COVID-19 Incidence and Age Eligibility for Elementary School.

Importance: Understanding the role of school attendance on transmission of SARS-CoV-2 among children is of importance for responding to future epidemics. Estimating discontinuities in outcomes by age of eligibility for school attendance has been used to examine associations between school attendance and a variety of outcomes, but has yet to be applied to describe associations between school attendance and communicable disease transmission.

Objective: To estimate the association between eligibility for elementary school and COVID-19 incidence.

Design, setting, and participants: This case series used data on all pediatric COVID-19 cases reported to California's disease surveillance system between May 16, 2020, and December 15, 2022, among children within 24 months of the age threshold for school eligibility.

Exposure: Birthdate before or after the age threshold for elementary school eligibility during periods when school was remote vs in person.

Main outcomes and measures: COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.

Results: Between May 16, 2020, and December 15, 2022, there were 688 278 cases of COVID-19 (348 957 cases [50.7%] among boys) and 1423 hospitalizations among children who turned 5 years within 24 months of September 1 of the school year when their infection occurred. The mean (SD) age of the study sample was 5.0 (1.3) years. After adjusting for higher rates of testing in schooled populations, the estimated pooled incidence rate ratio among kindergarten-eligible individuals (eg, those born just before the age threshold for school eligibility) compared with those born just after the eligibility threshold for in-person fall 2021 semester was 1.52 (95% CI, 1.36-1.68), for in-person spring 2022 semester was 1.26 (95% CI, 1.15-1.39), and for in-person fall 2022 semester was 1.19 (95% CI, 1.03-1.38). Reported incidence rates among school-eligible children remained higher during the month-long winter 2021-2022 school break but were lower during the longer summer break that followed. The findings were unable to establish whether associations between school eligibility and COVID-19 incidence were based on in-school vs out-of-school routes (eg, classrooms vs school buses). The study lacked power to detect associations between school attendance and hospitalization. Results were robust to functional form. A simulation study was conducted to demonstrate bias associated with nonadjustment for differential case acquisition by exposure status.

Conclusions and relevance: In this case series of children in California, the magnitude of the association between school eligibility and COVID-19 incidence decreased over time and was generally lower than other published associations between out-of-school child social interactions and COVID-19 incidence. This regression discontinuity design approach could be adapted to other geographies and/or disease systems to assess associations between schooling and disease transmission.