“But once you put a damper on the acceleration,” he said, “then you need to really examine how we keep the kids in school safely.” “One of the things we’ve learned is that we closed schools much longer than other countries, and we’ve had this terrible impact on educational attainment, and we have seen the test scores go down,” said Emanuel, who also advised Biden’s transition team.įauci said that early in the pandemic, “at a point when the hospitals were literally a day or two from being overrun,” closing public places like restaurants, bars, and schools was important for keeping health care systems operating by slowing the spread of the virus. Both said better indoor air circulation might be one way to safely keep schools open. Ezekiel Emanuel, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said the pandemic had shown that officials should think carefully about school closures and keep them as limited as possible. School closures have been a particularly contentious topic, but many experts now agree that some schools were closed for too long and that abruptly removing millions of children from US classrooms has had harmful effects on their emotional and intellectual health.īoth Fauci and Dr. “And as conditions change, we have to change.” “We need instantaneous data to know what’s going on,” said Osterholm, who advised President Biden’s transition team. Some coronavirus variants were more lethal to children than others, he said, adding that if officials had had access to timely data on the effects of the virus on children, they might have been able to tailor school closures to when students were most at risk. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, cited school closures as an example where real-time data would have helped. ![]() “How many people were getting vaccinated, and what was the effect of those data? We literally had to wait months instead of getting it in real time.” Anthony Fauci, who helped lead the pandemic response under both the Trump and Biden administrations. ![]() “We were in the embarrassing position of having to call up the UK and Israel or South Africa to find out was going on - how many people were getting infected with this new infection, what the variant was,” said Dr. Responding to a quickly mutating virus that poses different risks to different populations requires better and faster data, experts said. And unlike Britain and Israel, which have national health care systems, the United States has no mechanism for a free flow of data among public health agencies and private providers. The CDC was hamstrung during the pandemic by antiquated data systems and inconsistent data sharing between the federal government, states, and health providers.
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