Ideally, the CDC should also have mentioned high quality masks or double masking, said dr. Allen said. (The agency on Thursday released new advice for wearing masks that includes the use of two masks simultaneously.)
Other preventative measures the CDC recommends for schools are those they have previously endorsed: wearing universal masks for staff and students; physical distance; hand washing and hygiene; clean; and contact detection, combined with isolation for those who tested positive and quarantine for those exposed to the virus.
The agency advised that schools refer all symptomatic students, teachers, staff and close contacts for diagnostic tests, and that schools introduce weekly routine testing of students and staff unless community transfer is low. But the cost and logistics of widespread screening would be a major burden for school districts.
The CDC skated lightly over physical distance. The agency’s previous recommendation to remove it suggests that schools should attend students alternately to reduce the number of students in classrooms and corridors.
Rather, the new guidelines say that schools should implement physical distance ‘to the greatest extent possible’, but this is only necessary when the virus is high in the community. The softer emphasis makes the guidelines more feasible for school districts to follow, said dr. Nuzzo said.
“Many communities have followed hybrid approaches, or in some cases just not, because they could not figure out the spacing issue,” she said. The guidelines give the impression that it is ideal to maintain at least 6 meters of distance between students, ‘but the whole effort to bring children back to school does not have to break,’ she added.
However, the six-foot rule was accepted by many educators as an orthodoxy. Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the country, said there should be no room for maneuver over physical distance or other mitigation strategies.