How to make it safe for children to go to school

Our schools and other education centres are opening up. 

That led me to ask why they were closed in the first place and what is the risk of Covid-19 spreading with the students going back. 

In other words, how do we make it safe for the students to go back to school?

 

We certainly have our share of cases that are linked to schools.

• Our Tahfiz school cluster has about 600 odd cases.  But I think this grouping the Tahfiz schools from all over the country.

• Do you remember the Malaysian students returning from Indonesia who fell sick – we have 40 odd from Tembero and also about 300 from the Pesantran clusters.  I hate to think of what is happening to the schools in Indonesia

But these all happened during the MCO period and/or the other alphabetic variations of the MCO eg CMCO, RMCO.

I wanted to know whether there were student centres and/or school clusters during the period before any shutdown.  

But I was surprised when I surfed the net for this - there was hardly any news about students clusters during the shutdown or before the shutdown (apart from Malaysia cos of Tahfiz) 

 

Yes, there was news about students being infected, but not when in schools.

Maybe this is because most countries also shut down the schools during the country lockdown.  Some even closed the schools first before the rest of the economy.

The rationale for closing schools is that these are places where people spend a large portion of their time in close quarters with large groups of people (classrooms, canteen, libraries, school field).

 

So according to the Covid-19 equation, we should not be surprised that these are seen as high-risk areas and should be closed.

OK today everyone had flattened the curve (OK, maybe only less than half of the world based on my earlier post) and now we are re-opening the schools.

What is the international experience with regards to Covid-19 when schools were re-opened?

Well, there are lots more news about infections in schools when school re-opened.  To get a sense of whether the opening was well thought out, I triangulated the news with

• the number of Covid-19 cases in the respective country for 2 weeks before the news report (from Worldodometer) 

• The Oxford Stringency index on the day of the news.  This index ranged from 0 to 100 (with 100 as the best) to reflect the govt action in handling Covid-19.

So we have an anecdotal way to see whether schools can open safely.  

The results are tabulated below

Date of report	News reports of cases on re-opening of schools	No of cases for 2 weeks	Oxford Index
18 May	Just one week after a third of French schoolchildren went back to school, a worrying flareup of about 70 COVID-19 cases have been linked to schools	11,040	76.85
20 May	The discovery of new coronavirus cases in two students marred the reopening of South Korean schools on Wednesday, forcing 75 high schools to turn pupils away.	304	39.81
26 May	Two schools located just 2km apart in Sydney have closed after a student at each tested positive for coronavirus. The news comes one day after all students across the state returned to the classroom full-time.	169	62.5
3 June	Two weeks after Israel fully reopened schools, a COVID-19 outbreak — including at least 130 cases at a single school — has led officials to close dozens of schools where students and staff were infected.	710	75.00
23 Jun	At least 17 Ohio, USA high school students tested positive for coronavirus after a recent trip to Myrtle Beach, when they returned to a county that had previously reduced infection rates to zero.	6,994	72.69
23 Jun	More than 180 students in the Eastern Cape province tested positive for COVID-19. Schools started reopening in South Africa on June 8	53,117	76.85

I can't imagine what the govt in some countries were thinking of when they re-opened the schools given the severity of the cases. Look at South Africa, France and Ohio.

It would appear that it is not about SOP.

If the number of cases in the country is still high, no amount of SOP is going to make it safe to go back to schools.

Even in places like Australia and South Korea where the number of cases is low, there are cases of infection. We can say that for South Korea the govt has relaxed the measures (look at the low Oxford Index), but we cannot say the same for Australia.

What about Malaysia. The schools are to reopen on 15 Jul for those not taking the exams

So what is our comparative positions

• We have 125 cases for the past 2 weeks
• On 14 Jun, our Oxford Stringency index was 63.89

When we look at the table, the country that comes close to Malaysia is Australia.

Anecdotally, there is some risk.

At least in Malaysia, when the school re-opens in 2 weeks' time, the number of cases should have come down further. What I hope is the Oxford Index does not drop.

Then if we have fewer cases among the public and still have good govt measures, we don’t have to worry too much about the SOP.

The good news is that the number of current cases seems to be from imported ones and foreign workers. I would like to think that there would be minimal exposure to the children from these groups and hopefully reducing the risk further.

Moral of the story – Big picture is more important. SOP only makes sense if the cases among the community are very low.

We already know that the US is a gone case. But the French and South African govt got some explantation to do.

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PS: This blog is for me to better understand COVID 19 as this will impact my investments. If you are also into equities, follow me at i4value.asia.

Disclaimer:  I am not an epidemiologist, healthcare worker, pharmacist, or staff in the Ministry of Health, but rather is someone with a strong interest in numerical analysis.  The content is an attempt to understand what is happening in the battle against COVID 19 from a data-based perspective. The opinions expressed here are based on information extracted from readily available public sources but I do not warrant its completeness or accuracy and should not be relied on as such.