There is “intense transmission” of the coronavirus among 17- and 18-year-olds, the government’s deputy chief medical officer said today.
Speaking at a Downing Street briefing this morning, Jonathan Van-Tam contrasted this with “very low rates of increase in infection” in school-age children up to the age of 16.
His comments come the day after Britain’s largest teaching union called for action over “significant” increases in Covid-19 cases among pupils aged 10 and older.
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Professor Van-Tam was asked this morning: “Human contact, of course, doesn’t just take place in hospitality…How about the measures of transmission going on in educational settings? How worried are you about that when there’s no restrictions on that currently?”
He replied: “To your particular question about education, actually if you salami slice the infection data very carefully across the school-age bands, what you actually see is very low rates of increase in infection up to around the age of 16, and then picking up a bit in the 17- to 18-year-olds, as we drift into that age bracket, which I’ve already described, of really quite intense transmission.
“So the evidence that there is significant transmission in schools is not really borne out by the increased infection rates, and indeed we already know that children are not drivers of infection and spread in the community in the same way that we know they are for influenza, for example - hence our children’s flu vaccine programme, which is so important - and therefore it’s a different illness that we are dealing with.”
