School closures should be used as a last resort to control the spread of Covid-19 according to researchers as a new study found there was a limited spread of the virus in schools in Ireland during the pandemic.
The study by HSE personnel found that less than 3% of close contacts in school with people infected with the Sars-CoV2 virus during the 2020-21 school year had tested positive for Covid-19.
“The school outbreaks that we detected were generally small with 92% of outbreaks each comprising less than 10 cases,” said one of the report’s authors, Ciara Kelly of the HSE’s Health Protection Surveillance Centre.
