Trump says he’s ‘comfortable’ sending his son and grandchildren back to school amid pandemic

“Yeah, I am comfortable with that,” Trump said when asked about his own family.

“I would like to see the schools open 100 percent. And we’ll do it safely. We’ll do it carefully,” he said.

This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association released a joint report on covid-19 cases among U.S. children. While it found that severe illness among children who contract the disease is rare, there has been a marked increase in children testing positive in the past several weeks as more day cares and camps reopened.

Trump was pressed on whether he understood concerns that sending children back to school increases their potential for exposure to the virus, which they could spread to parents or grandparents who are more vulnerable to serious illness.

The president said his administration was examining whether children who caught the virus at school could transmit it at home.

“A lot of people are saying they don’t transmit. . . . They don’t catch it easily,” Trump said. “They don’t bring it home easily. And if they do catch it, they get better fast.”

A study in June found that children and teenagers are half as likely to get infected with the novel coronavirus as adults 20 and older. But the findings did not rule out children spreading the virus to family members. Experts say the evidence on how children catch and transmit the virus is still too scant to be definitive.

Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus response, appeared on Fox News shortly after Trump’s briefing. She didn’t directly answer when asked whether Trump was correct but said there were still questions about the health risks for children who become infected.

Birx said the United States is launching a study across all age groups to better evaluate the antibody levels among children, especially as the best research available about children developing the coronavirus was done in South Korea. The data “really needs to be confirmed here,” she said.

The results of a large South Korea study on children released this week determined that children older than 10 were just as likely to transmit the virus as adults. Those younger than 10 were less likely to spread it, but the risk wasn’t zero. Trump’s youngest child is 14.

Even if the findings confirm there’s minimal risk of sending kids back to the classroom, critics of reopening schools this fall point out that it’s not just children and their families whose health would be at risk, but also adult faculty and support staff members.

Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.