As the coronavirus has made its way around the world, more than 160 countries have closed schools. Nearly 90 percent of the world’s student population is now out of class.
In Taiwan, Singapore and Australia — and a few states in the US — school is still in.
That policy decision is becoming harder to justify by the day. Singapore recently reported a pair of coronavirus clusters linked to government-sponsored preschools. Australian teachers are considering a strike.
Photo: EPA-EFE
In defense of keeping schools open, officials in the few holdouts say that they can contain the outbreak without taking a radical action that, they fear, could do more harm than good.
They cite early medical research that children are not as affected as the virus and concern about the stresses of having children at home for working parents already facing deep economic uncertainty.
After Singapore’s recent school-based outbreaks, the city-state agreed to move to a four-day school week, but Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) appeared to rule out a nationwide shutdown.
“I think we should look at schools as individual schools rather than one whole system,” he said. “We confine and we rub out that cluster, but it does not mean that I must shut the whole system down.”
Australia banned people from going to most public gathering places last week.
Yet closing educational facilities might not have the same effect on containment, the country’s deputy chief medical officer said, and could worsen the strain on the healthcare system as the government estimates that 30 percent of essential health workers would have to stay home to supervise their children.
“We know that without closing schools the burden on the healthcare workforce already exists,” said Rochelle Wynne, professor of nursing for Western Sydney local health district. “There’s going to be a massive shortage — over 10,000 critical care nurses are needed to be redeployed from other areas to meet the demand, and that’s just critical care beds alone.”
In Europe, schools are mostly closed but governments have attempted to keep some facilities running for the children of healthcare workers.
Singapore says the emerging science on the virus supports its decision to keep schools open in the city-state.
The virus does not affect the young as much as adults, Singaporean Minister of Education Ong Ye Kung (王乙康) said, citing advice by Dale Fisher, a professor and chair of the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.
“A lot of the swabs that we have taken from family clusters have shown that while the parents might have had the disease and had symptoms, the children are completely well, even though they tested positive,” Fisher said in an article in the Straits Times.
Other research suggests that children are in no way immune to serious symptoms and complications.
One pre-publication study of more than 2,000 pediatric patients with the coronavirus in China reported that the virus was generally less severe in young people, but “young children, particularly infants, are vulnerable.”
Research is not yet conclusive on whether infected children are contagious, and if so, how contagious they are.
If this was a flu outbreak, said Benjamin Cowling, head of the epidemiology division at Hong Kong University, “closing schools would have a big effect on transmission, because children are more susceptible to infection and more contagious when infected, but for COVID-19, the potential effect is not so clear.”
The decision to close schools is often as controversial as the decision to keep them open. In Washington state, where the coronavirus first took hold in the US, Washington Governor Jay Inslee extended two-week local closures to a six-week statewide shutdown.
The biggest obstacle to closing schools is a question of equity, said Jason Tan, an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University’s National Institute of Education in Singapore.
Not everyone has a laptop or a tablet to support online learning, and remote instruction is a challenge for younger children regardless.
Low-income families could miss out on free school meals.
While public anxiety is rising in Singapore and Australia over a surge in infections, Taiwan has kept schools open without seeing a spike in virus cases.
The nation of almost 24 million reported its first case of the coronavirus in January.
At the time, Taiwan extended its school break to late February. Mask rationing and distribution, strict testing and up to NT$1 million (US$33,058) fines for breaching quarantine have resulted in the nation reporting just more than 300 cases.
Schools have remained open without interruption since students returned on Feb. 25, but heightened measures have been in place.
Schools with more than 1,000 students are required to have at least 10 entrance lanes for temperature checks and dividers are placed on students’ desks to separate them.
“It’s really a tough decision to make. There are public health concerns about transmission because so many people gather in schools, but it’s not a straightforward thing to do,” Tan said.
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