Kudos to North Dakota governor Doug Burgum for announcing normal, in-classroom summer school will start on schedule on June 1. North Dakota joins Idaho and Montana as the first back-to-school states — which is a huge relief to children and to parents trying to get back to work.

Contrary to distorted media coverage, Dr. Anthony Fauci didn’t tell the Senate Health Committee yesterday that schools shouldn’t be reopened in the fall.

Senator Lamar Alexander asked Fauci about school starting in August, saying: “Let’s start with treatments and vaccines first.”

Fauci replied to that by noting that “having treatments available, or a vaccine, to facilitate the reentry of students into the fall term would be something that would be something of a bit of a bridge too far.”

He continued: “What they really want is to know if they are safe. That’s the question that’ll have to be due with what we discussed earlier about testing.”

A feeling of safety is important, and certainly the ability of point-of-care tests available to anyone who is worried about being infected will help.

But given that 20 million Americans attend colleges and 50 million go to K–12 public schools, we should not wait until they have all been tested, because most are at exceptionally low risk themselves and of passing the virus on to others.

Students in France, Switzerland, Norway, and the Netherlands are all back in class and will be joined by Germany and other countries later this month.

Denmark reopened schools a month ago, and there is no evidence of any school outbreaks. Iceland, which never closed its schools, ranks on a per-capita basis at the very top of testing for the virus.

Kai Stefansson, an advisor to Iceland’s health ministry, reports that tests show children are extremely unlikely to be infected or transmit the virus to others. “We have not found a single instance of a child infecting parents,” he said.