Nearly 73 million children – about 99% of the US population under the age of 18 – live in a “high transmission” community, defined by the CDC as a county where there were at least 100 new cases of Covid-19 per 100,000 people or a test positivity rate of at least 10% during the past seven days.
The CDC’s guidance emphasizes five main mitigation strategies: requiring masks, physical distance, hand washing, maintaining clean facilities and tracking contracts. It also recommends different strategies based on how much transmission is in the surrounding community, and has a color-coded guide with areas of high transmission in red; substantial orange transmission; moderate transmission coded in yellow and low transmission in blue.
The CDC says that school districts should reevaluate weekly.
If schools in “high transmission” communities cannot “strictly implement all mitigation strategies”, the CDC says that all extracurricular activities must be virtual. In addition, elementary and secondary schools must maintain virtual learning in these red zones, and elementary schools must maximize physical distance through hybrid learning or reduced attendance.
Less than 100,000 children in the United States live in a county considered “low” or “moderate transmission”, where the CDC recommends that elementary and high schools be opened for full-time education in person. Most of these students live in Hawaii or Washington.
CNN’s analysis used the latest federal data on new case rates and test positivity rates, published Thursday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to determine the risk limit for each county according to guidelines of the CDC. Population data are from the US Census Bureau’s 5-year American Community Survey estimates.