Children almost never passed Covid infections in school, a study published Friday reveals.
In fall 2021, in four Massachusetts school districts with 18,000 children, researchers found 44 potential cases of in-school transmission.
You read that right.
18,000 students. 34 schools. Four months. And 44 Covid infections - including no infections of teachers or other staff members.
Throughout 2020 and 2021, as parents pressed with increasing urgency to reopen classrooms, teachers unions and Democratic politicians warned in-school Covid transmission would lead to waves of death. “Teachers are so worried about returning to school that they’re preparing wills,” CNN infamously wrote on July 16, 2020.
In reality, schools were among the safest possible places for students and teachers during Covid, this study suggests.
The study, which ran in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Health Forum, is both nearly useless and vital.
It’s nearly useless in advancing our actual knowledge about Covid- because serious researchers have known since 2020 that children spread Covid much less frequently than adults and that schools and camps were likely to be major sources of new Covid cases.
As early as April 11, 2020, French researchers published a paper showing that an infected nine-year-old child had not transmitted the disease “despite close interactions within schools.” By August 2020, researchers in Spain and Sweden had confirmed that finding on a much larger scale.
The reason is obvious too, since it is the same reason kids get much less sick than adults. They have lower viral loads and clear the infection more quickly. For many healthy children, Covid is barely even a cold.
Yet the new paper is also vital.
Why? Because it covers American schools and was published in an American journal. And the American Covid-political-medical complex has had the habit for three-plus years of simply ignoring any research from outside the United States, especially if it includes inconvenient data and facts.
And so having concrete American evidence that schools were not in any way meaningful vectors for Covid transmission can only help to make sure the colossal mistake of mass school closures never happens again.
Too bad it comes far too late to matter to the kids in blue states who in some cases were denied over a year of in-person education.
Alex Berenson is a former New York Times reporter and the author of 13 novels, three non-fiction books, and the Unreported Truths booklets. His newest book, PANDEMIA, on the coronavirus and our response to it, was published in November 2021.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/kids-almost-never-transmitted-covid
