the risk of having kids in school is really quite low,” he added. “And as we’ve discussed before, there’s a lot of other things: social development, and their academics, and so forth. And so I think everything we talk about in medicine is risk versus benefit.”

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As Dave noted, there was a recent report called the Great Barrington Declaration, which was put out by a libertarian economic group, but it was signed by epidemiologists. The report argues that the risks of kids not going to school are worse than if they were in classrooms. It also suggested that COVID has been more on par with an ordinary flu season, and that outright lockdowns are not the right approach.

“Well, we’re still learning about the numbers,” Cohen said. “For example, on Nov. 21, there was 177,552 new cases in the United States, and there was 1,448 deaths on that same day. Now, if you do the math, we’re now at 0.08% mortality rate. Whereas early on in this infection, we were saying it was 4% to even close to 5%. So how does it compare to the flu? I don’t think we can exactly answer that question yet, but obviously these scientists that wrote this declaration were all very smart people.”

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“One from Harvard is an epidemiologist, another one is from Stanford, another one from Oxford. Unfortunately, it’s unpopular, and there have been people based on their political persuasions or whatever who have tried to discredit them for what they’ve written,” he explained. “But what they’re proposing makes a lot of sense, which is a very targeted approach to trying to deal with the infection.”

For a targeted approach, they suggest you protect elderly people and people who are otherwise compromised. But you try to keep life as normal as possible for everybody else.

“And the notion of sending kids to school,” Dr. Cohen added. “But, you know, protecting the elderly. There is some decent logic to what they’re saying.”

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