We should target community transmission first to protect
educational settings, and not vice versa.
Recent empirical work from multiple countries that correlates school
re-opening to local Rt direction changes and secondary infection
clusters increasingly confirms earlier findings of minimal contribution
of educational settings to the community COVID-19 growth rates
[36-38,52-54]: open schools of all grades may be considered safe and
will not act as amplifiers of Sars-CoV-2 spread at times of low COVID-19
background prevalence. In fact, it appears that adults, and not
children, play a key role in bringing the virus into their households
[39,55], and that in-school COVID-19 incidence is directly
consequential to local background prevalence [40,41,56,57]. An
Italian study demonstrated that the COVID-19 incidence in young adults
(20-49 year-olds) was the earliest to peak only to be later followed by
younger age groups, making young adults the likeliest main drivers of
the second pandemic wave in Italy. With data coming from 97% of Italian
public schools, this multidimensional study provides no evidence of a
driving role for schools [36,52]. This observation is further
corroborated by a studies revealing young adults as consistently the
group with the highest incidence of COVID-19 during the second wave
[43,44]. Evidence seems to suggest that policies targeting young
adults could be significantly more effective than those targeting
children and adolescents, which could then consequently be themselves
partly protected from the infection.