One of the most contentious issues that has arisen during the coronavirus pandemic is the question of whether or not schools should hold in person classes.
As more districts have opened across the country with a range of different safety measures in place, more experts are saying that schools can safely open as long as certain precautions are taken.
“Half of the top 50 largest districts are still doing generally in person learning,” said Dr. Mark McClellan, Director of the Duke-Robert J. Margolis Center for Health Policy and co-author of a Rockefeller Foundation report outlining COVID-19 testing protocols in K-12 schools.
Dr. McClellan says that basic precautions such as mandatory mask wearing, reducing class sizes and increasing distancing and hygiene measures can effectively keep the virus from circulating within a school.
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He cites one district in North Carolina where 35,000 students have been back at school for nine weeks. About 100 cases have been detected, which he says matches the rate that the virus was circulating in the community at large.
“With these precautions in place, only eight cases of infection spreading from a student to someone or a faculty member to someone else in the school, and no cases of children transmitting to teachers, who were again wearing masks and using face shields and using these modifications,” he said.
An important factor in his assessment is that young people are less likely to face serious cases of the virus.
“The bigger concern with the younger kids is really transmission to others,” he said. “It looks like, with the evidence that’s emerging, if you have some reasonable steps to prevent spread in the school – spacing out the kids, maybe having a mixture of virtual instruction and in person instruction and attention to masks, stuff like that – not only can you keep the rate of spread down among students where the risk is relatively low, but you can also prevent that spread back into the community.”
Another critical part of a school’s reopening strategy should be frequent and rapid testing, which can catch outbreaks before they grow out of control. And by putting safety protocols in place and reducing the number of people that any given student or faculty member is regularly exposed to, then the impact of a positive case be limited further.
“There is a good path forward for reopening schools,” he said. “It’s so important for students’ education and development. We really think this should be a high priority now”