U.S. COVID-19 case count doesn't support notion that kids will return to school: Doctor

BC Children's Medical Director of Emergency Psychiatry Dr. Tyler Black joins Yahoo Finance's Zack Guzman to discuss the latest coronavirus outlook as U.S. cases top 5.2 million.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: And Dr. Tyler Black, appreciate you taking the time to chat. Obviously we saw yesterday the Trump administration coming out and saying that that would be enough in sending masks out and helping deploy CDC teams to support schools in reopening. I'm not sure what your take would be on that front when you think about how many schools are here in the US, and how limited we've seen the CDC in their capacity to handle the outbreak up until this point. So what's your take on whether or not we're setting ourselves up for failure in getting students back to in-classroom teaching?

TYLER BLACK: Thanks so much for having me. It's a little bit confusing because in many jurisdictions, we're seeing spikes of cases. Pandemics, you know, will dictate what we do a lot more so than what a politician says we can do. So, you know, there's many jurisdictions that are having their test positivity climb-- even number of cases climb, and certainly deaths are starting to peak again. So, you know, it feels very strange to be talking about reopening schools in a time where many jurisdictions just simply don't support that.

ZACK GUZMAN: And I mean, it's also kind of tied back to the positivity rates that we've seen. At least that was the plan released here in New York. We hadn't necessarily seen a lot of schools come out and introduce their own plans, though we did hear the guidelines of, you'd need to fall below a 5% positivity rate here in New York. We had been closer to 1% so it would fall in there.

But even showing the difficulties in a region that does have positive data to support reopening, a lot of school officials not necessarily being able to agree on what well-established and safe measures might look like. How difficult is it to get teachers, parents, kids, everybody on board to follow rules in place as well?

TYLER BLACK: Well, there's just so many nuances. I mean, we know for sure that a child going to school is at some point going to get the sniffles or a headache or a fever. And, you know, that's necessarily going to start creating-- you know, let's quarantine this class. Or let's send this class home. Let's get everybody tested.

The test turnaround time is unfortunately, in the United States, a little bit too long right now, and that's in areas where the numbers do support it. You know, in New York, it's 1% test positivity. In Texas yesterday, it was 24% positivity. And overall in the United States right now, it's 11.7% positivity. I mean, these are just not numbers that support this notion that kids will return to school and there won't be routine quarantines, suspicions, needs to open and shut down and open and shut down.

So you know, the complexities of this is just incredible. And I always just want to throw out there as a suicidologist this knowledge we have that before the pandemic, school days and school months were most associated with psychiatric distress and suicides in kids. So you know, we're adding the stress of a pandemic on top of what is already school, which is a child's major job and major stress.

So parents are understandably a little bit reluctant. Schools and teachers are a little bit nervous. They were arguing for smaller class sizes before COVID, and now you have a pandemic that is definitely dependent on how large a group is. So you know, all of these things are somewhat forgotten in this discussion about open or not open, even though they've been national dialogues for decades.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, and open or not open-- I mean, I guess we don't want this to be a political discussion. It would be a medical one, we would hope, in the throes of a pandemic. But when we talk about, you know, backing up and looking at the benefits of schools, a lot of people raise that for some underprivileged students out there, this becomes the only place that they can get a meal during the school year and very much dependent on those free lunches offered through the school.

And obviously, there is that to be considered here, but outside of it, we've also heard the benefits of in-classroom learning for younger students as well. But that's not necessarily always the case, so what would you stress in that discussion, when trying to consider what might be best here?

TYLER BLACK: Yeah, I think, you know, we've offloaded a lot of our social burden on taking care of underprivileged and systemically discriminated kids within school systems. But of course, that's not the only way a society could choose to materially support underprivileged people.

So inside the box of school, of course losing school means losing some of those programs. But if schools had the material support to be able to continue those programs, hand out lunches, check in with kids who are underprivileged or who don't have supervision, you know, that would be OK, too.

But I always dial it back to, we keep ourselves in this box that school is the only way to do this, and of course it isn't. There's many jurisdictions across the world that more materially support underprivileged people and recognize that, for example, a child eating or a child having a safe place to live is a priority of that nation.

And so putting that onto schools during a time when attendance at schools could lead to more distress or more illness is probably a bit of a mistake. Some children will benefit from going to schools, and other children may not. We know many kids with anxiety disorders, neurodiversity-- they really struggle in school. What are you going to do when a child who's really resisting coming into school then comes into school and becomes aggressive? You know, many children have to be isolated. So it's a really challenging nuance to add.

ZACK GUZMAN: And lastly, I mean, when we think about this discussion and what guidelines we've been seeing from the CDC, and kind of the White House taking their own stance on a lot of these things as well. I mean, it's tricky to institute some of these recommendations that we've seen for schools when you think about socially distancing around high-risk individuals, trying to get everyone to wear masks for younger kids out there-- a lot added to teachers plates. I mean, how realistic is it that some of these recommendations might be able to be instituted in some of these more cramped schools, rather than just having everyone be at home?

TYLER BLACK: Well, you know, I always want to relate that knowledge we had that prior to the pandemic, teachers were routinely complaining about not having enough resource, not having enough teachers, having too high a student-to-teacher ratio. And all of these things are just amplified in the pandemic.

So you know, if our knowledge of what schools looked like online was based off of teachers really cramming online schools in very quickly, not taking advantage of interactive formats. I mean, here we are discussing this virtually over a platform, and it's allowing us to do things that we couldn't do if we were in a studio together.

So when all of our knowledge is based off of how poorly things were implemented the beginning of an emergency pandemic, there's many opportunities we have to deliver online education in a better way, to distribute food and lunches to kids who need it, to check in with kids who may need checking in with. We don't rely on in-person schools to do those things if we think outside of the school box.