London – Most children across the United Kingdom are starting the new term learning from home as schools close to the large majority of pupils in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for the coming weeks.
So what is known about how the virus is transmitted among children and in schools – and will closing them make a difference?
What’s the risk to children and young people?
Children’s risk of becoming ill from the virus is tiny – and this hasn’t changed since the start of the pandemic, even with a new, more contagious variant of coronavirus circulating in the UK.
Despite a clear rise in the numbers of children infected in the second wave, child health experts confirm they are not seeing any rise in COVID-related illnesses in children in hospital.
“As cases in the community rise there will be a small increase in the number of children we see with Covid-19, but the overwhelming majority of children and young people have no symptoms or very mild illness only,” says Prof Russell Viner, president of Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
And Mike Tildesley, an infectious disease modeller, tells the BBC that “we are not getting a significant increase in cases in a primary school setting despite this new variant”.
Children are more likely to be asymptomatic than adults. One in three people are thought to have no symptoms when infected with the virus.
Do children spread the virus?
Among pupils in primary schools, up to the age of 11, evidence shows that there is very limited spread of coronavirus.
Children of this age don’t appear to be the main drivers for passing it on to their friends or to their families at home.
Children of secondary school age are different, however – they appear to be more able to pass the virus on.
But there is no evidence that teenagers are more likely to transmit than adults.
Schoolchildren and young adults have undoubtedly experienced a much faster rise in infections than other age groups in the second wave – and that may be down to their opportunity to mingle.
During England’s lockdown in November, for example, schools remained open and operated normally while many other areas of society were closed to anywhere near normal levels of mixing.
Experts, including Prof. Sir Mark Walport, a member of Sage, have said that teenagers are seven times more likely than others in a household to bring the infection into a household.
This figure comes from a University of Manchester analysis of household transmission risk, which also found that under-16s are much more likely to be the first case in their household than over-17s.
This may have been the statistic that forced the closure of school gates, with the prime minister saying on Monday evening that schools “may act as vectors for transmission between households”. (BBC)
