In a recent study, two-thirds of kids with Covid-19 didn’t have recognizable symptoms. That’s bad news for pandemic containment.

Yes, kids can get Covid-19. They can also spread it. They might even be better at spreading it than adults are. You wouldn’t know that from listening to the White House, though.

“It’s not just that children are not at risk at all from this disease. They also do not even transmit the disease,” Scott Atlas, President Trump’s controversial new coronavirus adviser—a radiologist and fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution—argued in June. He said it was “irrational” to close schools because there is “zero risk to the children.” The Trump administration immediately adopted this false argument, with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos threatening to withhold funding from schools that did not reopen in-person classes.

A month later, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association released a report showing a 40 percent increase in infection among kids in the second half of July. Nearly 100,000 American children had gotten sick in those two weeks alone. By the end of the month, 338,000 children in the U.S. had tested positive for the virus—8.8 percent of all known cases in the country. Continue reading at The New Republic.