UK epidemiologist/government adviser Mark Woolhouse:
**There has been no recorded case of a teacher catching the coronavirus from a pupil anywhere in the world.**
thetimes.co.uk/article/no-kno…
**There has been no recorded case of a teacher catching the coronavirus from a pupil anywhere in the world.**
thetimes.co.uk/article/no-kno…
Gee, ya think?
Woolhouse, a leading epidemiologist and member of the government’s Sage committee, told The Times that it may have been a mistake to close schools in March given the limited role children play in spreading the virus.
Woolhouse, a leading epidemiologist and member of the government’s Sage committee, told The Times that it may have been a mistake to close schools in March given the limited role children play in spreading the virus.
“One thing we have learnt is that children are certainly, in the 5 to 15 brackets from school to early years, minimally involved in the epidemiology of this virus,” Professor Woolhouse, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Edinburgh University, said.
“They are probably less susceptible and vanishingly unlikely to end up in hospital or to die from it.
“There is increasing evidence that they rarely transmit. For example, it is extremely difficult to find any instance anywhere in the world as a single example of a child transmitting to a teacher in school. There may have been one in Australia but it is incredibly rare.
“There are certain environments where this virus transmits very well and children are not present in these environments.”
Professor Woolhouse said the knowledge that children did not widely transmit the virus was “very hard won”.
He added: “We had to go into full lockdown while we accumulated this information. It is absolutely vital that we use this information in managing whatever happens in the future, so that we can target whatever measures we take much better at where they are needed.
“For example, most governments in Europe now recognise that stopping children playing outside was not needed, and most governments will probably now say that going to school as normal is safe. We can use that information in the future.
“It is also important to recognise that it has not become safe now, because the virus has changed. Those things were always safe — but we didn’t know.
“These things were never essential as part of lockdown, although there are other things around that activity that you might worry about, but at their heart they weren’t necessary so we must use that information going forward.”
