COVID-19 outbreaks in children complicate school reopening plans

WSUPG’s Dr. Pranatharthi Chandrasekar featured in COVID-19 outbreaks in children complicate school reopening plans from Aljazeera.

Children often learn better in school, education experts say, where they have direct contact with their teachers and can have the social-emotional learning they need by being around their peers. “Schools are key to the cognitive development of children,” according to a recent report by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

But sending children back to school also risks spreading the disease to relatives, teachers and other families.

“Children can be like conveyor belts, taking the disease back and forth,” said Dr Pranatharthi Chandrasekar, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Wayne State University School of Medicine.

“Children get the virus then they shed it, and therefore they can be a risk to other people who they pass the virus on to,” Chandrasekar adds, “it is a problem, opening schools, particularly in areas where the infectivity rate continues to be high.”

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