CDC: Safe schools lead to scant spread of coronavirus
WASHINGTON — Schools operating in person have experienced 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 last week.
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 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 school-based spread of the virus. That means policies such as restrictions on indoor dining at restaurants.
Still, Honein said, even in places with high infection rates, there is no evidence that schools will transmit the virus at rates that are any higher than those seen in the general community. She said they can operate safely as long as precautions are employed. Specifically, the CDC recommends that schools require masks, allow for a distance of six feet between people and keep students in cohorts to limit the number of people who must quarantine in the case of an exposure. It also recommends screening tests to identify asymptomatic infected people, and increased air ventilation.
“With good prevention, we can safely reopen and keep open more schools,” said Honein, lead for the CDC State and Local Health Department COVID Task Force.
The researchers said they were far more concerned about indoor sports and other extracurricular activities that do not allow for distancing and mask use.
Another CDC report, also published on Tuesday, described two December high school wrestling tournaments in Florida where 30% of the 130 athletes, coaches and referees who participated were then diagnosed with the virus. The actual rates might be higher, the report noted, as fewer than half the participants were tested.
After the tournaments, testing was conducted among the 95 people in close contact with the infected tournament participants, and found 43% of them tested positive. One person, an adult over age 50, died.
Wrestling, the report noted, is an activity where distancing is not possible and wearing masks is not safe.
“The bottom line for me is really prioritizing the in-person educational setting and making the hard choices both in communities and in schools about other activities that we value but might have to be postponed to not jeopardize our children’s education,” Honein said in an interview. To try to reopen schools, Biden has asked Congress for $130 billion to offset costs and has promised better guidance from his administration on how to do so safely. President Donald Trump also pushed schools to open, though provided little guidance, data collection or funding to help them.
Biden says his goal is to have a majority of K-8 schools open within 100 days of taking office, though he has not said how he will calculate this metric, or whether hybrid systems, where students divide their time between learning in school and at home, would count.
A survey of 13,597 school districts by MCH Strategic Data, cited by the CDC, found 17% of school districts were fully open for in-person learning in the fall and 51% used a hybrid model.