A new study says even six feet of separation is dangerous if schools reopen without updated ventilation systems. It adds children, where schools are open, can spread Covid into the community. Phillip Alvelda and Thomas Ferguson of INET join Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to the Analysis News. Please don't forget there's a donate button at the top of the web page. If you're watching on YouTube, there's a subscribe button somewhere there and be back in a second.

There's been a tremendous pressure put on teachers across the United States, Canada and most of the world to return to in-school teaching.  Right-wing media in the United States has been unrelenting in their attacks on teachers unions, blaming them for unnecessarily risking negative psychological effects on children caused by continued school closures and the economic consequences of parents not returning to work. The Biden administration has joined the pressure campaign, calling for 100 percent of all schools to be reopened by this fall.

New guidelines from the CDC state that schools can return to more or less pre-Covid distancing between desks, saying that three feet is as safe as six feet.

Of course, the real question is, is six feet safe? CBS News reports the nation's largest teachers union sent a two page letter to the Biden administration on Tuesday questioning the decision to reduce the recommended social distancing in schools to three feet between students.

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7 million member American Federation of Teachers, in her letter cited the study by the Institute for New Economic Thinking that stated "Contrary to the notion that even 3 feet of distancing is sufficient protection, and six feet is overkill, the critical safety issue is that students are all uniformly at risk in poorly ventilated rooms, no matter where they are or how they distance. With one infected person in an enclosed and poorly ventilated room, the coronavirus permeates the entire space, putting everyone inside at similar risk regardless of where they sit. The key corrective abatement measure necessary is wholesale improvement and ventilation, filtering, and HVAC systems. Nothing whatsoever in any of the cited studies supports safely moving students closer together, the report concludes. Reopening most schools now, before most schools have robust protective measures and don't yet have broad ability or finances to conduct frequent surveillance testing to prevent asymptomatic spreaders of the latest, more dangerous coronavirus variants from infecting their community, is thus very unwise."

Now joining us are two of the three authors of the study, Dr. Phillip Alvelda, who is the CEO and chairman of Brain Works Foundry Inc, a U.S. based developer of A.I. enhanced health care technologies and services. Prior to Brain Works, Dr. Albelda was a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Biological Technologies Office, where he developed and ran national scale R&D programs and technologies. And Thomas Ferguson joins us.

He is the Institute for New Economic Thinking's director of research projects and a member of its advisory board. He's a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Not able to join us is the third author, Dr Deepti Gurdasani, who did much of the research for the study and is a clinical epidemiologist and statistical geneticist and senior lecturer at the William Harvey Research Institute in London, and we hope to get her on sometime in the future.

All right. Let's start with the latest news, the CDC new guidance. Phillip, your paper says the new guidelines from the CDC on reopening schoo...