Schools should cancel sports, band in high-risk COVID areas, CDC says. But will they?
As the omicron variant continues to spread across the country, recent federal health guidance has some asking: Should extracurricular activities at schools be canceled to slow transmission of the coronavirus?
A guideline from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Jan. 13 instructs school officials to do just that under certain circumstances, drawing widespread criticism.
On the agency’s list of guidelines for COVID-19 prevention in K-12 schools, it says “high risk sports and activities” should be canceled or held virtually in areas with high levels of virus transmission “unless all participants are fully vaccinated.”
Those activities include sports that require close contact, like football and wrestling, the CDC said. They also include extracurricular activities where “increased exhalation occurs,” the agency said, such as “singing, shouting, band, or exercise, especially when conducted indoors.”
The CDC recommends simply screening students in areas with “low,” “moderate” or “substantial risk” of transmission before letting them participate in activities like sports or band.
But as of Jan. 19, those areas are exceedingly rare. According to the agency’s own data, over 99% of counties in the U.S. are considered to have high transmission.
That means if schools were to strictly follow CDC recommendations, nearly all sports and band activities across the country would be canceled or moved online.
Whether that’s likely to happen is another story, experts say.
Dr. William Schaffner, an adviser to the CDC, told CNN that it was “unlikely, unreasonable, and unrealistic” to think that schools across the U.S. would follow the agency’s suggestions.
“Making public health recommendations – they are not a platonic ideal,” Schaffner told the network. “They have to work in the real world.”
Some schools have already said they have no plans to cancel activities altogether, though they might cancel individual events.
For example, a representative from the Utah High School Activities Association told ABC4 that no adjustments or suspensions to the winter sports season had been discussed.
And Paul Imhoff, president of the School Superintendents Association, told CNN that he wasn’t aware of any schools that had canceled sports, band or choir, saying such activities are “important to students’ mental health.”
“As schools are making decisions about having choir and band and wrestling, it’s about making sure our kids are healthy in every way. I think everyone’s doing their best to take care of the whole child,” Imhoff, a school superintendent in Ohio, told the network.
Joe Pizano, the athletic director of Wyoming Area High School in Pennsylvania, told Fox56 that keeping students involved in extracurriculars was a top priority for him, also citing students’ mental health.
“School is number one and we stress that with everything we do,” Pizano said. “However, we had a lot of situations where kids were depressed, had high anxiety levels, and everything else. And it’s part of the extracurricular activity that people don’t think about that comes along with it.”
But not everyone says the CDC guidance shouldn’t be followed. Dr. Mark Kline, the physician-in-chief at Children’s Hospital New Orleans, told WDSU “there may be some things that have to be on the back burner for the time being” to help prevent coronavirus transmission in schools.
“That could be a lot of extra-curricular activities in the interest of seeing that children can be in school continuously to learn, which is first and foremost,” he told the TV station.
The guidelines come as schools continue to grapple with the spread of the omicron variant — which made up 99.5% of sequenced cases in the U.S. the week ending Jan. 15 — with many districts remaining open for in-person learning. Those decisions have sparked criticism from many teachers and students.
Most recently, students at schools around the country, from California to New York, have staged walk-outs and protests, saying they feel unsafe and won’t return until their schools do more to protect them and their teachers, multiple outlets reported.
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