Swedish Professor Who Quit COVID Research Over Backlash Stands by School Study s Findings newsweek.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newsweek.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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A careful analysis of health data from Sweden suggests keeping schools open with only minimal precautions in the spring roughly doubled teachers’ risk of being diagnosed with the pandemic coronavirus. Their partners faced a 29% higher risk of becoming infected than partners of teachers who shifted to teaching online. Parents of children in school were 17% more likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19 than those whose children were in remote learning.
Whether the harms of school closures outweigh the risks of virus transmission in classrooms and hallways has been the subject of intense debate around the world. Outbreaks have demonstrated that the virus can spread via schools to the wider community at least occasionally, and some data suggest teachers have higher than average risk of infection. However, it has been difficult to separate school-based transmission from other confounding factors, especiall
In Sweden, upper-secondary schools moved online while lower-secondary schools remained open during the spring of 2020. A comparison of parents with children in the final year of lower-secondary and first year of upper-secondary school shows that keeping the former open had limited consequences for the overall transmission of the virus. However, the infection rate doubled among lower-secondary teachers relative to upper-secondary ones.