Consider This from NPR - Can Schools Open Safely? What Other Countries Have Decided

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

Admiral Brett Giroir of the White House coronavirus task force tells NPR that the United States is still growing testing capacity. Positivity rates in parts of the South suggest there is a long way to go. Teachers, parents and public health officials around the country are trying to figure out what do to in the fall. The Trump administration says schools should re-open, but individual school districts will ultimately decide. Some already have: Los Angeles and San Diego announced this week school will resume remote-only. And while Disneyland in Hong Kong shut down after dozens of new cases there, Walt Disney World in Florida reopened after 15,000 were reported on a single day over the weekend. Find and support your local public radio station.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The U.S. is doing as many as 700,000 tests a day, and that's grown a lot since the early days of the pandemic. But it is less than half of what the U.S. needs to bring the virus under control. We know that in areas of the country right now that have appropriate mitigation, that the testing we have is sufficient. Admiral Brett Giroir of the White House Coronavirus Task Force told NPR today that soon the U.S., hopefully by September, will be doing a million tests every day. But right now in parts of the South, the rates of positive tests are as high as 25 percent. And the World Health Organization says you're doing enough testing when your positivity rate is 5%. So what we need people to do is to physically distance, wear the mask. We need places that are in hot zones to close bars and to limit restaurants. And if we do those simple

things, we can turn around the virus. Coming up, how other countries around the world are handling the issue of schools. This is Consider This from NPR. Kelly McEvers is off this week. I'm Elsa Chang, and it is Tuesday, July 14th. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Integrative Therapeutics, creator of Physician's Elemental Diet, Jenna Martinez-Enzunza grew up in rural Winkleman, Arizona. We're a very small mining community town. What kind of mining is it? Copper mining.

And here's how she described it to my colleague Steve Inscape. It's your typical desert landscape with saguaros and ocotillos and palo verdes and it's beautiful. It's beautiful to me. Today Jenna is a first grade teacher there. Last month she and two other teachers spent a little time back at school getting things ready for a remote summer session and the three of them worked in a room together, trying to keep a safe distance. But one of them, Kimberly Chavez-Lopez-Bird, felt sick in mid-June. It was the virus. She went to the ER on June 13th. And less than two weeks later, she was dead. She was 61. It's devastating. You know, the day that we do go back to school,

kids are going to look for Ms. Bird that do not understand that she's gone. Ms. Bird's not going to be there. Can schools be made safe? That is the question teachers, parents, and public health officials are struggling with all over the country. Teachers are, understandably, they have fear, they have anxiety around school reopening because in many conversations around school reopening plans, the educator voice

is lost. Tamika Walker-Kelly teaches elementary school in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She's also president of the North Carolina Association of Educators. And I mean not only just classroom educators, but our bus drivers and our custodians and our school nutrition workers who are essential and have been essential always, but particularly since school buildings closed. And so we've seen a really varied response across the nation. Back in Arizona, Jenna Martinez-Enzunza says things just don't feel safe enough to go back to school in the fall. And maybe things will look better in a few months, she says. But that depends on her neighbors in Arizona taking the virus more seriously. If everybody does their part, we can help the hospitals.

But when they're filling up and we are not taking this seriously, we are not helping them. And if we're not going to help them, it's just going to be worse when we repopulate schools. By the way, Jenna and the third teacher she was working with back in June, they both got sick too. Jenna says she's doing a lot better than she was. She's still not 100 percent. She says she's still not sleeping very well. What do you tell parents who look at this, who look at Arizona where a school teacher recently died teaching summer school, parents who are worried about the safety of their children in public schools. Yeah, schools should be opened. Schools should be opened. Last week, President Trump tweeted that he disagreed with his own government's

guidelines for reopening schools on things like masks and social distancing. He called those guidelines expensive and impractical, and he promised that they will be reworked. In the meantime, governors and more than 13,000 school districts across the country are puzzling it out on their own. Los Angeles and San Diego public schools, for instance, announced this week that they will start the year with remote-only classes next month. Other school districts around the country are pledging to go back. And as for how to do that, the U.S. might learn some lessons from some other countries, places like Germany, Thailand, Israel, where students have already been back at school.

