Back to School Fall 2020: A Natural Experiment in Tennessee

Did Closing Schools to In-Person Learning reduce transmission among Students or Communities?

In Fall 2020, the debate about opening schools was raging. By then there had been quality research out of Europe¹ about the fact that children were less likely to be major contributors to epidemic spread, which would mean that schools were likely to be safe environments when it came to transmission. Many places across Europe dedicated resources and experts to nail down this critical question, and by fall 2020, there were many European nations that decided schools could safely open² ³.

“Available evidence shows School Closures added little benefit to COVID-19 control whereas the harms related to School Closures severely affected children and adolescents. This unresolved issue has put children and young people at high risk of social, economic and health-related harm for years to come, triggering severe consequences during their lifespan”

Well, this is the United States of America, we’re not Europe! So apparently one tenet of American Exceptionalism is that we’re so different that we cannot learn any lessons about SARS-COV2 epidemiology from our friends overseas. I saw school board members and parents dismiss studies from Europe out of hand purely for that reason alone. “You can’t compare because [insert something that sounds sophisticated and relevant here].” Somehow the behavioral, biological, and epidemiological characteristics of the exact same pathogen were just different in a different country (still scratching my head on that one).

So, we had to try for ourselves. Some entire states went remote. Many states had varying responses depending upon the school districts. By now we should all know why there were differing approaches to re-opening schools, as I wrote about on my previous post. However, what was the epidemiological effect? How much of a difference did it make with regard to the infection rates within the student population and the communities they live in? Let’s see what we can learn from the accidental natural experiment in Tennessee.