April 30, 2021

Household COVID-19 Risk and in-Person Schooling

Category: Article Summary

Topic: Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions

Keywords (Tags): non-pharm interventions, schools, transmission

• A large, national survey of US adults in all 50 states and Washington, DC (N=2,142,887) found an association between living with a child who attended in-person school and the risk of COVID-19-associated outcomes, including reporting COVID-like illness (OR=1.4) or testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 (OR=1.3), although this association did not persist when ≥7 in-school mitigation measures were reported. These mitigation measures were low-cost and common, including temperature checks, cessation of extracurricular activities, and mask mandates. The authors caution that this association may not be causal given that community mitigation measures are not randomly distributed in the population and may affect respondents’ COVID-19 risk from other settings. [EDITORIAL NOTE: This manuscript was previously summarized as a pre-print on March 2, 2021].

Lessler et al. (Apr 29, 2021). Household COVID-19 Risk and in-Person Schooling. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abh2939