Over the past year, there has been a contentious debate over how much schools contribute to the spread of the virus and whether, and when, they should close. For some parents, teachers and officials, keeping schools open when a new, poorly understood virus was circulating seemed like an unacceptable risk. For others, however, it was school closures that posed the bigger danger of decreased formal learning, increased educational disparities and worsening mental health, not to mention the hardships for parents.
As the new school year begins, however, the C.D.CThe American Academy of Pediatrics and many other experts agree that reopening schools should be a priority.
“We are in a very different place than we were a year ago,” said Elizabeth Stuart, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We have very effective vaccines, we know a lot more about how to open schools safely, and we, I think, have a heightened awareness of some of the challenges that kids face when they’re not in in-person school.”
Several months ago, vaccinations for those 12 and older were occuring at a regular pace and new cases were declining. It seemed the path to normalcy had begun.
The Delta variant has altered the path. There are many unknowns about the variant, including whether it affects children more seriously than earlier forms of the virus. And with vaccination rates highly uneven, and most decision-making left up to local officials, the variant adds new uncertainty to the coming school year, which makes it critical for schools to take safety precautions as they reopen.
“Delta, because it’s so contagious, has raised the ante,” said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and a vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University. “It makes all these details all the more important.”
“When you have masks and even three-foot distancing, you are not going to see major outbreaks in schools,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at Stanford Medicine and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases. “There may be some transmissions, but they’re going to be pretty relatively infrequent.”
Studies in North Carolina, Utah, Missouri and elsewhere revealed that when schools layer several kinds of safety measure, such as a combination of masking, symptom screening, distancing, improved ventilation, virus testing, handwashing and dividing students into smaller groups, the transmission rates in schools were even lower than they were in the surrounding community.
“It’s actually safer for the kids in school than it is for them to be home,” said Dr. Daniel Benjamin Jr., a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at Duke University.
These low rates may stem, in part, from the fact that children under 10 seem to be less likely to transmit the virus than older children and adults are.
But another contributing factor is that schools are, or can be, controlled environments and may have stricter safety measures than the surrounding community, Dr. Benjamin said.
Additionally, research shows that the virus is much less likely to cause severe illness in children. They are not entirely protected; a small number of children may develop a rare but serious inflammatory condition, and some children with mild infections may experience long-term symptoms.
Initially, the C.D.C.’s guidelines recommended that unvaccinated people who were 2 or older wear masks in schools. And they strongly implied that vaccinated students did not need to be masked in the classroom.
But last week, because of concerns about Delta, the C.D.C. revised its guidelines, recommending that everyone, regardless of vaccination status, wear masks in schools this fall.
As the pandemic continues to evolve, schools and officials will need to make complicated decisions based on local conditions, including when to insist on certain precautions and when it is safe to lift them.
In schools or districts that do not have mask mandates, parents can provide some degree of protection by ensuring that their children, at least, wear masks to school, Dr. Maldonado said.
And adults can help protect younger children by getting vaccinated themselves. “The single most important thing any community can do in order to reduce the risk in schools is for the entire community to be vaccinated,” Dr. Schaffner said.
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