February 12th, local time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an pandemic prevention guide for reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic to guide schools to safely reopen face-to-face teaching.
The guidance recommends that schools implement reopening plans in stages according to the severity of the pandemic in their areas.
It also recommends that schools take “essential measures” when they resume in-person instruction, including wearing masks, social distancing, and monitoring the extent of the virus in surrounding communities.
And as an “add-on measure” to prevent the novel coronavirus, the CDC said that schools should also implement testing programs to identify and isolate infectious people and vaccinate teachers and staff “when supplies permit.”
The CDC said the first step to consider whether to reopen schools should be to assess the current situation of the pandemic in the community, and recommended that schools refer to the total number of new cases per 100,000 residents in the community in the past seven days, as well as the positive rate in the past seven days.
The CDC noted that schools in communities with fewer than 50 new cases per 100,000 residents within the last seven days can safely reopen in-person instruction if appropriate guidelines are followed.
Schools located in communities with high infection rates are likely to reopen face-to-face teaching on individual days, or with limited attendance and stricter precautions.
The CDC also noted that this guidance may need to be updated as more contagious COVID-19 variants spread across the United States.
Calls for reopening schools have been reported to be high in the United States because distance learning has costed 55 million U.S. public school students and their families in the past year.
According to the U.S. Center for Public Education Innovation in a survey of 477 school districts in nearly 13,000 school districts in the United States, as of December last year, only 44% of school districts provided full-time in-person teaching, 31% of school districts were all taught remotely, and some school districts used online teaching and face-to-to-face teaching.
Mixed teaching mode of the course.
