Epidemiologist believes Canadian schools can reopen

Countries around the world have taken different approaches when it comes to closing schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Jay Kaufman says all of the different scenarios have shown the same thing: There isn’t any harm in allowing daycares and elementary schools to reopen.

“The evidence from the school closings is that they have not contributed very much to slowing the epidemic,” the Montreal-based epidemiologist told Gormley on Thursday.

“Now, no effect at all is probably not zero because there are adults involved in the schools as well … As an institution that’s open, it’s not zero risk but it does look from these other case studies that having children going to school and interacting with each other is not an important driving force in this epidemic.”

Kaufman, a professor of epidemiology, biostatistics and occupational health at McGill University, said children regularly pass on illnesses like influenza. But contact tracing in numerous countries has shown that children very rarely transmit COVID-19.

That’s why Kaufman is in favour of daycares and elementary schools — institutions where children aged 10 and under gather — reopening.

“Obviously as kids go through puberty and start to grow and become much more like adults in their physiology, then they start to take on the characteristics of adults in terms of their disease and their ability to transmit disease,” he said.

“But certainly for the smaller kids in pre-school and elementary school, up through fifth or sixth grade, it does seem like they have very low viral load in the respiratory tract when they become infected and therefore (have) a reduced ability to transmit that to others.”

Some have raised concerns that children could transmit the virus to their teachers or other staff members at the schools, but Kaufman said the evidence doesn’t back up those concerns.

That’s just one reason why he believes kids should return to class.

“There are a lot of benefits a kid gets from being in school — the parents get to work, the children get nutritional and educational support (and) they get management for all kinds of special needs,” Kaufman said.

“Kids belong in school, they thrive in school and we have to keep in mind that there’s an important social cost to keeping them out of school. When we weigh that risk against the risk of putting them back, we have the opinion in reviewing that literature that it’s time to take small steps toward bringing them back to that normality.”

The Government of Saskatchewan hasn’t said yet if schools in the province will reopen to complete the 2019-20 school year.

Quebec has announced plans to reopen daycares and elementary schools in May, and Kaufman admitted there has been pushback against the idea.

Some parents are reluctant to send their kids back to school, but Kaufman noted the Quebec plan is voluntary so parents can keep their children at home if they so choose.

Many teachers also are leery of returning to work and Kaufman said there are a lot of logistical questions that have to be answered for them.

“It’s not a trivial task, the challenge of figuring out how to actually engineer this,” he said. “But we do think that it’s in the best interests of the kids to do so and to find a way in order to do it with the minimal risk for everybody involved.”