Since Monday, all schoolchildren and middle school students are supposed to have made their return to class, thanks to a simplified health protocol, after a long interruption linked to the epidemic of coronavirus and confinement. The simplification of the protocol, decided by the Ministry of National Education, was based in particular on a pediatric study showing that children were less contaminated with the coronavirus and less contaminant than specialists thought at the beginning of the crisis. A second study made public on Tuesday, and conducted in the six primary schools of the town of Crépy-en-Valois, in Oise, one of the first clusters to appear in France, supports these initial conclusions, noting that children from 6 to 11-year-olds do not transmit Covid-19 to school much, either to other students or to adults.
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All the children of the six schools were tested, as well as their entourage, parents, brothers and sisters. A total of 139 people have contracted the virus, or just over 10% of the panel. In addition, the infected children did not contaminate their classmates.
No or few symptoms
For Arnaud Fontanet, who conducted this study for the Institut Pasteur, these results are very reassuring. "We still have a lot of arguments today to say that children can be infected, but are not very contagious for their immediate environment, at least in school. The other interesting element of this study, is that children had minor forms of the disease when they were infected, about half of them had no symptoms, "he said at the microphone of Europe 1.
And for the other half, some mild symptoms: diarrhea and a little tiredness. In contrast, in families where the children fell ill, 61% of the parents also caught the coronavirus. For researchers at the Institut Pasteur, it is therefore not the school, the place of contamination, but the family home. And they go further in their hypotheses: it is the parents who contaminated their children in most cases, and not the reverse.
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This study therefore supports the resumption of school for all children. On the other hand, in April, a study carried out in the same town of Crépy-en-Valois revealed a high rate of contamination among high school students, around 40%. It is for this reason that the protocol has not been lightened in high schools and that the ministry has not rushed to accelerate this recovery.