I did a little digging on schools staying open in Europe and I suspect the decision to keep schools open in Europe has been partly driven by this paper from the ECDC (dated 6th August) which suggests the attack rate in schools is low.
They base this on:
Some contact tracing investigations (I think ~6 total) from schools, most of which showed at most 1 onward infection. However they note one study of an Israeli school where 2 index cases ended up being 178 cases in the school and more in the community.
Countries which reopened schools without noticeably increasing R and without significant school outbreaks
I do think there is some bias towards wanting to keep schools open (I think they downplay a couple of papers which suggest schools could be causing more infections) but actually the evidence is better than I expected. Of course they could be leaving out other studies completely and I wouldn’t know.
I did a little digging on schools staying open in Europe and I suspect the decision to keep schools open in Europe has been partly driven by this paper from the ECDC (dated 6th August) which suggests the attack rate in schools is low.
They base this on:
Some contact tracing investigations (I think ~6 total) from schools, most of which showed at most 1 onward infection. However they note one study of an Israeli school where 2 index cases ended up being 178 cases in the school and more in the community.
Countries which reopened schools without noticeably increasing R and without significant school outbreaks
I do think there is some bias towards wanting to keep schools open (I think they downplay a couple of papers which suggest schools could be causing more infections) but actually the evidence is better than I expected. Of course they could be leaving out other studies completely and I wouldn’t know.