To Stop COVID-19 Spread in Schools, Start with Local Data and Do the Math

Infection in General Population Mirrors Pediatric Prevalence, UCSF Study Shows

As schools across the country continue to wrestle with configurations of online and in-classroom learning, a new study from UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals shows that public data and a simple equation may be all that is required to estimate the number of infected students who might be in a classroom. The result may help school districts make tough decisions on whether it is safe for students to return to the classroom, and in what numbers.

UCSF has created an interactive tool to allow users to estimate the likelihood that a child in any county of the United States may have asymptomatic COVID-19. This tool may be used for estimating the risks associated with classrooms of different sizes.

In the study, which publishes in JAMA Pediatrics on Aug. 25, 2020, researchers compared the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, among asymptomatic children and found that it roughly reflected the number of confirmed local cases in the general population...

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/08/418301/stop-covid-19-spread-schools-start-local-data-and-do-math?fbclid=IwAR37m9z1R9VLJ5p7qPe1BXLu-nwJPogNF4NdS_H-U0JBpCgKOnrkuf6YU1Y