Schools ‘extremely safe’ but parents need to gain confidence: Health Minister

The staged return to class of NSW students is based on evidence, but parents still need time to be convinced, Health Minister says.

Phoenix Crawford does school work at home in Sydney. Picture: Getty Images

The staged return to class of all NSW students for at least one day a week from May 11 is based on evidence that schools are “extremely safe”, but parents still need time to be convinced, NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard says.

“The health advice is pretty clear … Some parents are still reluctant, some parents are desperate to get back to school,” Mr Hazzard said on Sunday

He added: “So somewhere we need to build confidence.”

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard. Picture: David Swift

Much of the debated around the safety of schools in the coronavirus crisis was “all getting a bit silly”,” Mr Hazzard said. But the health advice needed to consider “not just the physical but also the psychological” concerns and parents needed to be reassured the NSW government was acting on “the top of the top medical advice”.

The policy shift on NSW schools followed the release on Sunday of a report by the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, which concluded there was no evidence children had infected teachers with COVID-19 in NSW schools. Half of all confirmed cases at the schools studied were teachers.

The lead investigator of the report, Professor Kristine Macartney, said the “extraordinarily low rates of transmission” at schools should reassure educators and parents it was safe for students to return to the classroom.

Professor Macartney's investigation, commissioned by NSW Health and the Education Department, tracked all 18 cases of COVID-19 among students and teachers across 15 schools in March.

Professor Macartney said the report — the largest of its kind in the world — reinforced the findings of earlier studies in China, Iceland, the Netherlands and the World Health Organisation that children were not “super spreaders” of the virus.

She said compared to the other viruses such as influenza, where children were recognised super spreaders, one of the “rather surprising” features of COVID-19 was that it was “behaving very differently”.

Of the two known infected students in the study, one was in high school and had been in contact with another infected student. A primary school child who tested positive appeared to have caught the virus from a teacher.

Professor Macartney said it was important to stage the reopening of schools so infection rates could be carefully monitored.

“This is a brand new virus for us we have got so much to learn,” she said.

The return to school was “just part of a way to get to know the virus better and learning to live with it as it is”.