A week after schools returned, the government was fretting about a new surge in recorded cases – and found itself moved to introduce new rules limiting us meeting with no more than five other people at a time. The timing seems remarkable. So was it a big mistake to reopen schools? Should we have kept children at home, in some kind of blended learning arrangement so as to spare us all from a second wave of Covid-19?
To judge by the experience from Germany the answer is a firm ‘no’. In Germany, as in Scotland, schools have now been back for nearly a month. And the evidence, as reviewed by the Robert Koch Institute, is that no, schoolchildren are not responsible for a recorded rise in infections. Since schools returned the Institute has recorded 150 cases of Covid-19 in 31 clusters – which in a country of 80 million is hardly an epidemic.
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