School reopening: Back to classroom. A systematic review of strategies and their implementation during COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

School closure has affected millions of students worldwide. After more than a year of school closure, steps have been taken to re-start in-person schooling. These strategies have worked well for many setups; however, there are some gaps that have led to repeated sessions of closure and reopening of schools. We have studied these plans of reopening schools and looked into changes that can improve their execution. In this study, we have studied the impact of school reopening in the transmission of SARS CoV-2 in various countries, both developed and developing nations. We have reviewed the measures taken in different countries to reopen schools. We have studied how effective these measures were so as to chart out plans from them to execute our strategies in the country. Both urban and rural setups have been taken in to account. We have searched the electronic databases, PubMed and MEDLINE, and bibliographies of relevant studies were included. We have used the keywords "COVID-19," "school," "reopening," "prevention," "strategies," and "transmission." We have manually searched for studies addressing school reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic. PRISMA approach has been adopted to study the articles systematically. After reviewing different studies on school reopening, a low transmission rate among students was noted in 12 out of 13 studies. Measures such as hand hygiene, masks, and contact tracing are fundamental in preventing the spread of infection in schools.