CDC Updates Guidelines To Protect Kids From COVID In School. Plus: Vacation Tips

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It's only July, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is focusing on the coming school year, and its message is clear: It wants students back in the classroom.

On Friday, the agency issued updated guidance for K-12 schools, highlighting the importance of getting as many eligible children vaccinated as possible to return classrooms to normal or near normal and enumerating its list of best practices to prevent transmission of COVID-19.

So far, just 1 out of 3 kids ages 12 to 17 have received a COVID-19 vaccine. The Biden administration is hoping to boost these numbers before school starts in the fall.

"For families who haven't gotten their kids vaccinated yet, now is the time," says Erin Sauber-Schatz, lead for the Community Interventions and Critical Populations Task Force at the CDC. "It takes five weeks to get fully vaccinated. If you got your first shot today, the second would be July 30, and you'd be fully vaccinated on Aug. 13. So now's the time if you haven't gotten vaccinated yet."

If a high school could document that everyone in the building was fully vaccinated, she says, school would look a lot like it did pre-pandemic. Of course, the reality is that most schools will have a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated students and staff.