Dr. Tony Fauci expects schools to be open in fall

In the daily briefing at the White House, Dr. Tony Fauci said he expects schools to be open in the fall, but perhaps with some controls in place that weren’t in place previously “It’s going to be different, because this is not going to disappear.” He suggested that the summer campus would still be affected by the epidemic.

These are his complete remarks from the White House transcript:

Well, my daughter is a schoolteacher, so she asked me the same question. You know, it is unpredictable, but you can get a feel for — if we start talking about the things where the curve goes down, and we really have minimum — how we respond and what kind of a rebound we see or don’t see, I think, is going to have a lot of influence probably more immediately on things like summer camps than it does in the fall.

I fully expect — though I’m humble enough to know that I can’t accurately predict — that by the time we get to the fall, that we will have this under control enough that it certainly will not be the way it is now, where people are shutting schools. My optimistic side tells me that we’ll be able to renew, to a certain extent. But it’s going to be different, remember now, because this is not going to disappear. So we’re going to have to have in place the capability of doing the things that we talk about all the time on this stage: to identify, to isolate, to contact trace — number one.

Number two, by that time, we’ll have a better feel with the antibody test, about what the actual penetrance of this infection was in society. How many people have actually been infected? Who is protected? If you have antibody, it’s very likely that you’re protected. Who’s vulnerable? Do you treat vulnerables different than you treat the people who are protected? All of these things are going to go into the decision of just how much back to the original way we’d like it to be in fall.

The bottom line is: No absolute prediction, but I think we’re going to be in good shape.