There is no evidence having schools open drives the spread of coronavirus in the wider community in the UK, SAGE advisers said last week.
In a study of pupil and teacher absences caused by positive Covid tests, researchers said confirmed infections in schools did not lead to bigger outbreaks.
Instead, they said there were small signs that the opposite was true, and that schools tended to get worse hit when the cases around them had rocketed.
Many pupils have been home-schooling for almost all of the past year, except for a brief period between September and December before the second wave spiralled out of control.
But education bosses fear rushing back to normal classes could lead to an explosion in cases, leading to more closures and greater disruption. Neither pupils nor staff will have been routinely vaccinated against the virus.
Dr Mike Tildesley and Dr Ed Hill, members of SAGE sub-group SPI-M and Warwick University experts who did the study published today, said the reopening should be cautious and that it was important to ‘mitigate’ the inevitable risks of doing it.
The team admitted their paper was ‘an absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence’ of risk. And they conceded it probably underestimated how many Covid cases there actually are in schools because many people don’t get tested.
The Warwick study found Covid cases among teachers fell during the November lockdown, even though schools remained open.
And in December, cases in schools appeared to rise in tandem with outbreaks in the community, with bigger outbreaks in London and the South East, where the new variant was surging, and fewer cases in more rural regions.
Evidence showed that the numbers of people taking time off appeared to track alongside general outbreaks in the area around the school.
But there was no sign cases in schools would predict an outbreak in the community. Instead, there was ‘weak’ evidence that the opposite was true, suggesting pupils and teachers were more likely to get infected elsewhere.
Secondary schools appeared to see more confirmed cases in pupils and teachers, the study found, compared to primaries.
Dr Tildesley said in a briefing: ‘We need to approach the data with an element of caution – this will be an underestimate of the true number of cases within schools.
‘There will be some children with very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.’