Jennifer Nuzzo hopes to send her kids to camp this summer, but like many parents, she's a little worried about it. The camp she selected for her son requires kids to wear masks, and she thinks he might get overheated. Other than that, though, she sees little problem with kids attending an outdoor camp this summer. And the same goes for schools—most districts haven't yet announced when and how they'll resume in-person classes, but she thinks they should open up in the fall.

Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University and a leading expert on the coronavirus, is one of a number of scientists vocally advocating for summer camps and schools to reopen, with some precautions, even if there's no vaccine yet. "The idea of keeping kids at home, and having parents work at home, for however long, until we get a vaccine," Nuzzo told me, "it seems to me that there are harms that kids are experiencing that we are not accounting for."

Some public-health experts say that having in-person classes in a few months is still too risky, citing countries like Israel and China that have had to shut down schools after opening them up. The experts who disagree—call them the "reopeners"—aren't blind to the dangers of the virus, but they believe the hazards should be weighed against the costs of changing children's lives so dramatically.

This message likely has a friendly ear in many parents, especially those who have been Zooming into meetings while chasing after toddlers. Even parents who have been enjoying the extra family time might be ready for a break. I recently talked by phone with a friend, a father of two, and could hardly make out what he was saying, because he was yawning so much and slurring his words. He was exhausted from homeschooling all day, he said. (I don't have children, a decision some parents constantly berated me for—until they suspiciously stopped in March.)

But beyond relieving exasperated parents, in-person schooling confers all sorts of societal benefits that students are currently missing. With schools shifted to distance learning, 7 million kids have been stuck at home without the internet they need for their Zoom lessons. Research suggests that some low-income students are losing a year of academic gains. School feeds kids; it socializes them. There are good schools and bad schools, but even the worst ones tend to be better than no school at all.

Apart from the benefits of school, the reopeners point to evidence that children are less affected by the coronavirus than adults are. A recent study in Nature found that children and teenagers are only about half as likely as adults to get infected with the coronavirus. Though the long-term implications of a mild case of COVID-19 are still not known, when kids do get infected, only 21 percent show symptoms, compared with 69 percent of infected adults over 70. In May, some parents worried for their kids' safety when about 100 children in the U.S. came down with a delayed, severe reaction to the coronavirus called "multisystem inflammatory syndrome." Reopeners say this disorder has been so rare as to be worth the risk.

While more than 120,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, only about two dozen deaths have been children under the age of 15. Meanwhile, more than 1,700 children die in the United States each year from child abuse and neglect—two issues that have been harder for children to report while they haven't been seeing teachers regularly.