Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
When Schools Come Back, There Will Be Sweeping Change To Keep Children Safe
When students finally return to school, sweeping changes will be in place to help stop the spread of coronavirus. Items such as masks and hand sanitizer will be familiar sights in stuffed backpacks. Classes and school buses will have fewer people while some office meetings will be conducted by video conference, experts say. (Karimi, Almasy and Hanna, 5/22)
The coronavirus test wasn't as bad as Celeste Torres imagined. Standing outside a dorm at the University of California, San Diego, Torres stuck a swab up a nostril, scanned a QR code, and went on with the day. "The process itself was about five minutes," Torres says, "I did cry a little bit just because it's, I guess, a natural reaction." (Nadworny, 5/22)
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said it is too early to tell if New York schools will reopen this fall, as a grim picture emerged of historic job losses in the tri-state area from the region’s economic shutdown. There will be no summer school in New York this year, Mr. Cuomo said at a press conference Thursday. The state will issue guidelines in June for resuming school in the fall, and each district must also submit a reopening plan to the state by July in preparation for a potential reopening in September, he said. (De Avila, 5/21)
Students in the nation’s capital should not return to full, in-person learning until there is a reliable vaccine or cure for the novel coronavirus, according to recommendations released Thursday by a group of advisers appointed by D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser. The report by Bowser’s ReOpen DC Advisory Group divides the city’s reopening into four phases, with the fourth phase triggered when there is a vaccine or cure. It recommends that before that, students should return to campuses on modified schedules, switching between in-person and distance learning depending on the day. (Stein, 5/21)
Alabama schools are typically busy places during the summer, hosting academic summer school, enrichment activities, athletic tryouts and workouts, and other extracurriculars like band camps. And now, as of June 1, they can resume their summer schedules, but with a lot of new guidelines from the Alabama State Department of Education. (Crain, 5/22)
