Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence

and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists,

community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas

or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question

at jh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith Rogers, producer of Public Health On Call.

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Dr. Annette Anderson, a Johns Hopkins education

expert, about the impact that virtual schooling is having academically and socially on K-12 students,

and how she isn't sure schools will be fully open until the fall. Let's listen. Annette Anderson,

thanks so much for joining me. Thank you, Stephanie, for having me back.

So I just read a piece from the CDC.

They find scant evidence of COVID spreading in schools where there are precautions in place.

Yet at the same time, they found that only 17% of school districts are fully open in person with a

quarter of them fully online. So I guess my question for you is, what is the impact of COVID

on K-12 education as we know it? Well, I think that we're seeing that there's a lot of information

for families to sift through

as they make their decisions about whether they're ready to go back. As much as there is information

to say that schools are safe and that children don't transmit this virus, we have other reports

and there are other different types of data that suggest that children are super spreaders, in fact.

...