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 In a dozen countries with high vaccination rates in Asia, Europe and
the United States, case rates that surged in August have mostly
fallen back, according to local data and officials.
The jury is out on how much this is due to seasonal factors amid a
global decline in cases, and how much it is linked to vaccinations
and other preventative measures. Public health experts say they will
continue to watch for signs of an increase in cases as winter
approaches.
“In the United States, in-school transmission is higher in places
with low adult vaccination and no mitigation, but, overall, schools
have stayed open,” said Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine at
University of California San Francisco Medical School. “It is going
better than expected.”
Cases among children increased nearly seven fold in August but
peaked the week ended Sept. 2, American Academy of Pediatrics data
shows. But only about 2% of U.S. schools have closed temporarily
because of COVID-19 outbreaks, according to research firm Burbio,
which tracks school closings.
Children represent the largest swath of the unvaccinated in most
wealthy countries, either because shots for their age groups have
only just begun or are not yet approved.
August's summer travel-related infections and boost in
testing-related cases have faded, public health experts say, and
rising vaccinations, mitigation measures in schools and a broader
decline in community cases are helping.
There are exceptions. In Singapore, cases among children have been
on the rise for all of September and in Japan, Tokyo schools are
alternating students in class.
But in Scandinavia, Scotland, Germany, France, South Korea and the
United States, cases are falling, despite fears the more
transmissible Delta variant would drive up infections.
Sweden, where schools have largely remained open throughout the
pandemic, saw an initial rise of COVID-19 infections among kids
after the summer holidays, but cases are now at low levels - both
among children and the wider population.
In Norway, cases spiked to a daily record of 1,785 after the first
two weeks of school, before falling by 60% as of last week.
"We do expect the current downward trend to continue for a few weeks
and then level off at a low level, at least for a couple of months.
Then there are uncertainties about the winter season,” Preben
Aavitsland, senior physician at the Norwegian Institute of Public
Health, told Reuters by email.
Aavitsland said everything from parties to music lessons drove
adolescent cases up in August.
Britain has seen some increase in cases in schools that opened early
on, but it has not spread to the wider population, said Neil
Ferguson, epidemiologist at Imperial College London.
In Scotland, schools re-opened in mid-August, and positive test
results spiked to record numbers by the end of the month.
In the week ended Sept. 3, around 1 in 20 children aged 3, 8, 13 and
16 were estimated to have COVID-19, compared with 1 in 45 of the
wider population, according to government data. But cases among the
under 19s have fallen each week since.
While cases began rising in Scotland before schools opened, some
level of transmission appears to be happening in schools, Rowland
Kao, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, told Reuters
by email.
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 “It’s very hard to separate
community transmission that is related to
schools, to transmission in schools. However,
clusters of cases in single classrooms do not
appear to be particularly high, suggesting that
it is at least a mix of both,” Kao said.
UNITED STATES
In the United States, the number of children’s cases has grown as a
percentage of overall cases, according to the American Academy of
Pediatrics.
“Schools simply reflect what’s going on in the surrounding community
and, in most cases, you have less transmission than in the
surrounding community because of mitigation measures in place,” said
Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatrics professor at the University of
Colorado. In Kentucky, for instance, 45 of the
state’s 171 school districts have closed down at least once since
the academic year began in August, according to Joshua Shoulta, a
spokesman for the Kentucky School Boards Association.
Cases per 100,000 people in Kentucky are falling but still among the
highest in the country and just over 50% of its population is fully
vaccinated. The state’s school districts were already struggling
with staff shortages before COVID-19 cases and quarantines, Shoulta
said. The state legislature met in a special session last week,
where lawmakers gave local school officials more autonomy to
implement COVID-19 protocols.
“What we know now and the tools we have compared to where we were at
this time last year makes it a slightly different ball game,”
Shoulta said.
One Texas school district is struggling with less than half the
substitute teachers it needs. Brent Hawkins, superintendent of the
Livingston (TX) Independent School District, said the district was
forced to close down for Labor Day week after more than 10% of the
600-member faculty got COVID-19.
Hawkins said Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s decision to bar school
districts from requiring masks is driving much of the increase in
cases. Livingston recorded more positive cases among students and
teachers in the first few weeks of school than during all of last
year, he said. Just under 7% of the district’s approximately 4,000
students, or nearly 300 children, had been infected as of
mid-September.
“For a couple of weeks, we had people like myself and other
administrators in classrooms substitute teaching,” Hawkins said.
Meanwhile, California is nearly nine times the size of Kentucky,
with a population of around 40 million. With masks, ventilation and
high vaccination rates, the San Francisco and Los Angeles school
districts reported zero to few cases in their first few weeks. The
state has had fewer than half of the number of school or district
closures as Kentucky, according to Burbio.
(Reporting by Alistair Smount in London, Richard Lough in Paris,
Ludwig Burger in Germany, Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago, Joseph Ax
and Michael Erman in New York, Gwladys Fouche in Oslo, Johan
Ahlander in Stockholm, Rocky Swift in Tokyo, Lin Chen in Singapore
and Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen; Editing by Michele Gershberg,
Caroline Humer and Mark Potter)
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