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Too many children are being screened for the coronavirus because of an understandable but misplaced concern about school outbreaks, said a leading scientist, as a study shows they are 40% less likely than adults to become infected.
Professor Russell Viner of UCL and Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, lead author of the study, calls for schools to remain fully open in light of the findings, due to the serious harm done to children by the closure of classrooms.
“I think we have a consistent policy on testing in schools, but we’re probably being too cautious and testing too many kids,” Viner said. “It was the right thing to start with, but it has had some unintended consequences.
“The key to this research is that it supports keeping schools open. Schools should be open and almost the last places to close. As part of learning to live with this virus, we must keep schools open. “
Viner said that many children were having the usual winter colds, with sneezing and a runny nose, at the beginning of the fall term. Those symptoms are different from Covid-19. He said only children with classic coronavirus symptoms – persistent cough, high temperature, and loss of taste and smell – should be tested.
“There is clearly limited capacity in testing at the moment,” he said. “We need to think, ‘Are we testing too many children?’ due to our understandable but probably unscientific and misplaced concerns about the infection of children in schools. “
The study, published in the leading medical journal Jama Pediatrics, showed that elementary school children had the lowest rate of infections. The oldest age group, around 17 or 18-20, has infection rates similar to those of adults. There is too little data on the middle group of teens to be sure how they fare.
He stressed that this meta-analysis, which brings together a large number of studies from around the world with data on 41,640 children and young people up to the age of 20, is not about the ability of children to transmit the virus to others, that it will be the subject of a separate study.
But he said: “Susceptibility tells us a bit about transmission. You have to be able to contract the virus to transmit it. ”The document says that existing data suggests that children and adolescents are much less likely to transmit Covid-19 than they are to transmit the flu during the last pandemic.
Viner’s team began work in the spring and published an early preprint on their limited initial findings. Since then, they have been submitting their data to Sage, the government’s scientific advisory committee, updating advisers and ministers as evidence has accumulated and contributing to decisions on opening schools in the UK and abroad.
He thinks the debate about schools should end. “We need to stop some of the abrupt school opening and closing changes and recognize that we are probably testing too many children,” Viner said. “In the event of seemingly unavoidable future waves of Covid-19, there will likely be further pressure to close schools.
“There is now an evidence base on which to make decisions, and school closures must be undertaken with fear given the indirect damage they incur. Pandemic mitigation measures that affect the well-being of children should only happen if there is evidence that they help, because there is a lot of evidence that they do harm. “
