Let's see what one of the world's largest studies showed about the spread of COVID in school-aged children. This was a study performed with a rigorous contact tracing and testing system This important study from southern India, published in the journal Science on November 6, found children were spreading the virus among themselves and adults. The authors noted that the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh had developed a rigorous contact tracing and testing system. The study indicated that super-spreading events predominated, with approximately 5 percent of infected individuals accounting for 80 percent of secondary cases. Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan, member of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in New Delhi, India, told NPR, “What we found in our study is that children were actually quite important. They were likely to get infected, particularly by young adults of the ages 20 to 40. They were likely to transmit the disease amongst themselves … and they also go out and infect people of all age groups, including the elderly. Many kids are silent spreaders in the sense that they don’t manifest the disease with symptoms. They happen to get infected as much as anyone else, and then they happen to spread it to other people.” https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6517/691
Or let's take a look at the Montreal study... A more compelling study from Montreal provides a more granular assessment of children’s role in the community spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. The authors, Dr. Simona Bignami of Montreal University and Dr. John F. Sandberg of George Washington University, wrote, “As the start of the fall 2020 school year coincided with the start of the second wave in many European countries and Canada, the debate became particularly heated. What has been the role of transmission of COVID-19 in school-aged children for the overall incidence of infection in fall 2020? The answer to this question has immediate political relevance in deciding if, when, and how to reopen schools as the pandemic unfolds and immunization coverage remains low.” They note that before the opening of schools, Montreal’s public health authorities had documented 7.5 cases per 100,000 inhabitants around mid-August. By January 5, 2021, the incidence of infections had climbed to 282.7 cases per 100,000, with a concomitant rise in hospitalizations and deaths. However, Quebec’s government decided nonetheless to reopen schools on January 11, stating, like their American counterparts, that adults are responsible for the circulation of the virus in the community because COVID-19 cases were higher for adults than for children. They also adamantly stated that affected schools had only reported some isolated cases. To answer this critical question, Bignami and Sandberg turned to the “unprecedented compilation of data published by the Regional Health Directorate of Montreal,” which tracks weekly cases across 26 boroughs at 339 Montreal schools. Their findings noted that children do represent a significant part of all confirmed COVID-19 cases. Regions with the highest incidence of COVID-19 among children were those with lower income households and had a higher proportion of children under 18 in each household. A critical observation was that infections in children age 10 to 19 preceded the increase in cases among adults age 30 to 49. This means that infected children were infecting their parents, not the reverse. Similarly, by November, children under 10 saw an acceleration in new cases at the same rate as other age groups, implying that once community spread becomes high, not even young children are spared. The researchers concluded, “the transmission of COVID among children of school age does not appear to be the consequence, but rather an important determinant of the general level of infection in surrounding communities.” In an interview with Global News Canada, Oliver Drouin, one of the co-authors of the study, who also runs COVID Écoles Quebec, made a revealingly cogent observation, “When you have a case in school, you may have one, two, three other cases at home that are not counted as school cases but of course they are counted as home cases.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348418238_Enfants_ecoles_et_COVID-19_le_cas_montrealais
In a JAMA study published last July 29, the authors had found that statewide school closures in the first wave of the pandemic led to a decline in the incidence of COVID-19 of 62 percent per week. Similarly, mortality saw a 58 percent decrease per week. States that closed earlier saw the most significant relative change per week. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2769034
According to a study published in Science , looking at various government interventions used against COVID-19, the combination of the closure of schools and universities, limiting gatherings to 10 people or less, and closing most nonessential businesses reduced the reproductive number, R0, to below one. In other words, it led to an overall reduction in the number of infections in the community. Among the interventions listed, school closures and limiting gatherings to 10 people had the highest impact on mitigating the pandemic. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338
A German discussion paper published last July that evaluated the effectiveness of school closures and other pre-lockdown COVID-19 mitigations across three countries, Argentina, Italy and South Korea, found that early interventions that included school closures reduced the total number of COVID-19 deaths and helped flatten the epidemic curve. The authors write, “Our preferred estimates—those that in the main analysis are obtained with the smallest root mean squared prediction error—indicate that the interventions prevented 84%, 29%, and 91% COVID-19 deaths in Argentina, Italy and South Korea, respectively, in comparison to a counterfactual projection. These results are robust across different specifications and show that the effectiveness increases the earlier interventions are enacted. ... The later schools were closed nationwide during the course of the pandemic, the lower the effectiveness of this measure.” https://www.researchgate.net/public...Strategies_in_Argentina_Italy_and_South_Korea
I clicked on 3 of the school study links and got 3 models. If we had some contact tracing results from diverse schools in diverse places to a extent that we could make statistically valid conclusions maybe we could actually learn something useful. And maybe our govt could do something good instead of just failed lock downs and telling us to fearful and mask up.
Once again we are back to Tsing Tao's standard claim of "it only matters if the kids are dead". Let's ignore the long COVID issue, the hospitalizations, the medical costs and everything else involved in kids catching COVID. According to Tsing Tao - unless the kids are dead then it doesn't matter. SAD! Of course, this is coupled with his usual "Prove they got it in school nonsense". Well the study from India with the large sample with full contact tracing and testing of school children in two regions show both that kids spread COVID at school and then kids spread COVID back into their households.