Instead of working like hell to establish conditions for safe resumption of in-person schooling, the White House put all energy into denying any risk existed.

Resulting national failure to prioritize reopening schools is as big a scandal as anything in our political lifetimes. https://twitter.com/V2019N/status/1310760891281891334

As @AlecMacGillis writes, the failure to open schools is doing real damage.

Even in my own privileged household, we see the harm it does to our kids.

Then we go down the street and see MD bars and restaurants open. It's infuriating and indefensible. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-students-left-behind-by-remote-learning

What the bars vs schools contrast - which is mirrored across much of the country - reveals is a failure to sanely prioritize reopening.

Which in turn flows from a failure at the federal level to establish clear guidance and communicate relative risks.

This is relevant because the biggest single factor driving risk of in-school transmission is the level of transmission in the surrounding community. Keep that down, and schools can open (with modifications).

So opening restaurants and bars - and other proven transmission amplifiers - increases the likelihood that schools stay closed.

What would it take to get this right?

First: prioritized reopening.

We know a lot more about the relative risks of different activities than we did in April, or even July.

If the country were serious about safe schools, we'd be closing the other transmission risks to create some headroom to safely open schools.

The issue here is less the direct health risks to kids and more the risk that the schools amplify transmissions in the wider community.

Which leads us to....

Second: better data.

It is astonishing (as @cmyeaton frequently reminds us) how little we still know about transmission dynamics in the US. With the CDC sidelined, muzzled, and politicized, it is really hard for well-meaning school leaders to know what data to trust.

And the evidence remains murky. We know that kids themselves are at low risk of severe disease (unlike, say, flu). But we also know that they can and do transmit; outbreaks in Israeli schools and numerous US summer camps prove that.

An administration serious about safe schools would be aggressively generating data on school reopening experiences and providing rolling guidance to schools as the evidence evolves.

Instead we just get useless ham-fisted happy talk from the White House.

Third: testing.

One apparent takeaway from college reopenings this fall has been that mass testing makes a huge difference.

Imagine if the feds had invested in making this scale of testing available to every school in the country? https://twitter.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/1309329078403641345?s=20

Fourth: resources.

Schools have gotten shockingly little help adapting to safer school operations - which if done right would require physical adaptations to facilities, different class configurations and schedules, more staff, etc.

Instead - just some extra chromebooks.

It didn't have to be this way. Better planning, taking the risk seriously, and reopening strategically could have enabled schools to open. Could have avoided the damage that these closures are daily inflicting upon all our kids.

But it's hard to manage a risk you can't admit.

The administration's insistence (including, apparently, Dr. Birx) on downplaying the the risks of schools reopening, rather than creating a safe path toward that reopening, has left us in this horrible situation.