There is no significant link between face-to-face education and COVID-19 incidence rates, as shown in a study led by professors from Binghamton University in New York (United States), published in the journal Nature Medicine.
The research has analyzed face-to-face and remote learning models from 895 districts and data from the twelve weeks after school opened from July to September 2020, before vaccines were available.
Thus, it has been determined that there are no major differences between the counties, in which the schools are located, that had a face-to-face or remote modality. The lead author of the study, Zeynep Ertem, from the Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has ensured that the argument for the distance modality "is based on findings about influenza in minors".
However, his team has examined information such as grade levels, state and local COVID mitigation efforts, degree of community mobility, and differences between urban and rural areas to better compare different school districts and regions.
"In most of the US, we found no evidence linking school mode to COVID incident rates, suggesting there is no point in disrupting student learning experiences, although in the South there was an increase. statistically significant in cases where they were open to hybrid and traditional learning. There may be other factors behind this, because southern states used limited mitigation measures compared to other regions. But in the Northeast and Midwest regions, differences in the number of cases were not detectable in any of the three learning modes.", has explained.
The author has concluded that the effects of COVID-19 will remain "many more years", which is why it has asked governments to "understand the consequences of actions to learn to make better responses in the future".
.
