Open schools or school re-opening: under which conditions has it
jeopardized epidemic control in 2020-2021
The disparity of evidence brings us to the second key unknown we had
previously identified: what have we learnt about the role that
transmission among children and adolescents has played at the population
level? Epidemiological data coming from countries that have prioritized
continuous in-presence schooling especially for the younger age groups,
such as Iceland, France, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Denmark, and studies
monitoring the effect of re-opening of schools in countries that had
previously kept them closed, such as Italy, Germany, USA, UK, can be
greatly informative to understand the real-life epidemiological
consequences of leaving complete school closure to be a last resort in
controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. Although multiple contextual
variables could be factored out to account for any incompatibilities in
this large pool of evidence, three appear to be of key importance: the
age of the school-children involved, the background prevalence, and the
infection control measures initiated concurrently with opened
educational facilities.