Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Sweden, Schools, and Covid


Most of the following is from Science, 2/15/21:

“In March 2020, schools around the world closed as governments tried to keep SARS-CoV-2 in check. But children in Sweden through ninth grade continued to attend class, while 10th through 12th graders shifted to 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, especially because schools have tended to open or close in concert with other restrictions lifting or tightening.

“A study then compared infection rates of parents whose youngest child was in ninth grade with those whose youngest was in 10th grade. They also compared infection rates in teachers who continued to teach in person at lower secondary schools (grades seven to nine) with those of teachers at upper secondary schools (grades 10 to 12), who taught remotely. Finally, they compared infection rates in the spouses of teachers in the two types of schools.

“Swedish schools instituted only relatively mild precautions against infection in the spring. Health authorities encouraged pupils and teachers to wash or disinfect their hands regularly, keep their distance when possible, and stay home when ill. But neither teachers nor students wore masks, and close contacts of confirmed cases were notquarantined.”

It is of interest to me that this Science article was titled,

“Keeping schools open without masks or quarantines doubled Swedish teachers’ COVID-19 risk.” 

The first paragraph reads,

“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.”

The title and the introductory paragraph certainly imply that the risk to the teachers was prohibitive. OMG!

However, when the entire article is read, the actual numbers say something different.(N.B. going from a risk of 0.1% to 0.2% is a doubling, however both risks are exceedingly low.)

The following statistics are from this same Science article.

In grades 7-9 there were 39,000 teachers who taught in-person, and 79 (0.2%) were hospitalized with Covid, and 1 (0.0025%) died. Ergo, there does appear to be a risk to teaching in a classroom without masks, but it is extremely low.

Would the adding of masks possibly have reduced the risks to both teachers and families?  Possibly.

However, Danny Benjamin, a pediatrician at Duke University who has studied the spread of the pandemic coronavirus in North Carolina schools, said, the Swedish study shows that “even if schools do not require masking, risk to families of in-person schooling is low.”

So what can we learn from this informative article in Science? 

  1. The risk to teachers and parents of in-person learning is very very small.
  2. Since most readers will often only read the title and the first few lines of most things, always be skeptical until you have read the entire article.
  3. Since the writer of this piece has his own personal point of view, do not risk being mislead . . . read the entire Science article for yourself.

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