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Connecticut native Dr. Peter Hotez is the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.
"Here's the problem," Hotez said in an interview on MSNBC Wednesday morning, Dec. 29. "We're kind of going off old information what it's been like for the previous variants, the previous lineages.
"Omicron's a different animal. Omicron is so highly transmissible at a level of transmissibility around the level potentially of measles, which is the most transmissible common virus agent we know.
"It's going to be really a challenge and really tough. I don't really know how they are going to do this, especially during the first couple of weeks of school when Omicron is still surging.
"When you look at the numbers - a 1,000-percent rise in Washington, DC - I don't know how you keep those schools open during this time."
Hotez proposed the possibility of delaying the start of in-person learning in January for two weeks and extending the school year into the summer, "with the hope it (Omicron) will come down as rapidly as it's coming down now in South Africa and the UK."
"Everybody gets the importance of kids having in-person classes, look I'm the parent of four adult kids and I remember when the kids were little how important that was," said the 63-year-old Hotez, who grew up in Hartford and graduated from Yale University.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy just issued a special report on the mental health aspects of COVID-19 and the effects it has had on America's youth.
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