"We're going to need to do it safely. We're going to need to do it sensibly," Redfield told "NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt about school reopenings.
As President Donald Trump insists that schools across America reopen, even as new data shows a startling surge of the coronavirus among children and teenagers, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday that returning students to the classroom shouldn't be done hastily.
"We don't want to pressure anybody," he said."Our guidance is there to help them begin to open, as I said, safely and sensibly. The timing of that is going to have to be decided one school at a time." He drew criticism last week for saying in an interview that children should return to school because they are"almost immune" or"virtually immune" to the disease. While children make up about 9.1 percent of COVID-19 cases nationwide, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, they can still transmit the disease to others, and some children have also died from it."We got to open up," Trump said during a White House briefing.
During this crisis, more than 5.2 million people in the U.S. have been infected with the coronavirus, with 167,000 dying from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Worldwide, cases have topped 20 million, with roughly a quarter of deaths occurring in America, NBC News figures show. "If we choose not to get vaccinated, not to embrace these mitigation strategies, it could be a very difficult time," he added.
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