When it came time to start figuring out if or how schools could reopen safely, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started putting together guidance—and then the White House got involved. White House officials pressured the CDC to weaken its warnings about COVID-19 risks. They went around the CDC looking for data more favorable to Donald Trump’s desire to reopen without significant restrictions. It was a full-court press to ensure that the official word coming from the federal government was that schools could and should go back in person.
Dr. Deborah Birx pressured the CDC to include assessments from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in its guidance, including that “very few reports of children being the primary source of Covid-19 transmission among family members have emerged” and that asymptomatic children “are unlikely to spread the virus.” The CDC did manage to reject the line about asymptomatic children, but its final product was significantly shaped by the political pressure from the White House.
This is one more way the Trump White House contributed to the great rolling tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Because it should have been possible to reopen schools safely and with the confidence of parents and teachers and students—if doing so had been taken seriously from the beginning, and if there had been funding to improve ventilation in schools and provide the staffing needed for smaller, socially distanced classes. Reopening schools safely also required things outside of the schools themselves—for the nation to commit to doing the other things needed to reduce community transmission of the virus and keep it low, like keeping bars closed. But instead of that, the Trump administration simply pushed for ignorance, to keep people from knowing what the dangers might be or how to avoid them, rather than reducing the dangers. That meant that even if schools could be in-person safely, too many people were scared by what wasn’t known, by what hadn’t been done to improve the situation, and by the obvious political pressure figuring into the decision-making process.
As of now, we still don't know what the impact of school reopenings has been, and even figuring out the basics of the data is a challenge. We know that the number of children diagnosed with coronavirus increased sharply over the summer, but we don’t entirely know how much that came from increased testing of kids and how much it came from increased spread, and much of that shift happened before schools reopened in any case. There are so many unknowns, and rather than trying to turn them into knowns and take the necessary steps to make people really safe, the Trump administration recklessly pressured scientists to weaken their guidelines. In this case it was schools, but the pattern of behavior is why the U.S. represents such an outsized proportion of the global COVID-19 deaths relative to its population.
