White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow insisted to reporters Friday that going back to school in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic is “not that hard.”
“Just go back to school. We can do that,” Kudlow said. “You know, you can social distance, you can get your temperature taken, you can be tested, you can have distancing — come on, it’s not that hard.”
Kudlow, a former TV financial news host, has demonstrated his lack of expertise on health matters a number of times. He declared that COVID-19 was “contained” early this year when there were just 57 confirmed cases (including 40 people taken off a cruise ship). “We have contained this,” Kudlow told CNBC on Feb. 25. “I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight.”
After that turned out not to be true, he insisted in mid-June that there would be “no second wave.” Several states — and the nation — are now breaking records for the daily number of new coronavirus cases. “OK, so there are ‘bumps,’” Kudlow also said last month. It’s “something we have to get used to.”
As of Friday, there had been more than 3 million reported cases of COVID-19 and more than 134,000 deaths in the United States.
Kudlow was adhering to the Trump administration push that all schools should open full time for in-person instruction as early as next month, even as the cases of coronavirus soar across the nation.
But health experts warn that reopening schools shouldn’t be a political decision.
“Sending our children back in the middle of a plague that’s out of control ... is really indefensible. It’s a gigantic experiment,” Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at the New York University’s Langone Medical Center, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Friday. “I have to add when somebody says, ‘It’s just easy. Let’s go back to school,’ I find that outrageous.”
Check out more of that interview in the video up top.
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