Dr. Anthony Fauci is considering some of the steps taken in response to the Covid pandemic, including school closures, which led to Loss of learning ability Across the country.
He said on “CBS Mornings” Tuesday that the initial closures were not a mistake, but he questioned how long schools were closed.
“Shutting everything down immediately — and we didn’t shut it down completely — but essentially doing major social distancing and even closing schools was the right move,” Fauci said. “How long you kept it closed was the problem, because there was disparity across the country. If you go back and look at YouTube, I kept saying, ‘Close the bars, open the schools. Open the schools as quickly and safely as possible.’ But it was the right thing to shut it down initially. Keeping it closed for a year was not a good idea.”
For example, New York City high schools reopened in March 2021, after many had been closed for over a year. Months later, in September of that year, all schools reopened In the nation’s largest school district, that means more than one million New York City students returned to in-person learning.
Other areas of the country had shorter shutdown periods. For example, Florida in July 2020 Emergency order issued All “brick-and-mortar” schools are required to reopen full-time from next month, regardless of whether the state was one of them Hotspots by country For the virus.
Research has shown that it could take more than five years for students to fully make up for what they have lost due to the pandemic. And while students are lagging behind at every level, The biggest difference This problem is seen in Black, Latino, and low-income communities.
Data from previous year Reading skills among fourth- and eighth-graders have fallen to a 30-year low, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In math, nearly 40% of eighth-graders couldn’t grasp basic concepts — the worst performance since testing began in 1969.
Still, the number of cases in the country was very high. close time Cannot be ignored.
“When we shut down, 15 days to flatten the curve, we had a tsunami of cases,” Fauci said. “Right here in New York, we had freezer trucks parked in front of Elmhurst Hospital.”
Refrigerated trucks were used in New York City, Many are standing outside the hospitalA hospital has been set up to store bodies from the city's morgues and hospitals following deaths due to Covid-19.
The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases sheds more light on his role in leading the U.S. government's fight against the pandemic in his new memoir “On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service,” published by Penguin Random House.