Originally Posted by
stimpy
France was referred to in your post, and if you look at a regional COVID map of France you can see that most of the country has hardly any COVID hospital cases. It is just a few areas that are starting to see more people test positive, but not a big increase in hospital cases as I reported above. There is absolutely no reason for France to shut down again based on today's statistics. That said, school is now starting so it will be interesting to see what the numbers look like in a few weeks.
Equally in New York, private schools started last week and public schools soon I suppose. So New York's numbers will be interesting soon as well.
Urban communities vary in risk profile and Sweden's mix appears to be hard on Covid-19 spread among the young. I assume that well-run cities in France, the US, and other modern countries will feature much the same classroom populations and environments, so we can expect to see few if any case surges stemming from outbreaks among schoolchildren.
Sweden's health agency says open schools did not spur pandemic spread among children
- The report showed that severe cases of COVID-19 were very rare among both Swedish and Finnish children aged 1 to 19, with no deaths reported. A comparison of the incidence of COVID-19 in different professions suggested no increased risk for teachers. Children made up around 8.2 percent of the total number of COVID-19 cases in Finland, compared to 2.1 percent in Sweden. -
- State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell of the health agency, who has devised Sweden’s response to the epidemic, has said there is little evidence linking the death toll to the absence of a lockdown, pointing instead to conditions at nursing homes, a decentralised health care system and travel patterns.
Separate studies by Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet (KI), an independent medical research institute, and the European Network of Ombudspersons for Children and Unicef, showed that Swedish children fared better than children in other countries during the pandemic, both in terms of education and mental health.
WHO emergencies head Mike Ryan urged countries earlier this week not to turn schools into “another political football”, saying they could safely reopen once the virus had been suppressed.