Child COVID Cases Skyrocket As Schools Reopen Without Masks

Across the South, school districts are being overwhelmed by COVID-19, with the state of Mississippi alone having already been forced to quarantine 15% of students in the state. Florida isn't that far behind, neither is Georgia, and none of these states have mask mandates in place for students returning to school, nor are there vaccination requirements for school staff. This is now a man-made disaster, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

COVID is running rampant across the American South, all the way from South Florida, up to Tennessee and over to Texas and the state of Mississippi has not been spared either. They reported this week that so far, 15%, 15% of all K through 12 public school students in the state have already been quarantined after exposure to an active COVID infection in school, 15% and the schools haven't even been open for a full month. 65,000 students and that does not include the faculty members that also had to quarantine, but just 65,000 students in a couple of weeks already sent home. Already forced to go on the five, ten day quarantine, whatever it is depending on level of exposure here. And this was all totally preventable, totally preventable. You know, I have talked about this in the past, but when the pandemic first hit the United States, hit hard here in the United States, schools across the country shut down and immediately, almost overnight in some cases went to strictly online.

And yes, it was a challenge for parents. It certainly was a challenge for low income Americans that did not have the means to get their children online and do those, you know, webcam classes. But somehow we all pulled it together and we did it for months to close out the end of that 2019-2020 school year. And then after that, when school started again back in August of 2020, a year ago, they just said, screw it. Most of y'all are coming back to brick and mortar. A lot of us didn't even have the option to put our kids in virtual school because it wasn't offered, even though they already put the infrastructure in place and had an entire summer to build it out properly. We could have protected our children. But our state governments made the decision, the active decision to not do that. Tennessee right now, 14,000 children in the hospital with COVID-19, thousands down here in the state of Florida.

We've also had thousands forced to quarantine after school started. Texas, same situation. Alabama, same situation. Georgia, same. All of these states have one thing in common. These are all states being run by Republican governors. That's the golden thread there, folks. We could have saved children. We could have protected children. Could we have prevented every single case of COVID? Absolutely not. But we could have masked them up and reduce the number of children in hospitals, reduce the number of children on quarantine, which then puts stress on the parents who also have gone back to work. Now they have to take off. We continue to mismanage this pandemic at the state level, just like we did back in March of 2020, except this time these Republican governors are offering up our children as the sacrifice they're willing to make to appease the craziest part of their anti mask base.