To determine effective ways to deliver education during the pandemic, agent-based computational models ran thousands of simulations of infection spread across more than 100 different school situations, varying by school level, school size, operating strategy, approach to quarantines and closures, and the local community’s COVID-19 infection rate. The results offer educators and civic leaders a set of comparable schools to their own, and provide insights beyond the heated political rhetoric about the best approaches for individual communities and schools to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 while providing meaningful learning opportunities. Key findings include:
- Precautions such as requiring masks and limiting the mixing of students outside of classes can measurably reduce infection spread in schools.
- Hybrid approaches where smaller groups of students wearing masks attend in person part time dramatically reduce the total number of likely infections in a school.
- Infection rates in elementary schools are likely to be lower than in secondary schools employing the same operating strategies.
- Part-time hybrid operation is far more effective at reducing infections than temporarily closing the school building each time an infection is detected.
- In schools that are using a part-time hybrid approach, quarantining close contacts of individuals with detected infections is sufficient to keep the school’s infection rate low, while closing entirely reduces the number of days that students can attend with no demonstrable benefit in further reducing infections.
- Schools using a hybrid approach in a community with a moderate infection rate are likely to experience little or no unplanned disruption in the number of days students can come to school.
- Regardless of precautions taken, there is a chance that a school could have an infection on its first day of operation.
Gill, B., Goyal, R., & Hotchkiss, J. (2020). Operating schools in a pandemic. Princeton, NJ: Mathematica.
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