COVID-19: 'There's no significant data saying there's a huge amount of transmission in school,' says doctor

Dr. Daniela Lamas, Brigham and Women’s Hospital pulmonary and critical care physician, join Yahoo Finance to discuss the struggle between city mayors and school districts. The groups are divided over the issue of in-person learning.

Video Transcript

- Let's bring on our next guest to discuss further about the virus. Dr. Daniela Lamas is Brigham and Women's Hospital pulmonary and critical care physician. She joins us now. And Dr. Lamas, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon.

I want to pick up on what we were discussing with Anjalee on this back and forth between school districts, teachers unions, and officials throughout the country right now. What is the data saying about whether children, vaccinated or not, are safer in schools or learning at home?

DANIELA LAMAS: So I think this is such a sort of interesting pressure point, and a really unfortunate one. And one that gets to where we are today with Omicron and how different that is than in prior surges. And I think the question of data for how safe children are learning in school versus at home, there are no great data, there's no significant data saying that there is a huge amount of transmission in school.

I mean, as far as we know, when people wear masks, ideally districts will have access to testing at some point, that it should be safe for people to return to school. And that there's not a significant amount of transmission from children to staff, particularly when staff have been doubly vaccinated and boosted.

That being said, there's also another aspect of harm that we should think about when we're making these decisions. And that's not harm that's related to getting a virus, it's what is the harm of actually stopping in-person school. And so initially in the early surge, we were making decisions about life or death. And quality of life, it didn't even come into play, you fully isolate, shut everything down.

And I think now, though, we understand that those actions, while they were necessary at the time, they came at a cost. And so these questions about whether or not children should go to school it's not just about Omicron, it's about how can we very safely as we can, limit any potential risk while also acknowledging that schools should be the last to close. I mean, we shouldn't be in a world where we have bars and restaurants open but schools are closing.

- As we look out to the peak of Omicron and then the decline, people talk about this being an endemic situation. What does that look like for the rest of us when it becomes endemic? Besides, the flu kills, what? 30,000 people a year?

DANIELA LAMAS: Right, precisely. And so an endemic situation will not mean that we are in a world where COVID no longer exists and where we have closed the book on this chapter, as I once thought that ignorantly perhaps or naively, that is, that we might. But we will always continue to see COVID patients. However, when this is endemic, the difference will be, or one difference will be that we are not going to see patients to the extent that we overwhelm the health care system.

We will have sufficient immunity, such that there will be patients who get sick, and actually sick enough to be in a hospital every season, those who are not vaccinated, those with underlying disease, those who are like the flu simply unlucky-- unlucky. But for most of us, coronavirus will be something that we get, that we get a little sick or something like a flu and then our lives continue. And it's not cause for a shutdown.

- In terms of the public psychology around the coronavirus, what do you think it will take for people to consider new cases as part of an endemic, and perhaps not with the kind of anxiety and panic that we had when the Omicron variant was first discovered?

DANIELA LAMAS: I wonder whether-- I wonder about that. I mean, I wonder about that, to be honest, for myself as well. For myself and, you know, my own reaction to Omicron, which initially ranged from sort of exhaustion to anxiety and frustration and then settled it something in between those three. And I wonder whether Omicron will end up marking the last sort of time where we were able to have a massive kind of social response to a new variant of this virus.

I do wonder whether when this virus-- when this variant peaks and then falls, whether we will have all kind of brought ourselves into understanding that we are approaching a new world where coronavirus is not something that needs to stop our entire existence.

I think you see that right now. You see people weighing what am I willing to do? What am I willing to risk? And acknowledging that in not doing the things that you've been wanted to, not seeing that person that you love, that there is a cost to that too.

- All right, we'll leave it there for now. Dr. Daniela Lamas, Brigham and Women's Hospital pulmonary and critical care physician. Thank you so much for your time.