That was, and is, true. But now that Grandma and Grandpa have had widespread opportunities to get vaccinated, the risk to them has been substantially diminished.
Back to the kids: This summer, we have at hand the results of studies, discussed in a report published by Nature.com on July 7, that show that the risk to kids was even smaller than expected. Even the risk to Grandma and Grandpa, as it turns out.
A study published Jan. 26 in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report dealt with 17 K-12 schools in Wood County, Wisconsin. “The research team observed 191 COVID-19 cases in staff and students during 13 weeks in the autumn of 2020, a time of high transmission for that area. Only seven of those cases seemed to originate in the schools,” Nature.com wrote.
“Among 900,000 in-school pupils learning in North Carolina last fall, researchers would have expected, based on local transmission rates, about 900 cases of COVID. There were, it turned out, only 23,” New York Magazine wrote. “In another study, among 20,000 Nebraska students attending school all year there were, in total, two cases.”
The kids were safer than we thought, even when vaccines were unavailable, to them or anybody else.
Now that their parents and grandparents have had multiple chances to get vaccinated, and so many of them have gotten the jab, the kids should be back in their classrooms when September comes around.
