Schools Are Significant Sites of COVID Transmission

The school setting is an important site of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, new data suggest.

An analysis of surveillance data for almost 1000 exposures to SARS-CoV-2 found that students accounted for a higher proportion of infected individuals who caused onward transmission than did the public overall (46.2% vs 25%).

“Our analysis suggests that younger age groups were deeply involved in the spread of the infection,” wrote study author Stefano Merler, MSc, a fellow at the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento, Italy, and his coauthors. They added that “control programs targeting contexts responsible for most of the transmission could be effective in limiting the spread of the infection, including in educational settings.”

The data were published online Sept. 20 in Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses.

Schools Are Significant Sites of COVID Transmission (medscape.com)