He said it would be “a disaster” to “open and close schools.” In a September 2020 Financial Times interview, former Swedish state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said it would be “a disaster” to close schools as part of a longer answer about his rejection of lockdown-type measures. His dislike of national lockdowns is obvious. “It’s really using a hammer to kill a fly,”…

The UK foreign secretary totally rejected pandemic school closures. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Britain’s likely next prime minister, said today that schools should never have closed during the coronavirus pandemic. It is remarkable that Truss rejected UK pandemic school closures, which were significantly shorter than U.S. closures, in their entirety. The UK’s constituent nations closed schools in…

We must understand how the agency arrived at its child masking guidance. Throughout the pandemic, there has been an extreme trans-Atlantic divide on masking children. While European countries never masked toddlers and mostly didn’t mask primary school children — even on public transportation and planes — the United States has consistently masked children as young as two, per CDC guidance. …

Singapore’s prime minister makes a good point. Today, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced that masks would no longer be required in the country’s schools — or anywhere else except public transport and health care settings. When making the announcement, he noted that masks interfere with learning and development: He acknowledged that parents may be worried…

“Normal conditions” have returned. While Americans battle over CDC’s updated school guidance — still incorporating significant masking and rapid testing — Finland’s education sector has quietly returned to total normalcy. “Good hygiene measures” and preventing crowding are still recommended, but schooling — at every level — “will all be provided in accordance with the…

French and Italian guidance offers some lessons. We have known since the days of the original Wuhan outbreak that children are less vulnerable to severe disease and death than adults. Education leaders and doctors have recently said that pandemic school closures were largely unnecessary. Bizarrely, however, U.S. cities continue to impose fairly strict measures on schoolchildren while…

It was a mistake to set a pandemic school reopening goal that ignored high schoolers. In December 2020, then President-elect Joe Biden announced a school reopening goal for K-8 schools — ignoring high schools — that I worried would have tragic consequences for American teenagers. …

I hope CDC and White House officials will emphasize the value of normalcy. As CNN first reported, new CDC guidance is on the way for K-12 schools. It should end close contact quarantines, which are still being used in some districts, and generally provide more normalcy for children in districts where the agency’s guidance is applied with fidelity. However, despite the fact the…

Preserving citizen well-being must be at the heart of every country’s Covid-19 policies moving forward. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries have reorganized their societies around limiting transmission of SARS-CoV-2 on their national territories. With minimal concern for collateral damage or public health more generally, governments shuttered businesses, schools, cultural institutions, and even parts of their health care systems.