This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 14th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The learning curve for dealing with COVID-19 has no more impact than at schools,

places where young people gather and interact in rooms for hours each day,

changing classes, seeing friends, and then going back home.

So as school systems try to plan reopeningopenings, what are they doing?

What should they be doing?

And how much flexibility and I dare say grace should be given to parents who choose something

else.

Cato's Jeff Singer and Neil McCluskey comment.

We are for many school systems less than a month out from school starting again, maybe, and in light of COVID-19 pandemic, there are a lot of school systems that

are really don't appear to have a plan or are sort of just seeing how things go in a lot of ways.

So to you, Jeff, what do we know now about the coronavirus and COVID-19 that we didn't know in late

February and early March that should inform this discussion?

Well it's also important to state that we're probably going to even know more a few months from now than we know now.

So everything, you know, we're in a learning process because this is a new virus.

But what we seem, we have a lot of experience now in several countries in Europe,

and what we, what seems to be obvious now is that young children, let's say under the age of 11 or 12,

are very minimally at risk of contracting the virus in a classroom setting and of

transmitting it to one another or to teachers or adults or bringing it home with

them. Now that's of course not universal. There have been a couple of

pockets here and there. There was a case in Israel, a case in Quebec where there was an outbreak, but generally

...