In-person schooling and associated COVID-19 risk in the United States over spring semester 2021
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Abstract
Because of the importance of schools to childhood development, the relationship between in-person schooling and COVID-19 risk has been one of the most important questions of this pandemic. Previous work in the United States during winter 2020–2021 showed that in-person schooling carried some risk for household members and that mitigation measures reduced this risk. Schooling and the COVID-19 landscape changed radically over spring semester 2021. Here, we use data from a massive online survey to characterize changes in in-person schooling behavior and associated risks over that period. We find increases in in-person schooling and reductions in mitigations over time. In-person schooling is associated with increased reporting of COVID-19 outcomes even among vaccinated individuals (although the absolute risk among the vaccinated is greatly reduced). Vaccinated teachers working outside the home were less likely to report COVID-19–related outcomes than unvaccinated teachers working exclusively from home. Adequate mitigation measures appear to eliminate the excess risk associated with in-person schooling.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.20.21265293: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Although our results do not indicate that the rise of the Alpha variant over the study period changed the risk associated with in-person schooling, there were some unexpected patterns in the interaction between full-time schooling and variant prevalence, which may reflect a limitation of the data. As the prevalence of the Alpha variant was increasing in …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.20.21265293: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Although our results do not indicate that the rise of the Alpha variant over the study period changed the risk associated with in-person schooling, there were some unexpected patterns in the interaction between full-time schooling and variant prevalence, which may reflect a limitation of the data. As the prevalence of the Alpha variant was increasing in all states over the study period, as well as within each time strata we investigated, some of this effect may be due to other time-varying factors that are not captured in the data such as changing compliance with intervention measures. Additionally, data on variant prevalence was only available at the state-level, which may obscure important county-level differences. This study has several additional limitations. The survey data that informed the risk estimates were self-reported and subject to recall bias. They were also gathered through the Facebook platform and may not be representative of the underlying populations, though this should be accounted for at least in part through the survey weights (19). We found that vaccination rates were higher in the survey data compared to CDC’s reported data (15) (Fig. S1). While CDC’s reported vaccination data is known to be under-reported, this could also reflect a bias in the survey data (20). For example, the US CTIS survey may be capturing a more affluent, less rural population, which could explain in part why we found particularly large differences in the survey data compared to C...
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.
- Thank you for including a protocol registration statement.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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