Reassuring school report from Australia

[notevenat20]

For those with chikdren heading back to school.

From ncirs.org.au/sites/default/files/2020-08/COVID-19%20Transmission%20in%20educational%20settings%20in%20NSW%20Term%202%20report_0.pdf

Overview
 This report provides an overview of investigation into all COVID-19 cases in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia in all schools and early childhood education and care (ECEC) services between 10 April 2020 and 3 July 2020 (school term 2 of the academic year).
 6 individuals (4 students and 2 staff members) from 6 educational settings (5 schools and 1 ECEC service) were confirmed as primary COVID-19 cases who had an opportunity to transmit the SARS-CoV-2 virus to others in their school or ECEC service.
 521 individuals (459 students and 62 staff members) were identified as close contacts of these primary 6 cases.
 No secondary cases were reported in any of the 6 educational settings.
 In Term 2 no student or staff member contracted COVID-19 from a school or ECEC setting.

Australia is very different to here though. I wonder how things are in countries with our population density or in Victoria ?

A lot of the schools with recent cases are religious so they may have caught the virus at religious events rather than the school itself as well as other areas

I'm in South East QLD. Most school closures are from people visiting the school, not events & have been closed as a precaution to allow testing & cleaning. Some have created small clusters but not many. The first half of term 2 was done as home school.
My children's school & kindy are fine. No cases. Parents aren't allowed on campus though & they've staggered eating & play times to reduce contact.
Our cases are very low, so transmission risk is also low.
Victoria is in home schooling because of the spike so also no transmission there.
So there's been little chance for transmission - in our city there's only been a handful of active cases.
So it's dependent on a lot of things, but we feel safe - but quietly fearful of another wave.

Australian here. Be aware that our health authorities were pressured by the gov to declare schools safe for economic reasons.

During the time data was gathered, contacts were actively NOT traced, teachers and other close contacts were refused tests so as to reduce transmission stats and some schools were not informed of positive cases or closed down for cleaning.

Once they had a nice official report stating schools were safe they have been better about informing the community and shutting them down but that was certainly not the case in April and May..

If you look at the graph of NSW cases, the period they survey here (their school term) is almost exactly in the 'lull' between the their first peak (ended mid-April) and their second peak (began late June)

And they included data from only 6 of 9 schools with outbreaks, because they threw enough effort at it to establish that cases in the other three were false positives.

So yes, if you can wrangle your transmission rates down to 'negligible' and can surround every single case with a major public health response

www.nsw.gov.au/covid-19

then it does seem possible to keep rated very low for weeks at a time.

What do we need to change to get the same protections here? Because the start point for all this is a negligible rate of transmission (the phenomenon was not just in schools, it was several weeks of really low transmission state-wide), with restrictions on a number of aspects of daily life