Sending kids back to school, some thoughts

[andrewducker]

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.

Comments

[alithea]

I'd have more faith in (i) if we'd been doing more testing. There may have been asymptomatic cases in children that weren't picked up. If a parent came down with it, they probably assumed they had picked it up elsewhere but given we haven't been testing kids, we don't know that they didn't pick it up at school and bring it home.

But yes, the minimal risk outdoors is well supported by everything I've read.

[rmc28]

Yes, exactly. My thought about i) is "how do they know?". Anecdotally, there were multiple cases among parents and teachers at my younger kid's school of "high temperature and cough" in the week before and two weeks after the school closed. But afaik none of those people got ill enough to be in hospital and none of them have been tested.

My older child has the option of a public bus or 45+ minutes walk each way to school (there are roadworks in progress which allegedly will make it safer for him to cycle there eventually, but right now do the exact opposite). That's a lot more than he walks routinely now, but might be bearable for part-time attendance.

Both my children need 1:1 support in school, of a kind that can't be done at a distance, and my worry is less for the children themselves than them being asymptomatic carriers between us / the adult staff supporting them / other bus passengers / the people who stand too close and breathe on me in my weekly shopping expeditions / etc.

The road accident comparison doesn't entirely work, because if my kid gets hit by a car, he doesn't cause a bunch of other people to get hit by a car in the next fortnight.

[alithea]

Yes, my pottery teacher caught it from her small child, who started displaying symptoms the day after lock down started. Her son was only poorly for a few days but she's asthmatic and was sick for a month, although fortunately she didn't need hospital treatment. She did go to a local assessment centre and was told they were pretty sure they both had COVID but neither were tested.

Buses and public transport is another big issue too. A friend of mine teaches in a school in the Highlands where 85% of their students travel to school by bus. They've been given estimates of 8 students being allowed on a 53 seater coach...

[conuly]

If they're going to reopen, they should continue to offer online lessons or packets for more cautious families, and extend home instruction for the ill for those students who are high-risk or live with somebody who is high-risk.

And I strongly think that they should do a split schedule - perhaps half time for elementary, and even less than that for the older grades.

[redbird]

This is talking about young children, so while closing the roads around the school is a good idea, I see at least one practical problem in the COVID era: a risk of parent-to-parent and parent-to-unrelated-child transmission at dropoff and pickup, if the children aren't old enough to be walking to and from school alone.

I think this discussion is underestimating the number of children who have died of COVID; as of ten days ago, New York state had five pediatric deaths from the normally rare Kawasaki syndrome in patients who tested positive for coronavirus, though at least some of those children were past nursery age.

[hilarita]

Yes, biggest child safety thing would be to close roads round schools.

But before we're letting people gather together in even slightly larger numbers, we need better testing and tracking. Because if there's an asymptomatic spreader in a school, we're going to be crap at finding this out at the moment.

[rmc28]

Also we should close roads around schools ALL THE TIME, with exceptions for disability, and I don't like using our society's collective failure to face up to road safety risks to imply that schools will be just fine reopening during a pandemic

[malobukov]

In New York, there are over a hundred cases of severe complications from COVID-19 in young children with symptoms similar to Kawasaki disease (inflammation of blood vessels).

Comparison with traffic accidents is not apples to apples. One need to compare to traffic fatalities, which are much lower with today's cars, crossing guards, and speed limits around schools.

More importantly, the main risk is not so mach to children, but to their grandparents. Most infections happen inside the house.

[nickbarlow]

Point iv about spreading events made me raise an eyebrow, as restricting it to "one person to multiple people" seems odd. I'm thinking specifically about the known outdoor spreading events in large crowds like the Atlanta-Valencia and Liverpool-Madrid football games. The opening statistics feel a bit cherry-picked.

And it's hinted at here, but opening schools doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's being specifically proposed to allow people to get back to work (thus going out more) so while there may be low transmission in school, re-opening them can facilitate higher rates elsewhere, as well as signalling that some version of normality can resume.

[davidcook]

So, in Victoria, Australia, kids will be returning to school, starting from next Tuesday (grades Prep, 1, 2, 11 & 12 first, the rest of the grades a couple of weeks later).
But, our situation seems quite different to the UK - Australia-wide, new cases of COVID-19 are maybe 10-20 per day, some states have 0 new cases, and SA just had their last active case resolved. Testing seems to be far more available. Workplaces have been in lockdown mode for a while (everyone who could at my company started WFH on 19th March), and while the Federal Government's response has been a bit lacking, between the state governments and the example of NZ to follow, we seem to have responded early and well overall.
Many of the suggested mitigations above (staggered drop-off times, no parents on school grounds, reduced mingling in general) are being adopted by our school, so it'll be interesting to see if there is an upturn in cases in the next month or so. Outdoor time could be trickier, as we're heading into winter, but unless it's raining they do try to get the kids outside every day ...

Personally, we've been relatively happy keeping to our house except for shopping & exercise, but we have a good-sized house with a decent yard, I can imagine it's much harder for those trying to keep kids happy in a smaller space. Fortunately, the school is in a walkable/rideable distance, so we can avoid buses & trains for a while yet.

(and my workplace is only beginning to plan for bringing people back to the office, and will be starting with rotating shifts of 30-odd% of employees, extra cleaning, temperature sensors at entrances, etc ... no date has been set for this yet, though)

[anna_wing]

And masks on children, teachers and parents. No mask, not allowed in or near the school.