During our Parent COVID Task Force ZOOM call earlier this month, we discussed returning to school in-person amidst the higher active cases in Grafton county and New Hampshire. The Crossroads COVID Task Force presented recent research from Duke University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill showing that transmission of coronavirus in schools is rare, or at least much lower than local community transmission rates, in those schools enforcing multiple mitigation layers.
Overview: Medical researchers studied 11 North Carolina school districts (~90,000 students). Over a nine week period of time, 773 community-acquired infections that came into one of the school buildings during their infectious period. Public health officials found 32 in-school secondary transmissions from those 773 people. For context, typically people in North Carolina who are infected tend to infect slightly more than one other person, meaning there was the potential for 800 to 900 secondary infections, yet in the school setting with multiple mitigation layers there were only 32 secondary infections.
Of those 32 cases, six were in pre-kindergarten, 11 were in elementary schools, six were in middle schools, five were in high schools and four were in schools that included kindergarten through 12th grade. None of the cases involved a child infecting an adult. There were three clusters of at least five cases each in the same facility. One involved pre-kindergarten students who were exempt from face covering requirements and two others were among special needs classes.
Duke and UNC researchers created the ABC Science Collaborative to help school districts make science-based decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools are crucial to children’s educational, social, physical and emotional development, according to the AAP.
