New research published Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests the risk of COVID-19 spread in classrooms is relatively low, adding new questions over the continued closure of in-person education across the nation.
Published in the JAMA medical journal, researchers discuss the results of several studies looking at COVID-19 exposure among children under the age of 18. One case-controlled study in Mississippi.
Out of 397 participants, 154 were diagnosed with a COVID-19 infection. Attending close social gatherings or interacting with members outside of their households was a leading cause of infection, but in-person school attendance was not.
Similar results were recorded when examining 11 school districts in North Carolina, featuring 90,000 students and staff occupying school classrooms for nine weeks.
Researchers found that within-school transmissions were rare, with only 32 COVID-19 infections traced back to exposure in school settings. A far greater number of infections, 773, were linked to other community sources of transmission.
Another report out of Wisconsin showcased low transmission among 17 K-12 schools--so long as students and faculty wore masks.
"The investigators concluded that these data, together with the observation that rates of infection among teachers and nonteachers were generally similar, indicated that schools were not associated with accelerating community transmission," researchers wrote.
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