DENVER (KDVR) — Colorado outbreak data says one thing and national and state governments another when it comes to schools staying open or closed.
Tri-County Health Department executive director Dr. John Douglas today reiterated an increasingly widespread argument on Dec. 10 that schools are relatively low-risk areas for COVID-19 transmission.
“Schools have been very safe environments,” said Dr. Douglas during a Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment press conference. “In-school transmission has been very low.”
Gov. Jared Polis has recently made similar statements, bringing a kind of about face for national guidance on virtual learning models.
The American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement endorsing in-person schooling on July 10, but only recently have other organization followed suit.
“The infections that we’ve identified in schools, when they’ve been evaluated, were not acquired in schools, they were actually acquired in the community and in the household,” Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Nov. 19. “The truth is for kids kindergarten through 12, one of the safest places can be, from our perspective is to remain in school.”
The same day, a United Nation’s Children’s Fund report told members to open schools.
“School are not a main driver of community transmission,” reads the report. “Data from 191 countries collected from February to September 2020 show no consistent association between school reopening status and COVID‑19 infection rates.”
The day after, Brown University economics professor Emily Oster published a report in the Washington Post claiming school infections simply rise with overall community cases, rather than becoming super spreaders in their own right.
On a statewide call on Dec. 1, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told Colorado bluntly to open schools and close restaurant, causing backlash from eateries who feel unfairly singled out.
Dec. 7, UNICEF reiterated this week, “Evidence shows that schools are not the main drivers of this pandemic,” the international children’s advocate wrote. “Yet, we are seeing an alarming trend whereby governments are once again closing down schools as a first recourse rather than a last resort.”
Indeed, the state’s data seems to run crosswise to the official position that schools should open.
Of all the outbreaks that have occurred throughout the length of the pandemic, 12% have occurred in schools. This is more than any other single category of outbreak location type, including healthcare categories.
Considering schools have only been open for roughly one-third of the pandemic, this is significant.
As a portion of the outbreaks that have occurred since September, schools see an even larger percentage of the total. Sixteen percent of the state’s outbreaks occurred in schools since they opened.
