Details of COVID-19 Disease Mitigation Strategies in 17 K-12 Schools in Wood County, Wisconsin
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Abstract
Importance
With the current COVID-19 return-to-school guidelines, over half of America’s K-12 students are being denied access to full time in-person education, leading to harmful academic, emotional and health consequences.
Objective
To describe the specific details of mitigation strategies employed at 17 K-12 schools in Wisconsin during a time of exceptionally high COVID-19 community disease prevalence where in-school transmission was minimal. The aim of this report is to assist school districts and governing bodies in developing full-time return to school plans.
Design
Retrospective cohort
Setting
Wood County, Wisconsin, August 31–November 29, 2020
Participants
5,530 students and staff from 17 schools in 4 school districts
Main outcomes and measures
Distancing between primary and secondary students in school
School ventilation details
Masking among teachers
Lunch, recess and bussing practices
Results
89.3% of elementary students included in our study did not maintain 6 feet of physical distancing in the classroom and 94.8% were within 6 feet in lunchrooms. The majority of secondary students (86.2%) were able to maintain 6 feet of distancing in the classroom but no students were greater than 6 feet in the hallways. 58.8% of schools did not install new ventilation systems prior to the school year. Students ate lunch indoors. Bussing of students continued and all elementary children were allowed to go without masks at recess.
Conclusion and relevance
In the setting of high community COVID-19 disease transmission, 6 feet of distance between elementary students and major ventilation system renovations in primary or secondary schools do not appear to be necessary to minimize disease spread. Requiring masks at recess and prohibiting bussing also appears unnecessary. These findings may inform guidance on the safe reopening of schools and allow for more children to return to in-person schooling.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.16.21253761: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: The protocol was reviewed by the Aspirus Wausau Hospital Institutional Review Board and determined to be exempt from human subjects review as it met the requirements under 45 CFR 46. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to …SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.16.21253761: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: The protocol was reviewed by the Aspirus Wausau Hospital Institutional Review Board and determined to be exempt from human subjects review as it met the requirements under 45 CFR 46. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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