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Home Products Reopening Schools While Mitigating COVID-19’s Spread: How Many Days Should Students Attend?
Schools across the country face wrenchingly difficult decisions about reopening buildings for the upcoming school year in the midst of a pandemic that has not been defeated. Even so, school buildings cannot remain closed indefinitely. The educational costs of the spring school closures have surely been large, and no one thinks that even the most successful remote-learning approaches can fully replace classroom instruction. It is in this context that the American Academy of Pediatrics recently issued guidance strongly encouraging the reopening of school buildings (without specifically addressing how many days students should be in school).
The question, then, is how to reopen school buildings without creating undue risk of a spike in COVID-19 infections. At the request of the Pennsylvania Department of Education, we spent the last month gathering information and analyzing data to inform the guidance that the department would provide to schools. We monitored emerging evidence on COVID-19 in children, examined research on remote-learning strategies, and spoke to stakeholders across the state about challenges and concerns related to reopening schools. In addition, we enlisted our colleagues in public health research to apply an agent-based computational model to predict the spread of COVID-19 in schools under various scenarios using different disease mitigation strategies. We reported our findings in depth in a lengthy memo for the Pennsylvania Department of Education that was released publicly last week; we will also discuss them in a public webinar on Monday, July 6, at 1:30pm ET (please join us!).
As our findings make clear, there is enormous uncertainty associated with reopening schools. Children are less susceptible than adults to the more serious consequences of COVID-191, but that doesn't mean they can't infect others. Children might be less infectious than adults, but how much less infectious is unclear.2 Although masks, physical distance, and careful hygiene can reduce the rate of disease transmission, encouraging findings about those practices come largely from studies of adults3, 4, 5, who are likely to be better than children at following rules. The pandemic has a large element of randomness, which means that no school can count on avoiding an outbreak, no matter how careful its practices. And finally, research doesn’t yet have much to say about the educational effectiveness of hybrid approaches that mix classroom and remote instruction.
Despite these uncertainties, we reached some conclusions in the memo that should be useful to policymakers and educators:
There is much that remains unknown about transmissibility of COVID-19 among children, about children’s behavioral responses to mitigation strategies, and about the effectiveness of different approaches to hybrid and remote instruction. Yet the burdens of not having students in school every day are large for students and their families. These uncertainties and tradeoffs leave educators and administrators with many difficult choices for the coming school year. Fortunately, our work with Pennsylvania at least suggests some guidance for narrowing the range of options.
1 Center for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020, May 29). Information for Pediatric Healthcare Providers. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/pediatric-hcp.html
2 Dattner, I., Goldberg, Y., Katriel, G., Yaari, R, Gal, N., Miron, Y., Ziv, A., Hamo, Y., & Huppert, A. (2020). The role of children in the spread of COVID-19: Using household data from Bnei Brak, Israel, to estimate the relative susceptibility and infectivity of children. MedRxiv. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.03.20121145v1
3 Chu, D. K., Akl, E. A., Duda, S., Solo, K., Yaacoub, S., & Schünemann, H. J., on behalf of the COVID-19 Systematic Urgent Review Group Effort (SURGE) study authors. (2020). Physical distancing, face masks, and eye protection to prevent person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: A systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet, 395(10242), 1973–1987. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext
4 Ratnesar-Shumate, S., Williams, G., Green, B., Krause, M., Holland, B., Wood, S., Bohannon, J., Boydston, J., Freeburger, D., Hooper, I., Beck, K., Yeager, J., Altamura, L. A., Biryukov, J., Yolitz, J., Schuit, M., Wahl, V., Hevey, M., & Dabisch, P. (2020). Simulated sunlight rapidly inactivates SARS-CoV-2 on surfaces. The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 222(2), 214–222. https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiaa274
5 Somsen, G.A., van Rijn, C., Kooij, S., Bem, R., & Bonn, D. Small droplet aerosols in poorly ventilated spaces and SARSCoV-2 transmission. The Lancet. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-2600(20)30245-9
Author(s)
Brian Gill
Director for REL Mid-Atlantic
Connect with REL Mid-Atlantic