Thread by @Cukullen

thread: full text of London Times article
No known case of teacher catching coronavirus from pupils, says scientist
July 21, 2020 Tuesday
Mark McLaughlin, Marc Horne, Rosemary Bennett
thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/n…

2) There has been no recorded case of a teacher catching the coronavirus from a pupil anywhere in the world, according to one of the government’s leading scientific advisers.Mark Woolhouse, a leading epidemiologist and member of the government’s Sage committee, told The Times

3) that it may have been a mistake to close schools in March given the limited role children play in spreading the virus. Schools in England are preparing to reopen in full from September. Some primary year groups were invited back for lessons before the summer holidays

4) but most pupils have had no face-to-face teaching for four months.“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,

5) 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

6) 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

7) environments." Getting pupils back to school in England has been a fractious topic, with teaching unions opposed to the limited reopening of primaries on June 1. The process has been more collegiate in Scotland, where schools will reopen in full on August 11, and in Wales,

8) where all year groups started going back from June 29. 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.

9) 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

10) 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 -

11) 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."

12) Dr Gabriel Scally, president of the epidemiology and public health section of the Royal Society of Medicine, said that reopening schools should have been one of the top priorities of lifting the lockdown. "It is a real indictment of our society that we can manage to open pubs

13) and nail bars but we can't open schools," he said.