This archive report was first published on 8 July 2020.
US Schools Reopening Push Amid Rising Infections ¶
As the total number of coronavirus cases in the United States surpassed three million on July 7, 2020, President Trump and his administration launched a concerted campaign to assure that schools across the country would physically reopen in the fall.
The push to return to classrooms, rather than limiting instruction to online sessions, is vital to the administration's efforts to reinstate a sense of normalcy even as the virus has surged during the country's halting attempts to emerge from lockdowns.
On July 7, 2020, the president and his allies argued that the costs of keeping children at home any longer would be worse than the virus itself.
"We hope that most schools are going to be open, and we don't want people to make political statements or do it for political reasons," Mr. Trump said. "They think it's going to be good for them politically, so they keep the schools closed. No way. We are very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools to get them open."
However, the president brushed off the risks of spiking infection numbers, even as cases have risen in 37 states over the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the United States' top infectious disease expert, cautioned that it was a "false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death," which Mr. Trump and other officials had stressed in recent days.
"There are so many other things that are very dangerous and bad about this virus," Dr. Fauci said at an event with Senator Doug Jones. "Don't get yourself into false complacency."
