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The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) has investigated the role of schools in the pandemic.
An analysis of registration data and studies suggest that students “tend not to play a greater role as a 'motor'”.
But there are also transmissions with them.
This emerges from an RKI publication published on Thursday.
Teachers play “perhaps a more important role” than students, it is said.
It can be assumed that their contact pattern differs from that of the students, for example through encounters in the classroom and with parents.
Outbreaks in schools are usually small and about half are limited to the year or classes, the scientists found.
Larger outbreaks - in one case with 55 cases - do occur, but are "a rare occurrence overall".
The main focus of the investigation was on infections in schools that were reported to the RKI between the beginning of August and mid-December, i.e. between the end of the summer holidays in the first federal states and the start of the tightened nationwide lockdown.
School breakouts are therefore closely related to the incidence (number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants) in the population.
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