Sep 23, 2020, 7:48 PM
(From The Washington Post) Thousands of students and teachers have become sick with the coronavirus since schools began opening last month, but public health experts have found little evidence that the virus is spreading inside school facilities, suggesting that opening schools may not be as risky as many have feared. The data comes from Brown University’s new National COVID-19 School Response Data Dashboard. Tracking infections over a two-week period beginning Aug. 31, it found that 0.23 percent of students had a confirmed or suspected case of the coronavirus. Among teachers, it was 0.49 percent. Looking only at confirmed cases, the rates were even lower: 0.078 percent for students and 0.15 percent for teachers.
The early data are emerging as school officials continue to evaluate their plans and consider whether they want to change course. Many schools that began with entirely remote education are considering whether they want to introduce in-person options for some students or on certain days.
(From The Chronicle of Higher Education) In the higher education space, campus reopenings have been linked to thousands of new daily coronavirus cases, according to a new study a new study conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Indiana University, the University of Washington and Davidson College. The researchers estimated that an additional 3,200 cases a day occurred in the U.S. that likely wouldn’t have happened had schools kept classes online.
The new report draws on the researchers' analysis of GPS information from cellphones, as well as publicly available health data, to track students' arrival on campuses. It found that reopening for face-to-face instruction resulted around 3,200 cases additional cases per day. The researchers had suspected that the case counts would rise when face-to-face classes resumed but called the final findings surprising and “somewhat terrifying.”
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