Study: School kids rarely transmitted COVID
Over a 4 month period in 2021, 44 in-school transmission cases were found among 18,000 students
A recent peer-reviewed study published by the JAMA Network shows K-12 kids rarely transmitted COVID-19 in school.
The study, titled “Prevalence and Risk Factors for School-Associated Transmission of SARS-CoV-2,” looked at K-12 kids in 10 Massachusetts districts and found “the secondary attack rate of SARS-CoV-2 in schools was 2.2% during the 2020-2021 school year and 2.8% in the fall of 2021.”
“The findings of this longitudinal cohort study of K-12 schools in Massachusetts, based on detailed school-based contact tracing during the 2020-2021 school year and fall semester of 2021, indicate that the SAR of SARS-CoV-2 among school-based contacts was low,” the study’s conclusion states while underscoring a need for more data through continued school surveillance.
Over a 4 month period in 2021, 44 in-school transmission cases were found among 18,000 students spanning 34 schools.
The study also admits that the “true rate of in-school SARS-CoV-2 transmission, however, remains unknown,” and may be difficult to ever truly determine due to a host of factors such as individual school mitigation policies and the activities inside and outside of school by each individual student.
Interestingly, the study suggests masking was a factor in keeping transmission levels down, despite the fact that mask use against COVID has been relatively useless and ample evidence masking really made no difference.
Read: Large study shows masks make "little to no difference"
The study also infers that vaccinations may have played a role, yet the majority of kids in the study wouldn’t have been eligible for a shot during the first half of the study.
Test-To-Stay (TTS), the policy pushed by the CDC where unvaccinated kids stayed in school if they had a negative rapid antigen test result, is also addressed in the study. The results were interesting, showing those students were less likely than quarantined kids to pick up the virus:
In this study, unvaccinated students enrolled in the TTS program were less likely to acquire SARS-CoV-2 than unvaccinated students who were quarantined and tested. In addition, students who were identified as cases through the TTS program were not more likely to transmit infection than those identified as cases through other means (eg, symptomatic testing, out-of-school close contact). This finding suggests that exposed students who eventually tested positive but remained in school before their antigen test results became positive were not more likely than other students to transmit infection at school during that time, supporting the safety of TTS programs to minimize lost learning days.
All of North Carolina’s public school districts employed the TTS policies at some point.
All of the districts in North Carolina followed along with masking protocols pushed by the CDC and former NCDHHS Director Mandy Cohen, who ironically now heads up the CDC.