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Home > Portable Practical Pediatrics > Can We Safely Open Schools During a Pandemic? (Pedcast by Doc Smo and Sonya Corrina Williams)
Podcast: Portable Practical Pediatrics
Episode:

Can We Safely Open Schools During a Pandemic? (Pedcast by Doc Smo and Sonya Corrina Williams)
Category: Kids & family
Duration: 00:14:03
Publish Date: 2020-07-17 20:56:41
Description: I recently came across an excellent article by an infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Benjamin Linas, who addresses the question on every parent’s mind, “will there be school for my children this year?”  I strongly recommend you read his analysis which addresses five questions everyone is asking about reopening schools: Are Kids Going to be Safe? Are our teachers going to be safe? Will kids bring Covid -19 home to their family? Will opening schools lead to a second wave and lock down? What are the risks of not reopening? In today's pedcast, we are going to breakdown what Dr. Linas says and take a look at what a "safe" reopening of schools might look like. Image by Pixabay Musical Intro Question 1: If School Reopens, Will They Be Safe? If school reopens, will your children be safe? Dr. Linas argues that the answer to this question is "probably yes". He notes that current information indicates that not only are children less likely to become infected but their disease is generally much milder than Covid-19 in older individuals. Yes, it is definitely possible for children to get sick with Covid-19, even sick enough to end up in the hospital or ICU, but the chances of that happening are about 3 times less likely than someone over age 18 years. This has been true not only in the US experience, but also the same effect has been seen in China, Italy, and Spain. Will there be cases of Covid-19 among children in the U.S. if school reopens? Definitely. Will some children get seriously ill? Unfortunately, yes. But today's experience says that this will not happen very often.   Question 2: Will Teachers Be Safe Going Back to School? The next question people are wondering is will teachers be safe going back to school? Here, Dr. Linas says there is not much data except from France. In this French study, the investigators did not find one case of child to teacher transmission among 46 teachers and 541 students. So, Dr. Linas's answer to the question, will teachers be safe is again "probably yes".   Question 3: Will Children Bring Covid-19 Home and Make Their Families Sick? Next let’s consider if children will bring Covid-19 home and make their families sick? To answer this one, you need to know what an index case is. When a clustering of cases of a sickness occurs, sometimes that cluster begins with one person who makes the others sick. That first case is known as the index case. So, if children were to be bringing the sickness home and infect others, they would be the index case in their family's outbreak. Dr. Linas' analysis of available evidence leads him to the conclusion that children are rarely the index case in a family's Covid-19 outbreak. He bases this on 700 scientific publications that not only were children sick with Covid-19, but they were rarely the first case in the family.  So, the answer Dr. Linas gives to the question, "Will children bring Covid-19 home to their families sick? It can happen but not very often.   Question 4: Will opening schools lead to a second wave and lock down? At the time of writing this, it looks like parts of the U.S. are already having a second wave of illness so the real question is whether children will throw gas on that fire and greatly increase the spread of Covid-19 like they do with most respiratory infections. As I used to tell parents when I practiced pediatrics when explaining how infections move around a community, “parents, you wipe your kids noses, not the other way around”. That was my way of saying that children usually get sick first and make adults around them ill, not the other way around. But Covid-19 seems to break that rule, I think because children are just harder to infect with SARS-CoV-2 than adults. They are not as fertile a ground for this germ. Here is Dr. Linas' conclusion from his reading of the available data: “Modeling studies demonstrate no clear role of in-school transmission explaining current Covid-1...
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