The White House will soon issue a guidance on public schools closings to slow the spread of coronavirus, Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday.
“We’re working very closely with California, Washington, New York and Florida to develop community-specific recommendations for those areas where we’ve had what is known as community spread,” Pence said at a briefing. “In the next 24 hours, working with those states, we’ll be publishing CDC recommendations for what ought to be done.”
Pence, the Trump administration’s point person on the virus, was responding to questions about a Washington Post op-ed by former Trump adviser Tom Bossert, who wrote, “school closings can be the single most effective intervention.”
Bossert warned that soon, “If we fail to take action, we will watch our health-care system be overwhelmed.”
Some countries in Asia and Europe have already sent all students home in response to COVID-19, but major U.S. cities — including New York — have not.
White House coronavirus task force member Anthony Fauci told reporters Tuesday that school closure recommendations will be community-specific and won’t be as comprehensive as in Hong Kong, Japan, France, South Korea, and other countries.
“It’s incorrect to say, ‘Now everything has happened bad, let’s close the schools.’ And it’s incorrect to say, ‘Let’s just blanket close the schools in the entire country tonight,'” said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“I do think it would be appropriate to carefully try and do things like closing — but there’s other things besides closing, to do the mitigation sometimes before you think you really need it.”
Some school districts near New York have closed classes in response to a significant local outbreak. Gov. Cuomo on Tuesday ordered all schools within a mile-radius of a “containment area” around New Rochelle to shut by Thursday.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday that he’s not inclined to order all schools closed in the city.
“To me, it’s a high bar for a closure,” de Blasio said. “One thing I think makes sense is you have a situation in a school [with] a temporary closure, a specific targeted closure for limited periods of time.”
