Safely Reopening K-12 Schools During the COVID-19 Pandemic
medrxiv(2020)
Abstract
Early school closures were a consistent, nationwide response to the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March due to the role that children play in spreading influenza. This left us with limited understanding of COVID-19 transmission in children until several states reopened schools for the 2020-2021 school year. While early school closures were likely beneficial in protecting children in the initial stages of the pandemic in the U.S., long-term closures pose significant cumulative effects in children who rely on schools for instruction and additional social services, and for parents who need to balance work and childcare obligations. Reopening schools safely is a high priority for many interested stakeholders.
Proposed in-person school reopening plans include traditional, 100% school capacity, five days per week instruction, hybrid scenarios with reduced in-person instruction and virtual learning, and various reduced school capacity schedules with non-pharmaceutical interventions in place. To assess the potential impacts of different reopening plans, we created a modified SIR-type transmission model that captures multiple known pathways of COVID-19 transmission in a 100,000-person community.
Our results show that plans that utilize consecutive days in school and divide students into separated smaller cohorts who attend school together, as well as plans that emphasize distance learning, are better able to suppress disease spread and reduce risk from an introduced infective into the community. Plans with more consecutive school days are protective for both the schoolchildren and surrounding community by acting to separate the larger intermixing population into smaller intermixing subpopulations. The “Five-Day Switch” plan, which separates students into two cohorts, each of whom attend in-person learning for five consecutive days followed by five days of distance learning, best captures these protective attributes. All modeled plans assumed initially disease-free communities and that children’s interactions with the community are greatly reduced during instructional days, both for in-person and distance learning.
### Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
### Funding Statement
This research was funded through Laboratory Directed Research & Development funds (Los Alamos National Laboratory). Award no. 20200697ER.
### Author Declarations
I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained.
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The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below:
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All necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived.
Yes
I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance).
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I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines and uploaded the relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material as supplementary files, if applicable.
Yes
This article uses mathematical modeling and simulations, and does not use any real-world data generated from actual people.
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Key words
schools,pandemic
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