PROVIDENCE – The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said Rhode Island is “well into the green” zone and that schools should be able to open safely across the state.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, spoke with Gov. Gina M. Raimondo on a Facebook Live event hosted on her page on Thursday afternoon, where they discussed bringing students back to schools.
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Fauci cited “green,” “yellow” and “red zones,” and said that Rhode Island is fairing well, with a testing positive rate of less than 5% on average.
The yellow zone means that a state, or community, has a testing positive rate between 5-10% on average and a red zone is more than 100 positive cases per 100,000 people and a test positive rate of more than 10%.
“There will always be cases,” said Fauci of those people concerned that there are still new coronavirus infections each day throughout the state. “But how do we prevent those becoming blimps of cases.”
Rhode Island had an overall positive rate of 2.3% on Thursday. However, when excluding both repeat negative and repeat positive results, the positive rate for the day was 4.5%.
Fauci said it’s his impression that Rhode Island is safe to send students back, as long as they continue to follow the health guidelines. These include mandatory mask wearing, social distancing, avoiding crowding congregations, outdoors is always better than indoors and proper ventilation inside schools. He said he also recommends students to get outside for classes if possible and for bus windows to be open, even when students are wearing masks.
“I think it’s incorrect to call people super-spreaders,” said Fauci of those who identify children as “super-spreaders,” and said it’s more of events that are spreading the virus rapidly if health restrictions are not in place. “But saying ‘all schools must close’ or ‘all schools must open’ is not an adequate approach.”
Fauci said that if schools are in a “yellow” community, they should work to become a “green” community and the same for those in the red.
“Close the bars and forget the congregations,” said Fauci, which was directed at states that were closer to a “red” and “yellow” zone.
Pawtucket, Central Falls and parts of Providence all had higher positive percentages and case numbers than the rest of the state throughout the pandemic thus far.
“Not every town is green,” said Raimondo, and said she is recommending a virtual or hybrid start in schools where communities are seeing higher case numbers than the state’s average.
As many teachers are concerned about going back to work inside classrooms, even with the governor’s announcement on Wednesday that called for a delay to the start of school, Fauci said that since the infection rate is low in the state compared to others, then the chance of getting infected is also low.
“You’ve all done a really good job. Keep it up. This will end,” said Fauci in the call. “You can’t interrupt your life totally and indefinitely. You have to try to safely get back to normal.”
Alexa Gagosz is a PBN staff writer. Contact her at Gagosz@PBN.com.
