Coronavirus update: NY's Cuomo OKs sending students back to school as vaccine optimism rises

New York’s school districts will welcome students back into classrooms in the fall, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Friday, as the former coronavirus epicenter continues on its recovery.

Cuomo’s decision will clear the way for students to attend schools in person at least part time, depending largely on whether an area’s COVID-19 positivity rate stays below a certain threshold. The uncertainty has been particularly acute in the Big Apple, where over 1 million students have been in limbo awaiting a final decision — which also affects the plans of working parents.

“Everywhere in the state, every region is below the threshold that we established,” Cuomo said during a conference call with reporters. “If there’s a spike in the infection rate, if there’s a matter of concern in the infection rate, then we can revisit.”

However, the decision also heightens an agonizing nationwide debate over remote learning vs. physical school attendance, with President Donald Trump a vocal advocate for reopening schools across the country.

mainly because of a surge in Sun Belt states. However, hospitalizations and deaths have been slowing, and new diagnoses have shown signs of tapering off.

With that as a backdrop, U.S. health officials remain cautiously optimistic that an effective vaccine can be ready to go by late fall, with at least one emergency approval expected by the end of the year. The debate over a workable inoculation has been stirred by Trump, who recently floated the idea a vaccine could be ready by Election Day.

The aggressive timeline has worried some, but top officials — including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert— expect that they’ll have an indication of whether a vaccine can be deployed by year’s end.

Fauci told Yahoo Finance in a recent interview. He added that there will be doses by the end of the year or early 2021, at best.

Other experts have also made similar comments, pointing to the fact that monitoring patients during Phase 3 requires time. Despite a compressed testing and development timeline, the time needed to monitor patients for safety and efficacy cannot be compressed.

In the meantime, companies are still working on producing their candidates— at-risk and without knowing if they are effective yet. It means that despite stated goals of having millions of doses ready by the end of the year, some of those could end up being dumped if the vaccine fails.

MRNA), Pfizer (PFE), Novavax (NVAX) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ); Globally, Oxford University in partnership with AstraZeneca (AZN), is a frontrunner, as well as several Chinese candidates and a couple in India.

NVAX) has been ramping up production with relationships in India and Japan, giving the once-small biotech a global presence with its potential vaccine candidate.

TAK).

View Article Origin Here