253 - Schools Week Finale: Is It Safe to Reopen US Schools During the COVID-19 Pandemic?
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2021
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
While schools may not be inherently safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, they can be made safer. Dr. Caitlin Rivers of the Center for Health Security talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about what schools can do to consider reopening safely including the data to consider, and risk-reduction methods like masks, distancing, testing, and more. They also discuss how variants of SARS-CoV-2 could factor into these developments.
KEYWORDS: child health; student life; pandemic response
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:19.6 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence |
| 0:22.4 | and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists, |
| 0:27.8 | community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas |
| 0:34.4 | or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question |
| 0:38.7 | at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:41.1 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:47.0 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health On Call. |
| 0:50.5 | Thank you so much for joining us for Schools Week. |
| 0:52.6 | And in today's final episode, Dr. Josh Sharfstein talks with Dr. Caitlin Rivers about the science |
| 0:58.6 | behind reopening schools, what data districts need to consider, and the measures that can help |
| 1:04.4 | reduce risks to get kids safely back to the classroom. |
| 1:08.2 | Let's listen. |
| 1:09.2 | Dr. Rivers, thank you so much for joining me. I know that you have |
| 1:13.2 | been looking in great detail at this question of COVID-19 and schools. And so let's start with an easy |
| 1:21.4 | question. Is it safe to open schools? I think that schools can be made safe, but they are not |
| 1:26.9 | inherently safe. And if we think a little bit about what goes into making schools safe, I think that schools can be made safe, but they are not inherently safe. |
| 1:28.2 | And if we think a little bit about what goes into making schools safe, I think there's a few big elements. |
| 1:33.2 | One is community prevalence. |
| 1:34.6 | What is happening in the community? |
| 1:36.3 | In places where there is a lot of viral transmission, it will be more difficult for schools to be safe just because there will be so many introductions of cases into schools. |
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