Re: School closures and COVID

There was a definitive article in MMWR from the CDC on the topic: COVID-19 Trends Among Persons Aged 0–24 Years — United States,  March 1–December  12, 2020."Lower incidence among younger children and evidence from available  studies  (2–8)  suggest  that  the  risk  for  COVID-19  introduction and transmission among children associated with reopening child care centers and elementary schools might be lower  than  that  for  reopening  high  schools  and  institutions  of higher education. However, for schools to operate safely to accommodate in-person learning, communities should fully implement and strictly adhere to multiple mitigation strategies, especially universal and proper masking, to reduce COVID-19 incidence within the community as well as within schools to protect students, teachers, and staff members. CDC recom-mends that K–12 schools be the last settings to close after all other mitigation measures have been employed and the first to reopen when they can do so safely"

Even though the CDC still advocated for some school closures, the data overwhelmingly showed a vanishing small risk from COVID to school-age children:

"Among children, adolescents,  and  young  adults  with  available  data  for  these  outcomes,  30,229  (2.5%)  were  hospitalized,  1,973  (0.8%)  required  ICU  admission,  and  654  (<0.1%)  died"

This is from a sample of 2.9 million kids who tested positive for COVID for whom about 1/2 of the cases had follow-up data. The bottom line is that like SARS I, SARS-CoV-2 posed hardly any risk to kids. 

I was working with the CDC at the time bringing MMWR content into JAMA. This was the only paper we could not agree on because they did not want to highlight the low risk kids had from COVID infection (if I remember things correctly). I did not think the data supported any school closures, so I passed on bringing this article into JAMA.