If you just read the headlines, you would think teachers are getting sick while teaching this fall and then dying from the coronavirus.

If you read closer, though, you see that’s not happening. Teaching children in person hasn’t proven deadly this school year.

For instance, one PBS story this week discussed the deaths of four school teachers in an article suggesting, “the return to in-person classes will have a deadly impact across the U.S.”

The Washington Post uses the deaths of six teachers to tell a tale of “fears that school campuses will become a breeding ground for the virus.”

What these stories have in common: There’s no evidence that any of the teachers mentioned contracted the virus while teaching.

The PBS story begins with the tragic death of a 34-year-old middle school special-ed teacher with asthma in Missouri. The teacher died Sunday and had been in the hospital for three weeks, meaning she fell ill before Aug. 16. School in Missouri started on Aug. 24.

While PBS reports that the teacher had been in the school building to prepare for the school year, the story also reports, “Superintendent Alex McCaul said contact tracing determined she had no close contact with any teachers, students or staff.”

“It’s unclear where [she] picked up the virus.”

An Oxford, Mississippi, middle school teacher and football coach died Aug. 6. He “was self-quarantining when teachers and students returned to the classroom, said Lafayette County School District Superintendent Adam Pugh.”

While he practiced with football players over the summer, “an investigation found no new cases linked to him.”

Another Mississippi teacher who passed away, and is mentioned in the story, is reported to have contracted the virus at church.

A South Carolina teacher who died Aug. 31 was teaching remotely, in a district that didn’t have in-person learning.

The Washington Post story includes those four cases plus two others.

A Des Moines teacher who died was in an all-virtual district, and he died before the school year began.

One Oklahoma special-ed teacher fell ill before the first day of school, never got to show up to teach, was diagnosed with COVID-19, and died of a heart attack two days after classes start. Her husband also had the coronavirus.

So we have six coronavirus deaths of teachers. All sad. But it seems that all of them caught the virus while doing something other than teaching.

This doesn’t mean no teachers are getting sick. In some districts, there have been multiple positive cases. It also doesn’t mean that there will be no school-related deaths. It just means that the headlines are telling a story, that teaching has already killed teachers this school year, that isn’t even close to being true.