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Almost 40 people infected with corona at the Heinrich Hertz school in Hamburg – when this became known in September, it was one of the first major outbreaks in a school in Germany. At the time, authorities said: Many students had been infected outside of school. But now it turns out that was not true. Rather, the outbreak is mainly due to a person through whom the coronavirus spread to the school.
This stems from information from the Hamburg labor, social and health authorities, which was published shortly before Christmas on the platform “Ask the State” (the request can be found here). Consequently, the Heinrich Pette Institute (HPI) and the Eppendorf Unklinikum investigated the outbreak at the Heinrich Hertz School in cooperation with the Hamburg-Nord health department.
“Probably due to a source of infection”
As a result, the researchers obtained the following findings, he continues: “The infections / transmissions occurred at school.” A large number of identical genomic sequences were identified in the examined and usable samples. “Therefore, the vast majority of transmissions are probably due to a single source of infection. The possibility that the outbreak is the result of independent inputs can be ruled out with a probability close to certainty. “
HPI and UKE are expected to publish a scientific publication on this (and other outbreak studies in schools) “in due course”.
Politically explosive result
This result is politically explosive not only because it contradicts the mantra of education ministers that schools are not engines of infection in the pandemic.
In early January, the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs wants to discuss how schools should continue after the closure. So far it appears that the KMK does not plan to change its strategy and continues to rely on the fastest possible resumption of normal operation without major protective measures, other than ventilation. The studio should make that more difficult.
The study could also be tricky for Hamburg school senator Ties Rabe (SPD). Because it seems that the Rabe school board wanted to suppress publication of the study.
Their results were only made public now because a user asked about them in “Ask the State”, referring to the Hamburg Transparency Law. It was not the school authority that was asked to respond, but the health authority.
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Previously, school authorities had dismissed the study results as not relevant, that is, in a “Die Zeit” article, in which genome sequencing was first reported.
The school board saw no “relevant results” in October
“Zeit” had asked the school authorities in vain for the results of the study. “Unfortunately, there were no findings relevant to us from which meaningful school protection measures could be derived,” Peter Albrecht, spokesman for Ties Rabe, is quoted in the article. Accurate results would have to be requested from the health department, which also kept silent.
According to “Zeit”, Rabe’s spokesman announced this in late October (the article itself was not published until mid-December). School authorities should have known the study and its results by the end of October.
Did the senator mislead the public?
If so, the questions not only arise as to why the school authorities classified the findings as “not relevant” and why they have not published the results of their own since then.
Senator Rabe allegedly misled the public when he presented his own data on the infection situation in schools in mid-November. At that time, Rabe advanced the thesis that “the risk of contagion outside of school is much higher.”
Genome sequencing, the intra-school transmissions in question in numerous cases, was not mentioned at the press conference. Rabe spoke rather of the fact that there were 80 of the 372 documented cases in which “maybe” the school was the site of infection. With everyone else, this can be ruled out anyway. Education ministers then repeatedly referenced these figures when classifying the school as safe.
The representation of the school authority is difficult to understand
A request from the Tagesspiegel to school authorities regarding the timing and assessment of Senator Ties Rabe’s security situation in schools initially went unanswered on Monday morning.
Instead, a spokeswoman referred to a press release on Sunday that described the results that are now known as “good news.”
This assessment, which seems strange at first glance, was justified as follows: genome sequencing indicated that 25 of the 39 infections may have occurred at the Heinrich Hertz School during the outbreak. School authorities assumed 34 in their calculation in November, so the proportion of total infections in schools has even decreased.
This representation is difficult to verify, because the database for the calculation of the school authorities cannot be read anywhere in writing. At the press conference at the time, as I said, the outbreak at the Heinrich Hertz School was not mentioned, so it is unclear how Senator Rabe arrived at the sum of the infections that “maybe” occurred within a school .
