Florida Teachers File Lawsuit After State Forces Schools To Reopen; Nursing Home's "Romeo & Juliet" Share Poignant Farewell.
BERMAN: You heard Governor Ron DeSantis being heckled before the break. He's also being challenged in court in Florida. Today, unionized teachers in the state filed suit to overturn his emergency order for forcing schools in the state to reopen. And over the weekend, researchers from South Korea's Centers for Disease Control released a study suggesting that children ages 10 to 19 can transmit the virus as readily as adults. Younger kids pass it about three times less according to the data. Here to talk about it, Dr. Leana Wen, as Baltimore's Health Commissioner, she oversaw medical facilities in the city's public schools. Also with us, Dr. David Rubin, Director of the PolicyLab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. And Dr. Wen, I want to start with you just in Florida in general, given the state of the pandemic there and the surge in cases, how dangerous would it be to reopen schools there next month, as the Governor continues to want to do?</s>DR. LEANA WEN, FORMER HEALTH COMMISSIONER FOR THE CITY OF BALTIMORE: John, I can't imagine schools being reopened in Florida next month at the rate that we're going when there is escalating explosive spread throughout the state. We keep on asking the question of, can we keep schools free from COVID? Well, there's no way to keep schools free from COVID if the community is a hotbed of infection, and so what we really need to do now, if the goal is to reopen schools next month, we need to be implementing very strict guidelines, restrictions now to the point of even having short term place lock downs, once again. If Florida were to do that, right now, this moment, it would still take at least three to four weeks for us to even see the change in the inflection point for us to see a decline in the number of infections and that really must be done now and the window for that kind of intervention is closing.</s>BERMAN: Dr. Rubin, I want to play a clip of something that Missouri Governor Mike Parson said about children returning to school. Listen to this.</s>GOV. MIKE PARSON (R-MO): These kids have got to get back to school, they're at the lowest risk possible. And if they do get COVID-19, which they will, and they will when they go to school, they're not going to the hospitals, they're not going to have to sit in a doctor's office today. We're going to go home and they're going to get over it.</s>BERMAN: They'll get it. They'll get over it. As a pediatrician, what do you make of that statement?</s>DR. DAVID RUBIN, DIRECTOR OF THE POLICYLAB, CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL OF PHILADELPHIA: Well, you know children don't live in bubbles. You know, they rely on their parents often their grandparents. We've got 95,000 of them caring for kids here in Pennsylvania alone. The teachers, you know, kids are foundational to a working community. And the idea that kids live in a bubble just doesn't work. If we don't get community transmission rates down to acceptable levels to make it safe to reopen schools, I just don't see a path forward.</s>BERMAN: But he is willing to accept kids just getting it is that a public health policy?</s>RUBIN: No, because the reality is, while kids may be less likely to get severe disease, their parents and their grandparents and their teachers are not. This is about public confidence. This is about being able to say to a teacher can enter a classroom and know that his or her health won't be in jeopardy. That parents don't need to, you know to live with anxiety that their children may be bringing home illness that could actually confer pretty serious consequences within their families or throughout their extended family.</s>BERMAN: So Dr. Wen, and there are certain articles or studies that I read as a journalist and others I read as a parent, and when I read the South Korea Centers for Disease Control study on kids and transmission, I read that as a parent of 13-year-old boys and when you read that 10 to 19 year olds pass the virus just as frequently or more so, as adults, what's the takeaway there? What do you make of this study?</s>WEN: Yes, I mean, it's a well done study with a lot of people. It actually included up to 60,000 people in this study, but there are some limitations to it, including that it only looked at symptomatic individuals. And we know that children even more than adults may be asymptomatic carriers. I think it's also a problem if we look at children and how often they interact with one another, even if they're just as likely as adults are to transmit the disease, they may be in contact with far more people. And so I really worry about the impact not only on children and to your point, it is not harmless. There are children who have died. There are children who have gotten this toxic shock like syndrome with multi-organ damage. And we're talking about vulnerable teachers and staff and so many others who may be infected if we do not get this right, if we try to take a shortcut and don't follow public health guidance.</s>BERMAN: Dr. Rubin, what do you think a reasonable expectation is for children wearing masks at school? What ages do you think they can do it? How realistic is it to ask them to do it much, if not all of the day?</s>RUBIN: Well, first, you know, when I talk about public confidence, we talk a lot about masking but I often begin with other elements for a public health response, which is about distancing. It's about ensuring that we are not cutting corners, like Dr. Wen said, you know, with regards to overpopulation in classrooms with too many students and putting children and teachers in unsafe situations. There's also an important emphasis if you look at European reopenings of their schools, the investment in hygiene and disinfection that is required throughout the school day, and then we get to masks. And I think you know, we have to -- we have to look at masks and realize that they are an additional barrier that if we can lower the occupancy in our room and have youth wearing masks, but if we can separate them considerably, then we can begin to think about at times of low circulating infections, times when kids can take breaks, but recognizing that parents have worked really hard, in many circumstances to teach our children, our adolescents how to wear masks effectively and how to protect others in their community. And just disregarding that when the youth returned to school, I don't think is a proper solution given the circumstances we're in.</s>BERMAN: Dr. Wen, given how much contact kids have with each other, take that in conjunction with the testing issues and tracing issues we're having in this country now. What challenges would that provide if there was an outbreak in a school?</s>WEN: Yes, and I think that's something that we just have not talked about because it's not a question of if there will be an outbreak, there will be outbreaks. It's a question of when and there will be outbreaks, basically, especially if we are opening against this backdrop of surging infections. There will be a lot of outbreaks. And I worry that we don't have a plan. Imagine if one student becomes infected. Well, how many people are we then going to be asking to be tested? What happens if the tests don't come back for 10 days? Are we going to expect for every family member of all of these children to also be out of work for 10 days until this test comes back? And how many more people are they going to be infecting? So these are all the questions that we have to think through. We have to invest significant resources, as Dr. Rubin also mentioned, in order to bolster our infrastructure to keep everyone safe.</s>RUBIN: You've got to do it now. We're running out of time as the beginning of the school year approaches Dr. Leana Wen, Dr. David Rubin, thanks so much for being with us. Up next, we delve back into the politics of coronavirus with President Trump trying to downplay the risks in that Fox News interview. One of his comments made one frontline medical worker so upset when 360 returns.