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What were the first realities closed in February, after the first cases of Covid-19 Italy? And the first thing that the president of Campania Vincenzo De Luca, at the end of September, in an attempt to stop the contagion curve? And which are those for whom it would be crucial to know the infection data but for whom the ministry is limited to communicating the national aggregated data? The answer to these three questions is only one: the schools.
Now it is quite obvious that going back to class leads to an increase in infections. Trivially, because it increases the risk of crowds, whether on trains and buses, or even just at the entrance and exit. Equally, obviously, the size of this increase depends on how they are reopened. On the modalities of how this happened in Italy, we leave the judgment to the readers. However, we are interested in turning our attention to the future.
In fact, the alarms raised regarding the long-term effects of school closings are different. The issue does not concern only the social and economic aspects: there is a correlation between a low level of education and health problems. For example, in Italy the fifteen% of people between 18 ei 69 years who have stopped in primary school has two chronic diseases, against 2.4% of graduates. Students will have time to recover, someone will say. Yes, it is a pity that distance education increases the risk of school dropout, especially among the most fragile children at a socioeconomic level.
All this to say that the closure of schools is a measure that must be taken weighing the effects on the immediate and the long term. Ideally, only those schools where outbreaks occur should be closed. And this is where the problems begin.
Before illustrating which, the reader will allow a digression: May 4th, start day of Phase 2, the province of Oristano has been registered 55 almost from positivity to SARS-CoV-2, 3. 4 every 100 thousand inhabitants. However, it suffered the same blockage as that of Milan, where the cases have been 20,254or 621.3 every 100 thousand inhabitants. Here, the same is true of schools.
But if with regard to infections, thanks to the effort of Civil Protection, the data is known at the provincial level, this is not the case for schools. So we have to settle for a press release published by Miur last year October 15th. According to which, at October 10th, they were positive 5,793 students, 1,020 teachers, 283 subjects belonging to non-teaching staff. This without even making distinctions between the different school grades. As if there are no differences between how a child and a teenager get to school or how many are their peers.
A partial monitoring of the situation has Vittorio Nicoletta, PhD student atLaval University in Quebec, e Lorenzo ruffino, student of economy a Torino. The two collected data searching for ‘positive school’ in google news: “We open all the articles, read them and enter the data, adding the typing code (an alphanumeric code that identifies each school, ed) of the institutes ”, explains Ruffino to Infodata. A work that he himself defines as titanic: «in the first days we had to check between twenty and the 30 schools, but we also get to 120“With the data they have collected, Infodata built this map:
In the end «we intercepted the 59% of the cases. “And they stopped when the ministry released the first data. Too bad, however, that the Miur, like the minister’s word Lucia azzolina, you have created software that calculates the available space for students within classrooms, you have not been able to create one to collect case reports within schools.
Not only. While they were writing the October 21 his tomorrow Davide Maria De Luca me Filippo Teoldi, the number of cases reported by the Miur is not derived from the follow-up. Rather, they are the result of communications sent by individual managers. Is it possible that in six months there was no thought about developing a “software” capable of compiling reports related to cases of positivity to Sars-CoV-2 in schools?
Infodata did it in six minutes. School leaders who want to use it can find it at this link. However, all the information collected will be found here. All with the same simplicity with which he opens a can of tuna, to use a metaphor beloved by Minister Azzolina’s party of reference.
The point, and here we end, is that closing schools (as well as factories, shops and offices) is not free. It has consequences, some of which are not even quantifiable with certainty today. And if really, as the prime minister says Giuseppe Conte, “We must avoid a second national lockdown”, we need the data to understand in which schools the infections are spreading. And then which ones to close eventually.
Infodata you are sure that the institutions have this information at hand. Making them public would allow all citizens to assess the situation and judge the government’s response. Or is that the can of tuna only valid when you are in opposition?
Here are the other episodes of the critical chronicle of the dissemination of data:
S01E01
So1Eo2
S01E03
S01E04
S01E05
S02E01
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