My colleague Mary Louise Kelly recently talked with three NPR correspondents in each of those places. And here's their conversation. I am joined by Esme Nicholson in Berlin, Daniel Estrin in Jerusalem, and Michael Sullivan in Chiang Rai, Thailand. Welcome to each of you. Hi. Thank you. Hello. Esme, let me come to you first. What does school look like in Germany? Well, it depends on where you are. Germany's education system differs from state to state, like in the US. But in most of Germany, students have been back in school since May, albeit on a part-time basis. And this is to allow for reduced class sizes and social distancing. In terms of testing, well, there's not much of that going on. It's by no

means a standard. And even Berlin city education authorities recently announced that it doesn't expect students to follow social distancing rules as of the new school year, effectively acknowledging that younger students will ignore them anyway. Michael, I know in Thailand, students just went back last week. How has it gone? It's gone pretty well so far. I mean, it's been pretty normal with a couple of tweaks. I drop my son off in the morning. They take his temperature. Then he goes to the bathroom to wash his hands before he enters the classroom. And then there's social distancing once he gets to the classroom, of course. But I mean, that's pretty much it. Remember, Thailand, you know, we've only had a couple thousand cases here. There's been no domestic infection for more than five weeks.

So normal seems pretty normal. Daniel, in Israel, it's been a little bit more of a complicated picture. School shut down because of the virus, and then it reopened. They did go back in May, and now it's out again. What happened? Well, what happened in Israel is quite a cautionary tale, I think. At first, the Israeli health professionals here urged the government, yes, let school resume again, but only let kids under the age of nine go back to school and keep it in small groups. And they said data around the world show that younger kids have a very low rate of infection and transmission. But instead of just letting the younger kids go back to school, there were these last minute negotiations.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools wanted the older kids to go back to religious studies. And so they did. And then 11th and 12th graders also went back to school. And so very, very quickly, everyone was back. And then very quickly after that, there was a heat wave. So the government said, well, kids don't need to wear masks anymore during this heat wave. And then we just saw big outbreaks in schools. And a lot of schools shut down for several weeks. I mean, that's the big question is what happens when there's an outbreak? Esme, I'm sure Germany has confronted this.

How has it been handled? Indeed, we've already seen schools close again since they reopened in May, either because of an outbreak within a school or because of a surge in the infection rate locally. And when this happens, kids have to go back online in as far as that is possible. And Germany's health authorities, the CDC equivalent here, the Robert Koch Institute, is already warning that they expect the second wave to hit at about the same time as flu season this fall. So we're likely to see schools shut down and reopen repeatedly. The other obvious stakeholder here is parents. Michael, you described taking your kid to school,

taking your son and watching them check his temperature as he walks in the door. How has it felt? And what are you hearing from other parents? Has it been scary? It hasn't been scary, again, because of the success here. But, you know, there was concern the first day of school. There were a lot of us huddled up. I mean, we got out of our cars when we took our kids to school. We weren't allowed into the school, but we got out.

There's concern, but it looks like they're handling things pretty well. And so that, you know, made it a little less scary, I guess, for us. Yeah. Any lessons from your part of the world that you think the United States can take from the experiences in your country? Either things that feel directly applicable or things that are very different? Daniel? I think the lessons to be learned from Israel are listen to the health experts. The government here did not follow the health experts guidelines to just open the younger grades and to have kids in small groups. They open very fast. And there was no coherent policy. So listen to your health

experts have a coherent policy. That was NPR's Daniel Estrin in Jerusalem, Esme Nicholson in Berlin, and Michael Sullivan in Chiang Rai, Thailand, speaking to my colleague Mary Louise Kelly. Finally, here's something that says a lot about where we are right now. You may have seen the news that Walt Disney World in Florida reopened to visitors this week. That was after a weekend where Florida recorded a record high number of cases for any state, over 15,000 in a single day. On Wednesday, Disney World in Hong Kong, though, is shutting down because city officials there are trying to contain a surge in coronavirus cases. To give you an idea of the size of that surge, last Friday, the city recorded 38 new cases of the virus. That is the show for today.

Additional reporting on this episode from our colleagues at All Things Considered and Morning Edition. For more news, download the NPR One app or tune in to your local public radio station. Supporting that station makes this podcast possible. I'm Elsa Chang. I'll be back with more tomorrow. What does it mean to be the only person who looks like you at your place of work? I was the first Latina in the newsroom at NPR Ever to step foot Who wasn't cleaning it We discussed the reckoning over race Taking place in newsrooms across the country

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