Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Francesco leaving Laura Carlson is out. It's day one hundred twenty one since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today's main story. There's no doubt that classrooms from kindergarten to college will look different for students and teachers this fall. But even as education systems struggle to reinvent themselves for a COVID world, the issue of reopening schools has become a political football. But first, here's
what happened in virus News today. The pandemic is killing record numbers of people in the American Sun Belt, overrunning hospitals and exhausting supplies. But even as some leaders fall ill themselves, they have failed to take the stiff measures needed to contain the disease. On Thursday, Florida Governor Rhonda Santists offered no new restrictions as Florida joined Texas and
California in reporting record deaths. Arizona Governor Doug Doucy promised more testing and limited restaurant capacity after the state announced the most cases in six days. In Mississippi, where many lawmakers had resisted wearing masks in the capital. Twenty six of them tested positive, including the leaders of both legislative chambers. New US virus cases topped sixty thousand a day for the first time Thursday, with the national total above three
point one million. Gilead Sciences said it's ramdzevier virus treatment could reduce the risk of death for patients with COVID nineteen by sixty two. The company said they based this finding on an analysis that combines clinical trial results with a real world cohort of patients with severe disease. The results would have to be confirmed with prospective clinical trials. Finally, the FED has a message about the best way to
boost the economy wear a mask. Robert Kaplan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said that widespread mask wearing and following other healthcare measures will be vital to economic growth in the US. Kaplan said mask wearing could substantially mute the spread of the coronavirus. Using face coverings would likely bolster reopenings and create faster growth and a
lower unemployment rate. And now for today's main story. With the start of school, fast approaching institutions from elementary schools to colleges, are rushing to reinvent themselves for the coronavirus era. Some are shifting to a mix of in person and virtual classes. Meanwhile, the Trump admin station is pushing schools
to reopen completely. I talked to Bloomberg reporter and the Court, who reports that as schools become the latest political touch point in the COVID crisis, there are far more questions than answers about keeping classrooms safe and what education will look like in the fall. So what is the latest on how K through twelve schools are planning to reopen. Plans for reopening elementary, middle high schools are starting to come out. We've seen New York, for instance, offer up
this option of part time in person learning. We've seen some other districts follow in that sort of model as well. And the real constraint here seems to be literally physical space and classrooms. You know, under CDC guidance for reopening these schools, the ideas you want to have smaller class
sizes so kids can appropriately social distance. And obviously there's some concerns about you know, if you've really young kids, for instance, will they be able to social distance, will they understand what that means, will they be able to wash their hands as thoroughly as you would like, things like that. Um, And that's why you're seeing many schools propose these sort of smaller in person schedules because they physically can't really accommodate that, and they don't have staffing
as well. And what's the message on this from the Trump administration? This is something that the Trump administration came out very firmly against this week. During a press conference the other day, they said, basically, schools have to reopen in full, and that was really the message there. There wasn't really any public health guidance around that or practical advice about how schools might be able to accomplish that.
The message was really, schools have to reopen. They talked a lot about the different problems with schools being closed, including that virtual learning in many cases, you know, hasn't been as effective and some schools haven't really been able to do that very well. So you heard them talk about you know, losing educational gains, about other issues that come up, you know, food and security, you know, teachers not being able to spot domestic violence, things like that.
