Are schools safe from virus?
Lack of cohesive data makes it difficult to reliably predict whether reopening will cause coronavirus to spread faster
When panicked administrators shut down schools in the spring, little was known about how the coronavirus could spread among students and teachers. Could children fall critically ill and spread it to peers and teachers, like the flu? Would asymptomatic young people pass it on to their parents or educators?
More than nine months after schools closed, some of the answers to those questions are becoming clear. Emerging data on contact tracing — which illuminates the origins of infections — shows that the virus does not seem to spread much within schools when they require masks, urge social distancing, have good ventilation and when community spread is low.
But because of a lack of a cohesive federal response, huge gaps in the data remain, and many say new information about school transmission is not sufficient to make far-reaching conclusions. A dearth of data has plagued many aspects of pandemic response, and it has left governors, school superintendents, school board members and parents on their own to interpret the shifting body of knowledge as they make decisions that could affect the lives of everyone connected to school communities. This, coupled with soaring infection rates, has made these decisions especially fraught as school officials weigh whether to reopen their doors next month.
The results? School systems have responded to the virus in wildly different ways that often seemed more shaped by politics than data, according to an analysis conducted by the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
“It’s ridiculous. The districts are having to figure this out on their own and manage the local politics,” said Robin Lake, the director of the center, an education research group that has been tracking school closures. “It puts them in a pretty untenable position.”
Plenty of school systems report the number of infections that emerge among students and staff. But many experts and public health officials say data about where the infections originate is just as important. School transmission data, gleaned from contact tracing, can show whether students and teachers are getting sick from being at school, or because they picked up the virus at a child’s sleepover or a family birthday party.
“It’s incredibly important to have that second piece of data, that context, because it helps us understand, are these cases being acquired external to the school environment,” said Jennifer Kertanis, the director of the Farmington Valley Health District in Connecticut and the president of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. None of the students or staff who have contracted the virus in the 10 school districts she covers have caught it from school.
Researchers say that in some cases, closing schools, and leaving children in the care of adults who do not force them to wear masks or socially distance, may put them at higher risk of contracting and spreading the virus.
“If kids or teachers are not in schools, they may be in child-care centers or learning pods that are also causing community spread,” said co-author Dan Goldhaber, who directs the Center for Education Data and Research at University of Washington. “From a public policy standpoint ... it’s not necessarily safer to have the schools closed.”
A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of Mississippi schoolchildren found those who tested positive for the virus were not more likely to have attended in-person classes than those who tested negative. But they were more likely to have attended family gatherings, play dates, parties and funerals.
Researchers, too, are getting more information about when and how schools can contribute to spreading the virus in the community. A study by researchers in Michigan and Washington state examined school and infection data, and found that when community infection rates were low, reopening schools did not seem to worsen the situation.
But that calculation changed when infection rates were high — like they are now in Washington, Michigan and wide swaths of the country. Then, schools did seem to contribute to community spread. According to the researcher’s metrics, both states now greatly exceed that threshold, which appeared to be around 5 to 15 new cases per 100,000 people. On Dec. 27, Michigan was reporting a seven-day average of 29 new cases per 100,000 people. That same day, Washington’s 7-day average was 28 cases per 100,000.
There is debate among public health experts and epidemiologists over whether the data is sufficient to draw any conclusions or make recommendations, especially because only a handful of jurisdictions are reporting it, and because there’s no uniform way to gather it. They worry that schools that decide to remain open as infections rise to unmanageable rates, especially those that do not mandate masks or limit activities, could end up significantly worsening the virus’s spread.
“So there are two issues: One is that we don’t have enough contact tracing all across the country,” said Leana Wen, a physician and public health professor at George Washington University who previously served as Baltimore’s health commissioner. “The second problem is that the community prevalence is just so high that it’s going to be very difficult to sort out where the infections are originating from.”
And not all the data points to low incidence of school spread. St. Charles County, Mo., one of the few jurisdictions to post detailed case information about school spread, linked more than 1,100 coronavirus cases to school transmission. There is little data on what happens in schools where students are not required to wear masks or socially distance — as is the case in many schools in Georgia and other southern states.
Even as some are urging schools to reopen, infection rates are skyrocketing in many parts of the country, feeding growing tensions between those who wish to reopen buildings, including many politicians and school officials, and those who caution that we still do not know enough to assure safety, including teacher unions. Parents stand on both sides of the debate, but Black and Latino families appear more likely to advocate to keep schools closed.