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Why some experts believe children hold the key to ending coronavirus lockdown

An expert in infectious disease modelling believes the key to bringing Australia out of lockdown could be allowing children to become infected by coronavirus.

More than 6,300 people are confirmed to have coronavirus in Australia as of Monday morning and it has claimed 61 lives.

Australians want to know when will lockdown measures be pulled back – when we’ll be allowed to go out and visit our friends – and what the long-term plan is for overcoming this global pandemic.

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Professor Emma McBryde from James Cook University said we can’t be so risk averse that we just keep doing what we're doing because that has its own risks.

“If we do everything we possibly can to make sure that no one dies from coronavirus, people are going to start dying from other things,” the disease modeller told 60 Minutes.

She says one option is to carefully allow the infection to spread in select low-risk groups.

“Children could be the key to getting out of lockdown,” she said.

“They are not only less vulnerable to severe disease, they also may well be less infectious and less likely to become symptomatic”.

A man holds his daughter's hand while walking her to school.
Kids might hold the key to ending lockdown, some experts believe. Source: Getty Images (file pic)

Australian National University microbiology expert Professor Peter Collignon added “all the available evidence” around the world is that children under the age of 15 “rarely” get the virus or suffer from complications.

Of Australia’s coronavirus cases, the lowest numbers represented are those from the group aged 90 and older. The second lowest numbers of cases is the group aged 0-9.

When asked by 60 Minutes if opening schools might be the way to go, Professor Collignon said it “might be the first good experiment”.

He believes children could be used to spread the virus and boost immunity.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has not moved to lock down Australia’s schools and Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan said on Sunday all schools will open for term two.

State and territory schools are taking different approaches, but all remain open except those on school holidays.

In NSW and Victoria students are being told to stay at home if they can, while WA and the NT are encouraging parents to send children.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said the state can’t have “a million students moving around the Victorian community every day”.

Phoenix Crawford does school work on a laptop while being home-schooled by his mum Donna Eddy in Sydney.
Sydney kid Phoenix Crawford does some home-schooling on a laptop under the watchful eye of his mum Donna Eddy. Source: Getty Images

Quashing the herd immunity talk

Australia’s health authorities have all but wiped out any talk of herd immunity, believing it could have dire consequences.

Herd immunity, sometimes referred to as community immunity, is a scenario that a sufficient proportion of a population is immune to an infectious disease, making its spread from person to person unlikely.

Deputy Chief Medical officer Michael Kidd told ABC News Radio on Sunday “a very large number of people would be severely unwell and a very large number of people would die” if Australia attempted it.

People wearing face masks walk in the empty streets of Sydney's central business district on Easter Saturday.
A couple walk through Sydney's CBD on Saturday. Source: Getty Images

His thoughts on the process echo those of Virologist Professor Ian Mackay, from The University of Queensland, told Yahoo News Australia last week during a Q&A “it would kill a lot of people”.

“I think the UK really quickly wound that [idea] back after some modelling showed how bad that would be,” he told Yahoo News Australia.

Professor Mackay believes the virus will eventually become like the common cold to most people and pointed out “it does really not much at all” to the wider population.

He said the hope was a vaccine would be developed.

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