COVID & Children

Excerpt from Is It Safe to Reopen Schools? These Countries Say Yes - The Wall Street Journal on May 31st

A number of countries that have reopened schools in the past two months have reported no resulting increase in coronavirus infection rates.

Denmark, Austria, Norway, Finland, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and most other countries that have reopened classrooms haven’t had outbreaks in schools or day-care centers.

In Denmark, the opening of schools had no impact on the progress of the epidemic. Denmark became the first Western country to reopen schools on April 15 and maintains a sophisticated monitoring system to detect any increase in infection and identify its source.

Researchers and European authorities said the absence of any notable clusters of infection in reopened elementary schools so far suggested that children aren’t significant spreaders of the new coronavirus in society.

One reason for the absence of infections in schools could be that children below 10 have fewer of the receptors the virus uses to enter the body, said Prof. Herman Goossens, a medical microbiologist and coordinator of a European Union task force for researching Covid-19.

The number of so-called ACE2 receptors in some cells in the upper respiratory tract that the novel coronavirus uses as a gateway only starts to increase from the age of 10, making younger children comparatively less susceptible, he said.

His advice to EU governments: Bring children up to the age of 12 back to school.