According to leading immunologist, Professor Christine Loscher of Dublin City University, schools across the country should close up early for Christmas this Friday, in order to lessen the spread of Covid-19 over the Christmas period.
Professor Loscher expressed that if children were to finish up school on Friday, as opposed to next Wednesday, December 22, this would create a “really long circuit breaker,” meaning children would have an extra long period away from the classroom, where they could potentially pick up the virus, before visiting relatives over the Christmas period.
She also noted that this strategy might prevent the schools from being forced to close in the new year, due to worsening case figures.
“The last thing we want to be doing, is to worry about opening schools and my opinion, the kids are in for two and a half days next week. If the schools close this Friday, we have a really long circuit breaker for those children,” Professor Loscher said on RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne programme.
Continuing, she said, “If Omicron is two to three times more transmissible, we know that it’s 10% or 11% of cases at the moment – that’s going to increase next week. That could be up to 50-60% next week and we have the biggest cohort of unvaccinated people — i.e. children — we will have them mixing to a huge extent coming up to Christmas before we do intergenerational mixing.”
Loscher says that if children finish up for school this Friday, that will give them seven to eight days without being exposed to Covid-19 in the classroom. If they have contracted the virus from classmates this week, the symptoms will have shown themselves by Christmas day, she says.
This news comes after it was announced last week by the Department of Education that they have no intention of closing the schools early for Christmas.
