A sweeping study published Tuesday of COVID-19 spread in city schools offers the strongest evidence to date that virus transmission has remained

A sweeping study published Tuesday of COVID-19 spread in city schools offers the strongest evidence to date that virus transmission has remained low within in-person classes, experts and officials say.

The study, authored by Mayor de Blasio’s chief health adviser Jay Varma and published Tuesday in the journal Pediatrics, draws on hundreds of thousands of in-school COVID-19 tests from Oct. 12 through Dec. 18 of last year and contact tracing investigations for roughly 36,000 students and staff quarantined after a virus exposure in a school building.
Authors found that when virus cases do crop up in city schools, they are rarely transmitted to other students and staff.

Only 191 of the 36,000 students and staffers quarantined after a school virus exposure ultimately tested positive — a transmission rate of .5%.
“To the extent they were able to do a thorough investigation, and only found about half a percent testing positive, that suggests these are pretty low-risk exposures,” said Denis Nash, a professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at CUNY’s School of Public Health.
But while the coronavirus is likely not spreading widely within city school buildings, school staff are still reporting positive COVID-19 cases at roughly twice the rate of adults citywide, the study found.
City officials attribute the elevated case rate among school staffers to the fact they are tested much more frequently than other adults.

Nash said that’s “one possible explanation,” but “those findings certainly require some scrutiny and attention.”

“It also could mean there’s another risk there,” he added, noting that even if transmission is low in school buildings, in-person school staff could incur additional risk from their commutes.

Overall, epidemiologists emphasized the positive findings in the study — the largest to date of COVID-19 spread in city schools.

By most metrics, virus rates in schools were similar to or lower than those citywide.

“Overall, I think this analysis is really compelling,” said Anna Bershteyn, a professor of Population Health at NYU who’s written about testing and COVID-19 safety in city schools.

“Not only do you have fewer cases, but that’s also in the context of a lot more testing in the schools,” she added. “You couldn’t ask for something better than that.”

Study authors found that the prevalence of the virus in schools — measured by the positivity rate of more than 200,000 random school tests — fell below the projected prevalence of the virus citywide.

But as virus rates rose citywide, test positivity ticked up in schools, from a low of .12% one week in October to a high of .74% during the second week of December.

“When community infection increases, so does infection among students and staff,” said Nash. “That’s not surprising, but it’s really important they document this.”

Officials acknowledged that only 41% of families submitted to random COVID-19 testing in October and November, raising the possibility of a skewed sample.

Authors also attempted to tally the total number of new cases reported by in-person students and staff — a metric known as “incidence” — by adding up cases identified by random testing and those reported separately.

Incidence rates overall for kids attending in-person school were lower than those of kids citywide, the analysis found.

For school staff, the picture is more complicated.

Older school staff saw the highest incidence rates, while staffers ages 18-44 had rates consistently lower than those citywide.

Study authors stressed that the elevated school staff incidence levels were likely driven by additional testing. School staffers are tested ten times more than other city adults, officials said, and nearly half of the reported school staff cases were turned up by surveillance testing that is not happening in other parts of the city.

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