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.
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As noted by Alex Berenson, this study lags behind the findings by other nations that young school kids were not significant transmitters of COVID and had very small viral loads compared to adults and older teens.
“As early as April 11, 2020, French researchers published a paper showing that an infected nine-year-old child had not transmitted the disease “despite close interactions within schools.” By August 2020, researchers in Spain and Sweden had confirmed that finding on a much larger scale,” Berenson writes.
Berenson also points out the hysteria by teacher unions about allowing children back into the classroom with a CNN headline that teachers were preparing their wills as a result.
Also over at CNN, we saw reports of NYC teachers protesting - in crowded streets, no less- holding mock funeral services and signs with various “we don’t want to die” messages. The teachers there even went as far as to carry a casket through the streets that came with accusations that reopening schools was “racist.”
In the last few months, the nation has been treated to revisionist history about the role of teacher unions in keeping the nation’s K-12 schools closed.
One of the major offenders, Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), went on a PR campaign in an attempt to gaslight the public into believing she and her organization had wanted to open schools.
That didn’t work out so well for Weingarten, who was subsequently tarred and feathered on Twitter.
Here in North Carolina, the NC Association of Educators (NCAE) demanded schools stay closed through its campaign “Our Schools. Our Say.”
The NCAE also pressed Governor Roy Cooper to use his executive powers to keep the schoolhouse doors closed.
Following the “Our Schools” campaign, the top leadership of the NCAE, such as its Vice President Bryan Profitt, decided they would crisscross the state in a truck making in-person visits in every district while most students were either still in remote instruction or were cycling into schools one week out of every three.
Meanwhile, the NCAE President was taking heat for her tweet about learning loss being a “false construct.”
Kelly stood by that statement even as it became clear school closures had a catastrophic impact on student achievement with data more than proving learning loss to be a very real construct.