Good mitigation efforts are the key to keeping COVID-19 cases to a rare minimum in schools -- according to a new study.
The CDC and Washington University School of Medicine just released the results of a pilot study assessing COVID-19 transmission in participating schools in St. Louis County and in Springfield-Greene County.
One of the study's leading researchers is pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Jason Newland, professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine.
"This pilot project found that when schools practice mitigation strategies like masking, having some distancing -- we're learning that 3 feet of separation is sufficient as we saw in over 70% of classroms in this pilot project -- as well as hand hygiene, cleanliness, and keeping kids and staff members out of school who are sick -- if you do that, transmission is rare in schools," Dr. Newland tells KMOX. "So this is a really exciting study, and really a testament to the schools and all the work they're doing to keep our staff and students safe."
Dr. Newland says Wash U worked on this pilot study with Pattonville School District and two private schools in St. Louis County. This study is part of a larger, ongoing collaboration involving the CDC, The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Saint Louis University, Rockwood and University City school districts as well as Springfield-Greene County School District.
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So how did the study work?
"The schools would notify us of a case as well as contacts based on their contact tracing -- because as we know, our schools have been doing an amazing job doing the contact tracing," said Dr. Newland. "We would be notified and then we would reach out to these families to see if they wanted to volunteer to participate , we would do some interviews with both the cases as well as the contacts. We would do some testing as well utilizing a saliva-based test developed at Wash U. And then we used that info to help us determine if we had a contact of a case that turned positive and if that was due to what we thought was a probable school-based transmission or not. And as we are learning, school-based transmission was rare. There were only 2 contacts out of the 102 contacts who tested positive and those were in two elementary schools."
Dr. Newland's main message?
"I'd say to students, parents, staff and teachers -- when we do our mitigation strategies of masking, using our distance, though it can be 3 feet, washing our hands, keeping peole out of school who are ill -- then school transmission of COVID-19 is rare," said Dr. Newland. "And when we did this pilot project, it was in December at the height of the pandemic and we still showed rare transmission."
The bottom line according to Dr. Newland is that schools can operate safely during a pandemic when prevention strategies are followed.
"COVID-19 is not going away," said Dr. Newland. "We need to learn more so that our students and our staff members that do such important work for our communities can do that safely. We are going to continue studying this -- and hope to have some more results for you and the rest of the community in the next couple of months."
The findings from this pilot project are published in the CDC's journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
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