The reopening of schools amid the coronavirus pandemic has been one of the most important debates since the start of the coronavirus crisis, and now researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are offering An argument in favor of going back to school in person:
there have been few cases of community transmission
.
"The preponderance of the available evidence from the fall school semester has been reassuring," wrote the three government experts in an article reviewing the scientific literature on the subject, published by the
Journal of the American Medical Association.
"There is little evidence that schools have contributed to a significant increase in community transmission,"
concluded three experts, who independently expressed their opinion to the CDC.
The publication of the article comes at a time when President Joe Biden, who took office last week, has promised that safely reopening schools will be one of his administration's top priorities.
"The bottom line here is that, with enough effort, we can keep transmission in schools and educational sites pretty low
," Margaret A. Honein, the lead author of the article, told The Washington Post.
"This we did not know at the beginning of the year, but the data has really accumulated," he added.
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The experts discovered that one of the aspects that decisively influence the spread of the virus within schools is
the levels of transmission in the communities
.
Therefore, they recommend as essential to the reopening that communities implement policies to curb outbreaks, such as banning food from being served in restaurants and wearing masks in public places.
[Is using two masks better than just one to prevent coronavirus?]
Additionally, CDC officials recommend testing the school community for COVID-19 to detect asymptomatic cases and isolate them early.
One of the activities that are usually carried out within schools that most worried the experts were
gymnastics or sports classes in closed spaces
, among other reasons because the use of masks is not so frequent in these.
Inside the schools, the most important precautions that the researchers found were the use of masks inside the facilities, social distance of at least six feet, and the separation of students into smaller groups, precisely to facilitate distance and prevent students from mixing.
[How the new coronavirus mutations affect the need to wear masks]
Biden has asked Congress for $ 130 million to try to reopen the schools and has promised to publish more precise and easy-to-follow guidelines than those of the Trump Administration to carry out the return safely.
With information from The Washington Post and The New York Times.
