Those were the key takeaways from a briefing by the Infectious Diseases Society of America this morning.
Some schools have already been open for face-to-face learning, and data from those schoolshas helped the understanding of the appropriate protocols for keeping students and staff safe. The CDC this week announced that students in classrooms are safe if desks are spaced three to six feet apart. That’s a difference from the previous guidelines of six feet.
Of course, the CDC doubled down on mask wearing and hand hygiene, both important mitigation steps to keeping COVID-19 at bay.
“It didn’t seem possible to do this in the fall, but a lot of schools have gone back and we’ve learned because they have been sharing,” said Dr. Preeti Malani, the chief health officer and professor of medicine at the University of Michigan.
“The one thing that has been consistent,” Malani said, “Is that mitigation — masks, ventilation, distancing — can make it safe to get back to face-to-face learning.”
She said the risks vary depending on the community, but the bigger risk is not going to school. “Striking that balance has been difficult.”
But it will also be important for schools to be able to transition back to virtual learning if the numbers of infections rise again.
A big question still is when will children be vaccinated, and what will happen if the variant strains of the virus take hold. Tan said the vaccination of children may begin by fall and will occur in phases.
She said Pfizer has completed enrollment in its vaccine trials for children 12 to 16, and Moderna has an ongoing trial for the same age group; results for both may be known in late spring or early summer. Johnson and Johnson just started its vaccine trial in the 12-to-16 age group. Trials for infants and children under 12 are scheduled to start by the end of spring or early summer, and the results may not be available until late 2021 or early 2022.
When the vaccinations become available for children, they will be distributed based on age, with those six to 12 years first, then the two- to six-year-olds, then those six months to two years.
“It’s uncertain what impact the emerging COVID variants will have on the effectiveness of the vaccines, and we really need to track those variants to get a better idea of the vaccine effectiveness and if there is a need for booster vaccinations,” Tan said.
In Israel, Italy and Sweden, school-age children infected with a variant of the virus were much more likely to spread it to others. That has some epidemiologists in the United States calling for testing of school-age children.
Malani said that the University of Michigan is testing 20,000 students per week, but that testing will likely diminish everywhere and that testing for the virus in young children may not be that effective.
Tan added that although the testing in Israel, Italy and Sweden showed that school children were much more likely to be infected and transmit a variant of the virus, those places didn’t have mitigation protocols in place. “That’s something that’s really important to remember. Masking does work, social distancing does work, hand hygiene does work.”
