Whilst I would prefer that our governments maintained the restrictions for another week or two, we are opening back up. I have always favoured our schools remaining open for real essential job parents or for safety reasons, but I for one am glad that schools generally aren't going back as yet and especially so upon reading about a new German report from the Guardian website, the relevant part of which is shown below.
****Researchers who analysed data on infected people found that the viral loads in children differed little from those in adults. Opening schools on the assumption that children are less likely to spread the virus was therefore ill-advised, said Christian Drosten, a virologist and Germany’s leading coronavirus expert, who led the team.
Drosten’s study, which was released this week, examined the viral loads in the throats of 3,721 people, including more than 100 children, who tested positive for coronavirus in Berlin between January and April.
He said he had been able to carry out his analysis once the number of tests carried out by Labor Berlin, the largest laboratory of its kind in Europe, had reached the critical mass of 60,000 earlier this week. That gave him and his team enough data to be able to carry out an analysis of children who have had the virus.
Data on children has been scant because of the lack of tests that have been carried out on them, often because they show few if any symptoms.
“The end result is as clear as glass,” Drosten said on his podcast with the broadcaster NDR. “Children do not have significantly different concentrations of the virus in their respiratory passages compared to adults.”
Drosten said children were as likely to spread the virus as adults, particularly given their social behaviour, including an inability to practice physical distancing, their increased mobility and a tendency to sing and cry – activities proven to give the virus droplets as much force as a cough or a sneeze.
Lothar Wieler, the head of Germany’s leading disease control body, the Robert Koch Institute, said on Thursday that children play just as important a role in spreading the disease as adults. “They can be infected, they can excrete the virus and they can infect others,” he said.****