School outbreak figures lower than feared
Thousands of students and teachers have become sick with COVID-19 since schools began opening last month, but public health experts have found little evidence that the disease is spreading inside buildings, and the rates of infection are far below what’s found in the surrounding communities.
This early evidence, experts say, suggests that opening school might not be as risky as many have feared and could guide administrators as they charter the rest ofwhat’s already an unprecedented school year.
“Everyone had a fear there would be explosive outbreaks of transmission in the schools. In colleges, there have been. We have to say that to date, we have not seen those in the younger kids, and that is a really important observation,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
This doesn’t mean the risk of contracting COVID-19 is zero. Poor and inconsistent reporting in many parts of the country means experts don’t yet have a full view of the situation, and most schools have only been open for a matter of weeks.
It’s also not yet clear how closely the incidence of COVID in schools is tied to policies inside schools such as mandatory mask wearing.
In Texas, about 2,350 students have reported positive COVID tests — or about 0.21 percent of the 1.1 million students attending school in person, according to data released last week.
Another 2,175 school employees have tested positive, though a rate couldn’t be calculated because itwasn’t clear howmany of the state’s more than 800,000 school staff were working in school buildings.
Teachers unions in Texas keeping track of infections say they have been surprised how low it was. In many parts of the
country, teachers unions have resisted school systems’ efforts to return to classes, saying there weren’t sufficient safeguards in place.
“I am not seeing at this particular point the rate I had expected,” said Zeph Capo, president of the Texas branch of the American Federation of Teachers.
He said this is partly because parents in communities most affected by COVID are less willing to send their children back to school. And he predicted the numbers will rise as more students to return to buildings and if the pandemic worsens this winter, as experts have warned.
Around the country, most of the nation’s largest districts opened with fully remote teaching, so the data to date is largely from smaller communities. But the fact that large swaths of the country opened for in-person schoolwhile others did not offers the more cautious districts a chance to observe how things have gone elsewhere in charting their next steps.
On Wednesday, researchers at Brown University, working with school administrators, released their first set of data from a new National COVID-19 School Response Data Dashboard. It found low levels of infection among both students and teachers.
Tracking infections over a twoweek period beginning Aug. 31, it found 0.23 percent of students had a confirmed or suspected case of COVID-19. Among teachers, it was 0.49 percent.
Looking at just confirmed cases, the rates were even lower: 0.078 percent for students and 0.15 percent for teachers.
“These numbers will be, for some people, reassuring and suggest that school openingsmay be less risky than they expected,” said Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University who helped create the tracker.
Still, she said: “I don’t think that these numbers say all places should open schools with no restrictions or anything that comes close to that. Ultimately school districts are going to have different attitudes toward risk.”