Teachers are not at higher risk of infection, claims expert

TEACHERS ARE not at an increased risk of contracting coronavirus, an expert has said, amid calls from the profession to be considered as a priority for the vaccine.

The NASUWT teachers’ union is calling for all teachers and education staff to be prioritised for the Covid- 19 jabs to save lives and to help get children back to school.

It argues that it is in the national interest for teachers to be prioritised in the roll- out of the vaccination programme.

However, Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, told the PA news agency there was no data to suggest teachers were at greater risk.

Speaking as an independent researcher, and not in an advisory role, he said: “In terms of whether teachers are at risk, there’s been a number of studies on this now and teachers, as a profession, are not at more risk than many other professions, are certainly not at elevated risk either of getting infected in the first place or having a bad outcome of infection.”

He added that teachers who were at high risk would already be covered by the priority lists.

Prof Woolhouse said that while children are infectious, most do not show symptoms and most experts consider children to be about a third as infectious as adults, depending on the age of the child.

He added: “When infections do occur in people in schools, whether they’re staff or students, that does not necessarily mean they got the infection in the school environment.

“So it’s perfectly possible for a teacher or school child to get infected outside the school.

“Every teacher that has turned positive in the UK in recent months, not all those teachers will have got infected in the school environment.”