CDC: Little spread of virus in schools that take precautions

Washington — Schools operating in person have seen scant transmission of the coronavirus, particularly when masks and distancing are employed, but some indoor athletics have led to infections and should be curtailed if schools want to operate safely, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in papers published Tuesday.

The CDC team reviewed data from studies in the United States and abroad and found the experience in schools different from nursing homes and high-density work sites where rapid spread has occurred.

“The preponderance of available evidence from the fall school semester has been reassuring,” wrote three CDC researchers in a viewpoint piece published online Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “There has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission.”

The review, which echoes the conclusions of other researchers, comes as many school districts continue to wrestle with whether and how to reopen schools and as President Joe Biden makes a return to in-person learning one of his top pandemic-related priorities.

A new CDC study, also published Tuesday, looked at 17 rural K-12 schools in Wisconsin and found just seven out of 191 coronavirus cases resulted from inschool transmission. Researchers noted that students and staff in these schools wore masks almost all the time.

“The conclusion here is with proper prevention efforts ... we can keep transmission in schools and educational settings quite low,” said Margaret A. Honein, the lead author of the JAMA report. “We didn’t know that at the beginning of the year but the data has really accumulated.”

The CDC said communities should work to reduce overall levels of transmission in order to prevent schoolbased spread of the virus. That means policies such as restrictions on indoor dining at restaurants.