Former FDA chief warns of reopening schools and COVID-19

Former FDA commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb has warned that states in the northern United States may see COVID-19 cases increase as students return to class.

Gottlieb said the states may not have epidemics rivaling southern hot spots such as Florida, but they are still vulnerable to the increase in the number of cases.

“I think the northern states are more impervious to the kind of spread we’ve seen in the south, but they’re not completely impervious,” Gottlieb said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“They have higher vaccination rates, there have been more previous infections. But there are still people who are vulnerable in these states.

Gottlieb said going back to school could increase the number of cases everywhere.

“The challenge right now is that the infection will start to collide with the opening of the school. And we have seen that schools can become sources of community transmission when you are dealing with more transmissible strains, ”he said, referring to the dangerous variants, B.1.1.7 and Delta, which have emerged for the first time in UK and India. , respectively.

“We’ve seen it with B.1.1.7 in states like Michigan and Massachusetts,” he said. “And Delta is much more transmissible than B.1.1.7. So this creates a lot of risk that the spread in the northern states will start to collide with the opening of the school. “

Gottlieb said schools should once again welcome students with a “degree of caution” and keep COVID-19 rules in place as the Delta variant continues to spread in communities.

“I would not take these things out… until the start of the school year, as we are dealing with a tension that we do not fully understand,” he said.

“This strain is clearly more transmissible. It will be more difficult to control in a school setting, and it can be more pathogenic. “

He argued that it would be dangerous to allow students to return without a mask warrant.

“I can’t think of a company right now that would put 30 unvaccinated people in a confined space without a mask and keep them there all day. No company would do this responsibly, ”he said.

“And yet that’s what we’re going to do in some schools. So I think we need to approach the school year with a certain degree of humility and caution. “

The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr Francis Collins, said on Sunday that the largest number of children – 1,450 – were currently hospitalized with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.

Experts said it was not clear whether the Delta strain was causing more serious illness or whether more children were exposed to more illness than at other times in the pandemic, but they urged people living in hot spots to wear masks in public to limit the spread.