A local review of school outbreaks abroad among pupils and staff up to September has found they were “probably due to failure to adhere to public health principles of hand washing and distancing”.
The local paper also observes that targeted closure of other establishments and facilities may be required to keep the COVID-19 reproduction rate below 1.1. The opening of schools, especially secondary schools, could increase the value by 0.2 to 0.5.
The implication is that shops, bars, restaurants and other establishments may need to close to allow schools to remain open.
Entitled Holidays over: A review of actual COVID-19 school outbreaks up to September 2020, by consultant paediatrician Victor Grech, together with Elizabeth Grech and Jeremy Borg Myatt, the peer-reviewed paper is hot off the press as the new scholastic year gets under way in earnest.
The study says the overall consensus is that children are not super spreaders of COVID-19, with Public Health England research showing that two-thirds of outbreaks have arisen from staff-to-staff and staff-to-pupil transmission.
While school closures followed the precautionary principle that many epidemics are mainly transmitted by children, this theory is not supported by many studies, highlights the paper, published in the journal Early Human Development.
It also refers to a British Medical Journal review that shows school spread via children does not appear to be a driver of transmission and concludes they are not greater COVID-19 transmitters than adults.
According to the paper, staff are much likelier to transmit COVID-19 than children but adolescents seem to be particularly “troublesome” globally when it comes to exacerbating the pandemic due to their propensity to party.
For this reason, parties have been targeted with hefty fines and even university suspensions in some countries, the paper observes.
“It is almost as if youths ignore the possibility that they may suffer serious morbidity from COVID-19, including multisystem inflammatory syndrome as well as further spreading the virus in school environments and among vulnerable relatives and contacts.”
The closures have also impacted working parents, with significant economic consequences and equally pressing concerns regarding children’s mental and physical health, including increased risks of childhood obesity, the paper says.
It also sheds light on the fact that children are half as susceptible to COVID-19 infection as adults and appear to be less severely affected, displaying milder symptoms than the general population, especially when compared to the elderly.