Note: Written by Pete Stevens over on Facebook, and reposted here by permission because I wanted some more opinions on it.First up, some background:
(i) 39 nurseries that have been open (without social distancing between kids) for key worker children (particularly at risk of catching covid) have been examined, and they've not had a case of child to child transmission of covid.
(ii) 3728 cases of covid transmission were investigated, of these 3727 were indoors, only one outdoors.
(iii) The US DOD in 2005 did extensive experiments about UV inactivating viruses, it predicts for an RNA virus 67% should be deactivated in around 70 minutes in full sunlight. That's thorough clean in two hours, domestos bleaching in 4.
(iv) 329 spreading events (one person to multiple people) were investigated, all occurred indoors.
(v) Children who get covid show mild symptoms, recover quickly and only extremely rarely have serious symptoms (2 children have sadly died of covid).
(vi) An acceptable level of risk is sending a child to a school pre-covid, and 1200 of them are involved in a traffic accident within 500m of the school gates every month.
Sending kids back to school opens us up to transmission risks that may increase R:
- Child to child. Given (i) above this is fairly minimal.
- Child to teacher. I think given (i) above this is fairly minimal.
- Teacher to child. More likely, but as kids aren't seriously at risk the consequences aren't very serious.
To minimise these the "stay at home if you have symptoms, or if your family have symptoms" rules are good, and it would be sensible to temperature check everyone on arrival in school.
Given (ii) and (iv) moving as much activity outdoors is a good idea, more physical exercise, lessons outside if possible. Given (iii) on sunny days we don't need to be too worried about transmission in the outside environment from play equipment etc. Maybe disinfecting between classes using might be an idea.
- Parent to teacher / teacher to parent. Given (ii) the best preventions would be drop-off / pick-up outdoors only, with spacing. Requiring face coverings for parents would help protect the teachers here too.
- Teacher to teacher. Keeping teachers and children together and not mixing seems a good idea. This probably involves shutting the staff room and having a private space outside for teachers. Any teacher-teacher interaction needs to be outdoors.
- Parent to parent. Suggestions in (iv) should help, staggered pickup/dropoff would help too.
But the biggest improvement to child safety in the covid era would be to close the roads around the school.
Additionally to the above, some interesting links came up during the discussion.
The Children's Commissioner
discusses when children should go back to school.
Research showing that
there have been almost no outbreaks stemming from outside transmission.
Research showing that
children do not appear to be super-spreaders.
Edit:
ONS data showing that infection levels amongst 2-19 year olds were as high as for any other age bracket.
How stupidly dangerous it is to take your children to school, due to cars. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