A really strong message about how working parents will not be able to restore the economy basically under these kinds of conditions. And how are families with kids reacting to this? What do what do they want to see happen in the fall? You know, it's interesting about this is a lot of parents really want school to come back, right, and they want to be able to kind of resume
a normal schedule. But there's some really major concerns about safety here obviously, and whether schools can appropriately keep kids safe. At the same time, you know, two or three days a week in the classroom doesn't really solve many working parents problems, right, They still have to figure out child care for other days of the week. I mean, many working parents have been really in a state of very
difficult circumstances during this time. And I think you know a lot of people probably agree that kids need to go back to school. The question is how. But children, as far as we know, are supposed to be largely shielded from the virus, right, So what is the science on that. How much danger would kids be in going back to schools? This is kind of the ten million dollar questions, So it's still really mysterious what the role
of children is in all of this. We know children have become infected with COVID nineteen, but it's not as frequent as adults become ill with this disease. And there's some contradictory research on this subject. So some have found, you know, school aged children seem to be less contagious, but there's also another study that found, you know, basically the opposite, that kids may be as contagious as adults. I think it's worth noting there's an international perspective on
this as well. There are countries that have reopened schools successfully without seeing coronavirus cases you know, rides significantly. But the consensus on that is really that they did that by following safety precautions, by limiting class sizes, by taking other kinds of mitigation steps. Reopening schools obviously has major implications for the economy, not just for working parents, but also for their kids educational gains. So what are the
experts saying about that? How are they kind of sifting through all of these difficult choices. The issue here is that the stakes are sort of pretty high no matter what you do. Right, Um, we know that working parents have had to manage both their workdays and childcare and
it's forced really difficult situations for families. There are questions about whether it's pushing working mothers out of the workforce because it's just too impossible to be caring for toddlers during the day and also managing a demanding full time job. But then on the other hand, you have this question about if children really aren't learning effectively during this time, are they losing out on all of this education that
could basically further literally they're earning potential. There's the stakes are high. It's not just K through twelve schools, right, Colleges and universities are also dealing with these issues. How
do college is plan to approach this? This has really been the week of school, so we've seen not only some of the sort of political tensions heat up between the federal government and states and localities over you know, whether school should reopen and how, but we've also seen a number of universities come out this week with plans
as to how they will go back to school this fall. Um. You know, there's a mix of plans that are emerging, but most are opting for some form of in person reopening and then a mix of you know, virtual and in person classes or just a full in person reopening with US. Some schools also turning to online classes again. For instance, Rutgers has chosen to do most of its classes online this fall, and I believe all of their undergraduate classes online. You know, what's interesting is the amount
of variety and the lack of consensus here. You might expect, given that universities have so much in common in terms of challenges, that they might all be coming out with the same kinds of plans, but that's just not what's happening here. I think one expert I spoke to said, people don't really know what the right thing is to do here. In schools are coming with from very different places in terms of resources, not just financial resources, but also in terms of ability to do things like testing.
So if you have a hospital or a really big research lab on campus, that's something you can leverage to test your student body. But you know, if you're a university or a college with that's public, that doesn't have as much financial resources, that's really small. Those questions become
a lot more complicated. And when we look at states like Florida, Texas, California, sun Belt states that have had these recent virus surges, how is that complicating this question even further, are those places planning to reopen schools and is that even a good idea. That's the thing about this virus when you're planning for how to do things
during this time, that the target is always moving. So we've heard, for instance, the Los Angeles Times reported that Los Angeles County, which has been a big hot spot right now, is looking at being able to shift online depending on where the virus is, you know, come the fall, and quoted the health Health Department director, They're saying, we have to do this, we have to think about a
backup plan because of what's going on right now. In Florida, there's plans to push ahead with an in person reopening in the fall, but I spoke with a public health expert there who said she was very worried about it and she didn't see how it could possibly work and
was really concerned about planning for in person reopening. She said, is something you can do for schools when the virus is really in the background, Right when the virus isn't making itself so present and so known in the community is and infecting so many people, She said, doing something like this when the virus is Uh, you know, breaking records every day is not advisable, and I think there are gonna be some really big questions about wheather reopening
schools if this does happen intensify as some of the trends we've already been seeing. You know, you really wouldn't want a young child going to school and maybe themselves not getting sick, but bringing it home, the virus home to their parents, to their maybe they live in a house with elderly grandparents. That's a situation you wouldn't want um and could add to to the damage that's already
been caused. So these are really difficult decisions. But you know they wouldn't be so hard if the United States was in a better place with this virus, If there were more precautions, that there were more safety measures that were well developed, like contact tracing, you might be able to say, Okay, we have a better grip on this virus, and we think we can go successfully back to school. It seems so difficult because on the one hand, everyone's
really demanding answers about this right now. It's so important for families and kids and education employees to understand kind of how this is going to work. And yet at the same time, any answers we come up with right now could be thrown right out the window a month or two from now. Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, we've been making excruciating decisions for months now about whether to open things, how to open things, whether it made sense, whether it would come at the expense
of the health of the community. Right we're still making those decisions now as the fall arrives. And you know, you would have thought it might have gotten easier by now, that we would have had more tools in our tool kit, more ability to weigh the costs of some of these things.
But we're still we're still making these excruciating decisions. And you know, I think what's becoming apparent is anyone who thinks we're going to be in a much better place in a couple of months should think about the experience we've had in the last couple of months and wonder if that's really going to be true. That was Emma Court and that's it for our show for coverage of the outbreak from bureaus around the world. Because at Bloomberg dot com sh coronavirus and if you like the show,
please leave us a review. And a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Topor foreheads Jordan Gospore, Magnus Hendrickson, and Laura Carlston. Today's main story was reported by Emma Cord. Original music by Leo Sidran. Our editors are Rick Shine and me Francesca Levi. Bloomberg's head of podcasts is me