Now that the state has lifted the regional stay-at-home order, is it more likely that schools will reopen soon?
Dr. Naomi Bardach is Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Health Policy at UCSF, and she leads the state’s "Safe Schools for All" team. She said a lot has been learned about the risks of in-person instruction since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic when students were first sent home from schools.
"We began to understand that kids are not actually a big source of transmission - they don’t pass (the coronavirus) around. Schools seemed to be relatively safe," she told KCBS Radio's "As Prescribed" program.
Then, during the summer surge, there were more worries about safety at schools because of the large number of cases in communities.
"The most recent data from the fall, from even the more recent surge, is that even if there are high case rates in our communities, as long as we have safety mitigation layers in place in the school setting, there is very, very rare and very unusual person-to-person transmission in school," said Dr. Bardach.
"Those safety mitigation layers include the masking, physical distancing, hand hygiene, ventilation, symptom screening and testing."
Under the state’s plan, schools could reopen in the strictest purple tier if the community transmission rate is below 28 cases per 100,000 people.
But, some would prefer to wait until that rate is much lower.
For example, the San Francisco Unified School District put off its January target date for reopening after it failed to reach and agreement with labor unions.
"Most significantly, labor groups have proposed that no staff or students return to in-person learning until the City and County is in the state’s orange tier, indicating 'moderate' spread of COVID-19, for 14 consecutive days," a December statement from SFUSD administrators read.
With education and childcare workers in the state’s Phase 1B group for vaccinations, there is also the question of whether schools should wait until teachers get their shots.
Dr. Bardach doesn't think school reopening should be tied to vaccination.
"The idea we would need to wait for vaccinations when we already know that there’s a lot of layers that as long as we put them in place there’s very rare transmission - it’s too late," she argued. "We can’t wait for vaccinations. We already are almost a year of kids being in distance learning and we know it’s bad for them and we know it’s inequitable."
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