Covid-19 cases in American children are at an all-time high

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ON SEPTEMBER 13TH pupils in New York City, America’s biggest school district, will make a full return to classrooms for the first time since the start of the pandemic. That will be a relief for many parents. But it will also bring fear. In America, until recently adults suffered the highest infection rates; today the virus is spreading fastest among young people (see chart). Cases in children are surging, accounting for more than a quarter of total infections in the country in the week ending September 2nd.

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Compared with other school districts, New York City is something of a straggler. Pupils in Tuloso-Midway School District in Texas have been back at their desks since the middle of July. Children in Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest school district, began their studies four weeks ago. Parents in New York City will doubtless be wondering whether and how the return to school elsewhere has contributed to the recent spike in cases among young people.

Studies conducted during the first wave of the pandemic found that closing schools reduced the spread of covid-19. But such policies were introduced alongside other measures aimed at containing the virus, including bans on public gatherings, stay-at-home orders and restrictions on businesses. That makes it difficult to isolate the specific effect of school closures. What’s more, these studies were done before the benefits of measures such as mask-wearing, social distancing and classroom ventilation were well understood, and months before the start of vaccination campaigns.

More recent work indicates that, with masks and other appropriate precautions, in-person schooling may not be that risky. Studies carried out in schools in Oslo, Salt Lake City and New York City during the autumn and winter months tested children and teachers who had been in contact with students diagnosed with the virus. All found that the attack rate—the percentage of people who became infected after exposure—was less than 1%.

Even when infection rates in the surrounding community were very high, the vast majority of cases in children were traced to household members, not to teachers and classmates. Other studies from the same period examining 17 schools in Wisconsin and 11 school districts in North Carolina found that only a few cases per hundred originated in the classroom.

In all these studies students and teachers were required to wear masks and stay socially distanced. They also all took place before the vaccine roll-out, implying the numbers would have been even lower if jabs had started. Without these preventative measures, risks go up. In May an unvaccinated, unmasked elementary-school teacher in Marin County, California spread the disease to dozens of students, with an attack rate of 50%.

Since states set their own rules when it comes to managing covid-19 in schools, location matters. Several conservative states ban schools from enforcing mask wearing. At the other end of the spectrum, more than a dozen states mandate face coverings in public schools, and seven require teachers and staff to be vaccinated or to undergo weekly testing. Washington state and Oregon have made vaccination obligatory for teachers; on September 9th the Los Angeles school board voted unanimously to mandate vaccines for eligible students. Eligible schoolchildren in New York are not yet required to get a jab. But in a city where vaccine uptake and support for masks is high, they will be safer than most.