Teachers’ risk of being admitted to hospital doubled after return to schools

TEACHERS’ risk of being hospitalised with Covid more than doubled after remote learning ended and schools in Scotland reopened for the autumn term last year, according to a new study.

Researchers also found that teachers working in secondary schools were more likely to end up in hospital with the virus than those working in primary or nursery school settings.

However, they caution that over the course of the pandemic as a whole, including when schools were open, teachers were at lower risk of severe Covid resulting in an intensive care admission than the general population.

Their overall incidence of a hospital admission between March 2020 and the end of July 2021 was also similar to the average for working age adults, at less than one per cent.

The authors of the study, published today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), said their findings “should reassure most adults engaged in in-person teaching”.

The research, led by scientists at Public Health Scotland and Glasgow University, counted a total of 128 hospital admissions, including five ICU admissions, among teachers over the study period.

Demographically, teachers had an average age of 42, 80 per cent were female, and 84% had no co-morbidities.

However, once the data was adjusted to account for variables such as age, sex, ethnicity, deprivation and pre-existing illness, teachers still had a 50% lower likelihood of being hospitalised with Covid during the period when schools were closed in spring and summer of 2020 compared to other working age adults aged 21 to 65.

However, the risk for teachers specifically was 2.4 times higher during the autumn term, when schools reopened, than earlier in the year when schools were closed.

“This increase suggests that the risk to teachers during the autumn 2020 term was similar to that in the general population,” the report said.

Overall they found that secondary school teachers were roughly 35 per cent more likely than other workingage adults to be hospitalised with Covid during this time, while primary school teachers were either at the same or lower risk.

However, the researchers noted that the margin of error for these estimates was wide. By the time schools had fully reopened for the summer term in 2021, when the Delta variant was spreading but vaccine rollout was at an advanced stage, teachers overall had a 15 per cent lower risk of being hospitalised with the coronavirus.

Nonetheless, the risk remained 1.7 times higher than when schools were closed in 2020, which researchers said was probably due to fewer contacts and the “protective effect of working at home rather than a harmful effect of working in a school setting”.

No increased risk of severe Covid was found in either period.