Dr. Michael Osterholm is the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “Please understand, this B.1.1.7 variant is a brand new ball game,” Osterholm said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “It infects kids very readily. Unlike previous strains of the virus, we didn’t see children under 8th grade get infected often or they were not frequently very ill, they didn’t transmit to the rest of the community. Anywhere you look where you see this emerging, you see that kids are playing a huge role in the transmission of this,” Osterholm said. “All the things that we had planned for about kids in schools with this virus are really no longer applicable. We’ve got to take a whole new look at this issue.”
