An illustration showing a group of children in school with viral particles floating above them. Image credit: Paul Tupper (CC BY 4.0)
During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials promoted social distancing as a way to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission. The goal of social distancing is to reduce the number, proximity, and duration of face-to-face interactions between people. To achieve this, people shifted many activities online or canceled events outright. In education, some schools closed and shifted to online learning, while others continued classes in person with safety precautions.
Better information about SARS-CoV-2 transmission in schools could help public health officials to make decisions of what activities to keep in person and when to suspend classes. If safety measures lower transmission in schools considerably, then closing schools may not be worth online education's social, educational, and economic costs. However, if transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in schools remains high despite measures, closing schools may be essential, despite the costs.
Tupper et al. used data about COVID-19 cases in children attending in-person school in four Canadian provinces between 2020 and 2021 to fit a computer model of school transmission. On average, their analysis shows that one infected person in a school leads to between one and two further cases. Most of the time, no more students are infected, indicating that normally infection clusters are small; and only rarely does one infected person set off a large outbreak. The model also showed that measures to reduce transmission, like masking or small class sizes, were more effective than interventions such as keeping students with the same cohort all day (bubbling).
Tupper et al. caution that their findings apply to the variants of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in Canada during the 2020-2021 school year, and may not apply to newer, highly transmissible strains like Omicron. However, the model could always be adapted to assess school or workplace transmission of more recent strains of SARS-CoV-2, and more generally of other diseases. Thus, Tupper et al. provide a new approach to estimating the rate of disease transmission and comparing the impact of different prevention strategies.
