Are schools actually the main spreader of covid?

[Newyearsamecovid]

People on here are constantly saying that schools are the biggest spreader and to start I accept the fact that obviously there will be spread in schools.

However here we are, schools have been closed 10 days and yet we have the highest confirmed cases on record. I appreciate people may have mixed over Christmas, but from what’s being said, 30 separate kids from different households being crammed in a classroom with no social distancing would surely be more spreadable than say 2/3 households round the dinner table?

Looking at the stats, infection rates for all children are consistently quite far behind the infection rates of 20-40 year olds also - who are not at school.

Given schools are one the only places open, you’d expect it to be a very different picture. You would expect schools to be the place everyone is catching it but the figures just don’t seem to point to this.

So why do we think schools are the driving factor in spreading covid?

It wouldn't be bizarre if children were less likely to pass on infection

A lot of the discussion around this involved children under the age of 10. No one seemed to point out that this didn't apply to teenagers.

The thing is, if you assume that covid behaves in teens the same way it does in adults and spreads best in indoor cramped environments with no masks or social distancing, the infection rate graphs make perfect sense.

It's only the people who for some reason are trying to argue that that isn't the case who have to scrabble for alternative explanations.

They probably are. I don't personally know anyone who has caught it at school though. Everyone I know caught it in hospitals including my mum (NHS staff). 2 children at DS's school caught it but I'm not sure if they caught it at school or not.

I know loads of people who caught it at school, what with me working in a school.

But these anecdotes can be misleading whichever way they go.

"But these anecdotes can be misleading whichever way they go."

Shame then that the government stopped publishing all analysis of infections and deaths by occupation so we didn't have to rely on anecdotes.

Probably. We can't do anything else. We aren't seeing the impacts of Christmas mixing yet, that will come in the next few days...

Three of the families I know currently ill had caught it from their children, who'd caught the "bad cold" going around at the end of term. They became ill themselves over Christmas.

In hindsight, it was obviously the new variant Covid the children had but, because the symptoms didn't match with the official guidance, they didn't think to get their children tested. When their own symptoms matched, they were tested and found to be positive.

@Tanith Yes the kids all just seemed to get a bit of a cold, I wouldn’t even call it a bad one.

I actually think the government are still going for herd immunity, they just don’t dare say it aloud again