School, Salmaso: “Masks must always be worn”

“The masks must be taken to school, to the desk and out, because the Delta variant spreads with great efficiency. It is showing greater contagiousness in children than the previous variants.” Stefania Salmaso, epidemiologist of the Italian Association of Epidemiology and former director of the National Health Surveillance and Promotion Center of the Higher Institute of Health, says this to Repubblica, according to which, with regard to quarantine, “7 days are foreseen for vaccinated and 10 for the unvaccinated from the last exposure, with a swab at the end of the isolation period. If, on the other hand, the tampon was foreseen earlier, several days of distance learning could be avoided. The American Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, propose a swab 3-4 days after exposure to check if the infection has occurred “. Even the interpretation of “close contact”, Salmaso specifies, does not have a univocal value: “We speak of a distance of less than two meters indoors, even for less than 15 minutes. With the Delta the rules have been made more stringent. It is difficult to understand who is in close contact if we are inside a classroom. We have learned that the virus spreads through aerosols more than we imagined, and the aerosol moves unpredictably indoors. When we talk about ‘bubbles’, we generally refer to classes. The pupils stay together inside them, but without coming into contact with different classes. I also think that it would be important to combine distancing measures with greater information for children, for someone to explain to young people how the infection occurs, what are the situations in which you risk and how vaccines work, not only for the coronavirus. We did it in the days of AIDS. Today we could repeat it, with the help of videos and graphics that are much more effective than before ”. As for salivary tests in some sentinel schools, the epidemiologist explains that “the sampling must follow precise rules. For example, it is necessary to fast for an hour before the swab, otherwise breakfast is instead of the virus ”. Regarding swabs at school to give the Green Pass even to the unvaccinated, “if done right they could help a lot. However, they should be performed periodically, not once. Checkerboard swabs can be made, each time testing a fraction of the children in the class and analyzing multiple samples together to simplify the procedure. There is no shortage of technical solutions “.