FNC's Dr. Siegel: Closing Schools Spreads COVID, Does 'Public Health Damage' and I Wonder How Long Pauses Will Last

On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” Fox News Medical Contributor and Clinical Professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine Dr. Marc Siegel said that closing schools does “a lot of public health damage” and helps spread coronavirus. Siegel also said that when you see schools pausing their openings, “you kind of wonder when they’re going to unpause it.”

Siegel said, “[W]hen schools hit the pause button, with 2,000 around the country or more, you kind of wonder when they’re going to unpause it. And I think — and hats off to Ashish Jha from Brown, who was on the week before, saying that Brown’s going to be open. And I think that schools and universities have to set a precedent here and go out front and say, we’re going to be open. Because we can do testing, rapid testing on the premises. We can make sure most people there are vaccinated or have boosters and we can monitor this. Here’s the most important thing: We can monitor this much more closely in a school than we could ever do by letting them go into the community. What do you think happens if you send students, university students certainly are going to spread it in the community when they’re at home trying to learn online or even public schools or high schools are going to spread it anyway. So, you get a lot of public health damage by closing schools. You get mental health issues, you don’t get screenings, developmental delays are missed, you don’t get immunizations, nutrition is all screwed up. And on top of that, you spread virus.”

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