AS VIRUS SURGES, NEW STUDIES SUGGEST WARNING FOR SCHOOL REOPENING – By Rachel M. Cohen (The Intercept) / January 6 2021
New evidence suggests that as community rates of Covid-19 increase, so do risks of in-person learning.
SINCE THE BEGINNING of the pandemic, one of the most contentious questions has been under what conditions it might be safe to reopen schools. Families are distressed about children suffering academically and emotionally at home, and leaders are anxious to get parents back to work, partly to aid economic recovery. The absence of good information about how the coronavirus spreads, along with a lack of federally led testing and contact tracing, has fueled massive amounts of distrust, with some suspicious that reopened schools are less safe than leadership purports and others convinced closed schools are safer than leaders claim. Teachers and communities have organized protests, both to close schools and to open them.
Now, higher-quality research is beginning to emerge, shedding light on the relationship between reopened schools and the spread of the virus earlier this fall. Two new studies in the U.S. that were published in the last two weeks suggest that when community transmission is low, reopening school buildings, at least when schools are not operating at full capacity, does not contribute much to the virus’s spread. But the risks change, the researchers found, when community transmission is higher. A third study, published in early December, found that reopening Florida schools led to increased infections among school-age children, particularly among high schoolers. Florida is one of the only states to provide incidence rates by age and county.
One of the studies, published Monday by two economists and one epidemiologist at Tulane University, looked at the effects of school reopening on Covid-19 hospitalization rates. The authors believe it’s the first study worldwide to explore this relationship, as nearly all prior research has compared school reopenings to case positivity rates — a less reliable but more accessible measure. While hospitalization rates don’t capture those who may still be suffering from long-term symptoms of Covid-19 or who got very ill but never sought hospital treatment (perhaps due to lack of health insurance), the researchers say it’s still a more robust way of measuring real sickness in a community than case rates, which include those who are asymptomatic or have very mild illnesses.
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