The benefits of in-person learning outweigh the risks

Many North Carolina school administrators and leaders have been reluctant to follow the science when it comes to weighing a return to in-person instruction, thereby damaging the educational, emotional, and physical well-being of thousands of the state’s children.

I come to this assessment not only as a parent of a child in the Wake County school system, but as a pediatrician, an infectious disease physician, a virologist and an immunologist, for which my expertise is grounded in scientific inquiry, data and assessment of risk.

Nearly a year into the global pandemic, a number of studies of the virus in congregate settings for children have demonstrated that transmission can be avoided when the proper mitigation measures are taken. The data are overwhelming.

In a study of Wisconsin school districts with strict mask-wearing requirements, transmission rates were lower in schools than the rest of the community. Of 191 cases occurring in staff and school children across 13 weeks in the fall, only seven were linked to transmission in schools.

In North Carolina, a study of over 90,000 students and teachers attending in-person in the first nine weeks of school, only 32 of the 773 infections that occurred were linked to school exposure and none constituted student-to-staff transmission.

In a study of YMCA of the Triangle day camps held between March and August last year, of 6,830 campers and staff, only 19 cases of SARS-CoV-2 were identified -- and only two were linked to the camps – which included both indoor and outdoor camps, settings in which children did not sit at desks six feet apart. Importantly, programs administered by community organizations like the YMCA have filled the gap of childcare during online instruction, and none of these settings had to close due to outbreaks.

The risks of picking up the virus in schools that adhere to masking and small class sizes are essentially lower than having visitors in your own living room, even before the addition of vaccines.

A bill requiring in-person learning in North Carolina schools has passed the N.C. House and Senate and will now go to Gov. Roy Cooper. I want him to have a full picture of how children are impacted.

My role as pediatrician-in-chief at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and New York-Presbyterian has given me a clear vantage point of the crisis that has been exacerbated by keeping schools mostly closed for in-person learning. We have observed trends that signal potentially irreversible damage to children:

• A tidal wave of children requiring hospitalization for mental health crises filling our emergency rooms because the inpatient units are full.

▪ An obesity epidemic unrestrained.

▪ Children with pre-existing conditions who have lost fitness and strength and worsened their disease.

▪ Child maltreatment that is not being detected until it is too late.

▪ A growing education gap — now a chasm — for children living in low-income homes.

We cannot continue to pretend that our children are well served by virtual learning or deny the data showing that the benefits of in-person school outweigh the risks. Closing schools was necessary at the outset of the pandemic while we gathered data. Now we know that transmission in school can be prevented, using measures that will also work against new variants.

And we also know this: only when the state returns to full-time, in-person instruction — modified for infection control measures – will we arrest the crisis our children now face.

This story was originally published February 18, 2021 at 8:20 AM.