Professor Philip Nolan:

I want to say something and Dr. Glynn may want to expand on it. We have seen an increase in cases in children, not transmissions. Children are getting it from adults but there is very little evidence of child to adult transmission outside of the household, where it does occur, and very little evidence of child to child transmission. We had 100 cases last week in children. We will see 100 cases next week and the week after and they will be back in school. It is really important not to overreact when cases are detected in school. It is really important that we give public health colleagues the space and respect to allow them to manage any given school cluster or outbreak differently. In no other walk of life and no other branch of medicine does one expect the full plan to be set out in advance. We do not ask cardiologists what the plan will be if I have a heart attack next week. It depends on the type of heart attack and it depends on a whole lot of co-morbidities. It is exactly the same with schools. The appropriate reaction to an outbreak in a school depends on the nature of the outbreak and the setting. We simply have to trust public health colleagues, because they have not let us down before, to properly manage those outbreaks rather than ask them for a specific, precise protocol in advance. There are broad protocols and principles there but we cannot say what is going to happen in any given setting this week. We just do not know.