Will the return of schools reverse, or dramatically slow, the sharp downwards trend in new Covid-19 infections, which is currently falling at more than 30 per cent a week? No one knows for sure, but it seems unlikely that the mass return of schools today will not have some effect on infections in England, especially given that it involves a section of the population that has not been vaccinated.
While few children suffer serious symptoms of Covid-19, they can carry the disease — older children, especially. For that reason, a return of unvaccinated children to school is likely to have a greater effect on raw infection numbers than, say, a return of vaccinated over-70s to bowls clubs and whist drives.
Yet if there is a slowdown in the decline of new cases, or even an increase, how much of it will be real and how much of it created by extra testing? From today, 3.4
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