Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant Discusses Return to Schools

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So, obviously, for people who are people in their homes, very human concerns are right now, I guess, for kids going back to school. Let me just read a couple of things. There’s been four to five times increase in COVID cases amongst children in the last month alone in the United States. And respiratory viruses amongst them are surging. There could be flu as a wild card. Schools don’t have mask mandates, and obviously kids under a certain age don’t get vaccines. What — do you see this as a potential sort of super-spreader when everybody starts going back to school?

DR. LARRY BRILLIANT, CEO, PANDEFENSE ADVISORY: Oh, you put your finger on it. I do see it. I do worry about it. All of the models before we came to the end of the summer in the United States and elsewhere suggests that the Delta variant was so transmissible that we would get a rapid up and a rapid down, a kind of inverted V kind of epidemic curve. And that’s continued elsewhere in the world, where we are seeing the Delta variant burn hot and quick and then move on. In the United States, we predicted the same thing. The models all showed that, but now we’re plateauing. And I think that the reason we’re plateauing, we must look at the fact that, this week, next week, in a one-month period, 100,000 schools are opening up, 100,000 schools are opening up, and most of them don’t have vaccine mandates, they don’t have mask mandates. And for these young children who we used to think didn’t get or carry the virus, they certainly do get, carry and spread the Delta variant. We’re putting them in harm’s way. We’re not thinking of these kids first who can’t be vaccinated yet, are not being masked in some states, can’t be protected with testing because it’s too expensive, really, for public schools. So I’m very worried that that — what we expected to be that rapid up and down from the Delta variant is running into an event. And this event is the opening of schools.