When should British schools reopen? Here's what the science tells us | Devi Sridhar and Ines Hassan

We need to get children back into education, but a locally managed approach using testing and tracing is the only way

The big debate over the past few days has been whether it’s safe to open schools to children other than those those of key workers or classed as vulnerable. However, this isn’t quite the right question to be asking. There will never be no risk. In a world where Covid-19 remains present in the community, it’s about how we reduce that risk, just as we do with other kinds of daily dangers, like driving and cycling. What we should be asking is whether schools are safe enough to open. To answer this, of course, you have to have data. What is needed to inform decisions is information and real-time monitoring, at the local level, to tell us what the daily number of new cases and rate of transmission is. Those concrete numbers should be what drives policy, not a set of abstract arguments, even less an ideological battle.

In the absence of this data, the proposal to reopen schools in England on 1 June remains controversial among teaching unions, the British Medical Association, staff and parents alike. Our view is that schools should reopen as soon as possible, but this must form part of a larger system of “test, trace and isolate” strategies, proper support and full transparency about the trade-offs involved and the large scientific uncertainty.

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from Children | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ygPQpR