Closing schools for 6 weeks is one thing; closing them for a year is another entirely. We need to prioritize reopening schools, especially K-5, over just about everything else. Given age-specific disease dynamics, this should be possible, esp. w/ testing. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/health/coronavirus-schools-children.html

Since the comments are filling up the predictable responses, I'm not saying that we should immediately throw open the doors without taking precautions.

I *am* saying that getting K-5 open is something that with concerted investment and ingenuity we should be able to do.

Please re-read my original post.

I claimed that opening K-5 should be a priority.

I did not claim that opening K-5 tomorrow without additional precautions would be safe or even advisable.

It seems to me that we need two things. First, we need detailed contact tracing and genetic epidemiology to understand patterns of spread in the schools that have decided to open. This helps us understand the scale of the risk.

Second, we will aggressive surveillance testing and probably massive scale proactive testing.

Costly? Sure. But literally billions of dollars allocated by congress for testing have gone unspent by this administration. If we care about schools, need to make this it a priority.

If bars are open and schools are closed; if fans fills stadiums but kindergarteners are on zoom; if billions of dollars are waiting to be used on testing but we say that opening schools is too costly—if these things are happening, we cannot pretend we are prioritizing education.

Perhaps my intuitions are wrong. Perhaps there is no way to safely reopen K-5 under present conditions, even with testing.

But we are not making the concerted effort I would like to see to figure out whether this is a case. We're sitting back and waiting for a vaccine.

We can do better.

The first step is to stop pretending that nothing is happening, or that COVID is going to magically disappear. The second is to develop safe environments and to build testing capacity.

What we do now will pay rich dividends even once the vaccine has arrived.