Study: Child care centers don’t drive COVID-19 infections

Yale-led effort was largest attempt of its kind in U.S., maybe the world

A large national study published Wednesday by the American Academy of Pediatrics provides some of the clearest evidence yet that child care centers don’t hasten the spread of the novel coronavirus, even in communities where overall infections are high.

“This is the largest study of COVID transmission in child care programs that’s been attempted in the U.S., and I think globally,” said Yale professor Walter Gilliam, who led a team of researchers in the groundbreaking study. “These are very positive findings, and they should be very comforting,” both to child care providers and the families who rely on them.

The study surveyed 57,335 providers serving almost 4 million children across two-thirds of counties in the United States, including Puerto Rico. It found that those who continued to work during the first three months of the pandemic were no more likely to have fallen ill than those who did not.

“We found there was absolutely no relationship whatsoever” between working in child care settings and contracting the virus, Gilliam said. “Working at a child care center did not put these providers at any increased risk of COVID- 19 than if they had stayed home.”

Adults are far more likely than children to get sick from COVID-19, making providers “a good measuring stick” for the rate of transmission in child care settings, Gilliam said. Smaller studies in the United States and abroad have generally shown that schools are not hot spots for SARSCoV-2, the scientific name for the virus, the way they are for other viral illnesses, particularly the flu.

“In influenza, we see that children are a main vector and schools are hot spots,” Dr. Nava Yeganeh, a pediatric infectious- disease specialist at the

University of California, Los Angeles. “What we’re trying to do is find out if it’s the same for COVID-19. And we’re seeing that they’re not.”

The newly published findings also conform with low rates of infection and transmission reported by over 33,000 licensed preschools and day cares in California, where just 657 children and about 1,000 providers have been sickened since March.

But labor advocates warn that the majority of those cases have emerged since the Yale study was done, and that rising infections everywhere, combined with widespread reopening and “quarantine fatigue,” could make child care riskier than the study’s findings suggest.