Secondary attack rates in primary and secondary school bubbles following a confirmed case: Active, prospective national surveillance, November to December 2020, England.

Powell, AA; Ireland, G; Baawuah, F; Beckmann, J; Okike, IO; Ahmad, S; Garstang, JORCID logo; Brent, AJ; Brent, B; Aiano, FORCID logo; +20 more...Hargreaves, JORCID logo; Langan, SMORCID logo; Mangtani, PORCID logo; Nguipdop-Djomo, PORCID logo; Sturgess, JORCID logo; Oswald, WORCID logo; Halliday, KORCID logo; Rourke, E; Dawe, F; Amin-Chowdhury, Z; Kall, M; Zambon, M; Poh, J; Ijaz, S; Lackenby, A; Elli, J; Brown, KE; Diamond, SI; Ramsay, ME; Ladhani, SN and (2022) Secondary attack rates in primary and secondary school bubbles following a confirmed case: Active, prospective national surveillance, November to December 2020, England. PloS One, 17 (2). e0262515-. ISSN 1932-6203 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0262515
Copy

BACKGROUND: Following the full re-opening of schools in England and emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 Alpha variant, we investigated the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection in students and staff who were contacts of a confirmed case in a school bubble (school groupings with limited interactions), along with their household members. METHODS: Primary and secondary school bubbles were recruited into sKIDsBUBBLE after being sent home to self-isolate following a confirmed case of COVID-19 in the bubble. Bubble participants and their household members were sent home-testing kits comprising nasal swabs for RT-PCR testing and whole genome sequencing, and oral fluid swabs for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. RESULTS: During November-December 2020, 14 bubbles were recruited from 7 schools, including 269 bubble contacts (248 students, 21 staff) and 823 household contacts (524 adults, 299 children). The secondary attack rate was 10.0% (6/60) in primary and 3.9% (4/102) in secondary school students, compared to 6.3% (1/16) and 0% (0/1) among staff, respectively. The incidence rate for household contacts of primary school students was 6.6% (12/183) and 3.7% (1/27) for household contacts of primary school staff. In secondary schools, this was 3.5% (11/317) and 0% (0/1), respectively. Household contacts were more likely to test positive if their bubble contact tested positive although there were new infections among household contacts of uninfected bubble contacts. INTERPRETATION: Compared to other institutional settings, the overall risk of secondary infection in school bubbles and their household contacts was low. Our findings are important for developing evidence-based infection prevention guidelines for educational settings.


picture_as_pdf
Powell_etal_2022_Secondary-attack-rates-in-primary.pdf
subject
Published Version
Available under Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0

View Download

Atom BibTeX OpenURL ContextObject in Span Multiline CSV OpenURL ContextObject Dublin Core Dublin Core MPEG-21 DIDL Data Cite XML EndNote HTML Citation JSON MARC (ASCII) MARC (ISO 2709) METS MODS RDF+N3 RDF+N-Triples RDF+XML RIOXX2 XML Reference Manager Refer Simple Metadata ASCII Citation EP3 XML
Export

Downloads