Should you send your child back to school? The expert consensus leans toward ‘yes,’ with caveats - The Boston Globe

As many schools begin opening this week, parents around the state are confronting a decision that few expected to face and most find agonizing: Is it safe to send children back into the classroom?

Barocas, an infectious disease specialist at Boston Medical Center and father of two young children.

Despite the uncertainty, experts consulted by the Globe say the latest scientific evidence skews strongly in favor of sending children to school — provided two conditions are met: Transmission of the virus should be low in the surrounding community, as is the case in most Massachusetts cities and towns; and the school system should be wholeheartedly adopting safety measures such as mandatory mask wearing, physical distancing, and opened windows or outdoor classrooms when feasible.

But in fact, Chiang said, “If the community transmission of the virus is controlled, you can reopen schools safely.

But Barocas said the conversation has neglected the considerable risk to children’s mental and physical well-being, as well as their education, if they stay home.

But Barocas said it would be “not unreasonable” for another family to make the opposite decision.

“The harm of keeping children out of school is enormous,” said Dr.

Because transmission from child to adult appears to be rare, he said, “The risk to teachers is very, very low.

The risk that a teacher is going to become infected with COVID-19 is higher when she’s in a supermarket buying groceries than it is while she’s in the classroom.".

Teachers, Tang said, want to go back to school but worry about their safety.

In Europe, Guthrie said, schools reopened just as community lockdowns ended.

And once there’s community transmission, cases will show up in schools.

“That doesn’t mean you have transmission in the school,” Guthrie said.

It remains an open question the extent to which schools contribute to the spread of coronavirus outside their walls, he said.

6 report, the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that coronavirus transmission within schools is uncommon and found little evidence that schools drive transmission within a community

With precautionary measures in place, Denmark did not see major school outbreaks or an increase in disease transmission when schools reopened

In Sweden, where schools stayed open throughout the pandemic, teachers were at no higher risk of getting infected than people in other occupations

Last week, the Massachusetts Medical Society said it supported “the safe and equitable return of as many students, teachers, and support staff as possible to in-person school settings.”

“They’re going to pull their mask down, they’re going to wipe their noses with their hand.” Accepting that the risk can never be zero, he said, the best anyone can do is reduce the likelihood of disease transmission as much as possible