Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top White House medical adviser, suggested that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention might update its heavily criticized guidelines for operating summer camps.

Last week, the CDC called for both children and adults at camps to wear masks at all times – even if they’re vaccinated and engaged in activities that allow for plenty of distance, like tennis or baseball. (Swimming and eating are the only exceptions).

Under the CDC guidelines, social distancing is mandatory. The sharing of books, toys, games, and art supplies is discouraged. Campers and staffers should be divided into pods.

Criticism of the rules was robust. Dimitri Christakis, an epidemiologist and the editor-in-chief of JAMA Pediatrics, called them “unfairly draconian.”

In a New York article published yesterday, Mark Gorelik, a pediatric immunologist at Columbia University was also critical:

“We know that the risk of outdoor infection is very low. We know risks of children becoming seriously ill or even ill at all is vanishingly small. And most of the vulnerable population is already vaccinated. I am supportive of effective measures to restrain the spread of illness. However, the CDC’s recommendations cross the line into excess and are, frankly, senseless. Children cannot be running around outside in 90-degree weather wearing a mask. Period.”

On Wednesday morning, Dr. Fauci was asked about the controversy during a TODAY Show appearance. He called the precautions “stringent,” and added:

“I wouldn’t call them excessive, but they certainly are conservative,” Fauci said. “And I think what you’re going to start to see is really in real time, continually reevaluating that for its practicality. Because you’re right, people look at that and they say, ‘Well is that being a little bit too far right now?’

Nearly 580 thousand Americans have died of COVID-19, but cases are on the decline.

Children are much less likely to have adverse outcomes from COVID-19 infections than adults – and they’re less likely to catch the virus in the first place.

Evidence does exists that children can transmit the disease. However, the risk of transmission is small. From FiveThirtyEight:

For example, even after many school districts had been open for a while last fall and case numbers were rising to a surge, a study modeling the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. found that children age 9 and under were responsible for only about 5 percent of the transmissions happening at the time. And those results line up with what researchers are seeing in other countries. Kids in the U.K. can and do get infected and spread COVID-19, said Rosalind Eggo, a professor and infectious disease modeler at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. But so far, she said, cases among kids aren’t rising before cases in adults, a sign that would indicate they were the ones driving infection.