Dr. Scott Atlas joined @GovRonDeSantis for a press conference today, emphasizing that the U.S. is "the only nation among our peer nations that are hysterical about opening schools."

#RationalGround

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Atlas: "There’s a considerable cost to shutting down medical care, whether it’s cancer, chemotherapy, live organ donor transplants, cancer screenings, biopsies, immunizations, all kinds of things went by the wayside in the prolongation of the lockdown…"

2/14

Atlas: "The third part of the president’s strategy… is making sure that we safely open schools because we cannot sacrifice our children. There’s nothing higher on the national agenda than educating our children, and the harms of not opening schools are really tremendous"

3/14

Atlas: "I was shocked to see the [WaPo] story because they never asked me for a comment, first of all. You know, there’s news, there’s opinion, and then there’s overt lies. And that was never a strategy that was advocated by me in the administration."

4/14

DeSantis: “If there are 3 cases in a school somewhere, how many of those people developed any type of symptom? How many of them were ill? Like the University of Alabama had all these, quote, cases. I don’t think a single one of them required hospitalization."

5/14

Atlas: “What that means is that if you’re talking about closing schools for the children during this, then you must necessarily close schools from November through April during flu season. Of course, we don’t talk about that because that’s really not rational policy"

6/14

Atlas: “The purpose of testing is to stop people from dying, stop people from getting a serious illness from this disease, and allowing other people, who are very low-risk, to function."

7/14

Atlas: "And that’s what the new CDC guideline came out this week on testing, and I’m very much for that, as was every single doctor on the Task Force, despite what you may read, is that we do testing in a very smart way."

8/14

Atlas: "When you close schools to in-person learning, it is enormously destructive... Distance learning alone is a failure... There are serious, enormous problems with not having in-person schools"

9/

Atlas: "We are the only nation among our peers that are hysterical about opening schools. When you look at the rest—Canada, the UK, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Italy, Spain—they’re opening schools because they recognize the data."

10/14

DeSantis: "We will never do any of these lockdowns again, and I hear people say they’ll shut down the country, and honestly, I cringe, because we know places that have done that"

11/14

DeSantis: "The most draconian lockdown in the world has been Peru, military enforced since March. They have the highest per capita mortality in the world from COVID. And at best, what a lockdown will do is delay. It does not reduce the ultimate mortality"

12/14

Atlas: "Half of them didn’t come in for their chemotherapy. You had thousands of tumors that weren’t biopsied; 2/3 of cancer screenings that were not done; we had more than half of childhood immunizations not done; 85% of living organ transplant surgeries were not done."

13/14

Atlas: "We know what’s going on; this is not March or April; we’ve had a massive decrease in the case fatality rate since then; we know a lot more; length of stays in hospital are one-third of what they were at the peak; 50% less mortality, if you are hospitalized."

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