“Risky numbers, today we cannot say that the school is safe”



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ROME – The data offered to the interested audience by the Minister of Education Lucia azzolina – From September 14 to 26, the students who tested positive were 0.021 percent, 0.047 teachers, 0.059 administrators – raise doubts. Some teachers pointed out that in the same period, from September 14 to 26, there were 20,355 infected in Italy, which is equivalent to 0.034 percent of the population. The data for the entire population, as we can see, are therefore in line with those of the school population: the percentages of students are slightly higher than the average, and those of ATA teachers and staff are slightly lower. It is difficult, from here, “to deduce that the school is not part of the contagion problem.”

Again, 0.021 percent as of September 26, which means two positive students for every ten thousand evaluated, if updated after Nicoletta-Ruffino’s studies, today it becomes a number two and a half times higher (0.052 per hundred, five students each). ten thousand). By the same reasoning, the schools involved in at least one infection today would be 2,800-2,900, or a third of the total 8,868 (9.2 percent if the positives are divided among the 40,151 school complexes of individual schools). “How can we deduce from these data that the world of education is not part of the contagion problem?” It is always the question of the conscious audience.

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Deepening

Azzolina: few infections at school. “But in the Babel Regions of rules”

On the Facebook page “Coronavirus, data and scientific analysis” doctors in physics and communicators Giorgio Sestili me Francesco Luchetta write: “The minister gives the numbers and says: ‘The school has not had an impact on the increase in infections if it is not residual.’ We wonder what sense it makes to communicate statistics of this type and in particular to give the percentage of school personnel who He has contracted the virus after just two weeks of activity. We wonder if such statements go more in the direction of propaganda than in the direction of correct information. “

The two disseminators, as it has already done Republic yesterday, they tried to frame the fractions in a more complete and truthful context. “According to figures from the Ministry of Education,” we read, “in the period between September 14 and 26, school infections were 1,957, or 9.6 percent of the total number of new cases registered in Italy in the same period “. . There were 20,355. “It is a significant percentage with respect to the total number of infections, but it is reduced if we compare it with the total student population, 7.1 million excluding students in pairs. However, the data have no statistical value if taken after two weeks of lessons and taking into account that on September 14 not all Italian schools reopened “.At this time it is not possible to evaluate in statistical terms the effects of the reopening of schools. What tools does Minister Azzolina have to indicate which infections have occurred inside and outside the classrooms? No widespread activity of put on screen How many students, as very young subjects, could be asymptomatic and therefore not be detected as positive? ”.

Enrico Bucci is a biologist with a long career – a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia – who founded a company dedicated to the analysis of scientific data and in the period of confinement has become a heard voice in the interpretation of public numbers. Contacted by Republic On the question of “positive percentages in school”, he says: “After two weeks, you cannot speak of a negative or positive effect, you simply cannot speak of anything. The observation period is so short that there is no physical time to draw conclusions. The minister was gambled, in fact, said something nonsensical. The student population is a part of society that behaves like the population as a whole, no one today is able to say if these positive aspects are we sick at school or out of school The ministry, among other things, offers us numbers without telling us how it gathered them from a methodological point of view. How many are positive and observe if, compared to the new positive totals, over time the fraction It grows. Within the sample offered by the minister, however, there is everything and, therefore, we cannot know who got sick at school and who at a party. It is likely that the measures taken in schools are really useful. them and can be applied successfully, but reselling them in this way does not help to understand or build anti-Covid policies ”.

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