Child health-care experts say keeping children from school won't stop them from contracting the virus. Stock image.With education officials and teacher unions still at loggerheads on whether it is safe to reopen schools amid the coronavirus pandemic, child health-care experts have stressed it is near impossible to prevent children from getting the virus. Depriving children of heading back to school was therefore pointless, the experts said.
“We need to move away from the idea, and the sooner we do so, the better for everyone that we are going to prevent children from getting infected from the coronavirus,” said Professor Shabir Madhi who specialises in vaccinology at the University of the Witwatersrand. “We have never been able to prevent children from getting infected from RSV or influenza which causes more children to die [than the coronavirus],” he said.