Kids don't "bring home bugs" every school season, they become infected with viruses, fall ill, and transmit those viruses to their family members.
*blinks*
What do you think "bring home bugs" means?
And no, it's not just viruses; it's also bacteria (strep in particular). That's why I used a colloquialism that is accurate, rather than a more precise wording that isn't.
All indications say this statement is almost entirely false. Asymptomatic zombie covid kids wandering around does not appear to be happening.
I have yet to see any actual analysis. Everything I've seen has been opinions based on very crude data — either:
A. Making assumptions based on low positivity. This is meaningless, because kids get sick more often than adults, because their immune systems aren't quite so well trained at handling random crap that gets thrown at them; the resulting higher rates of testing inherently drive positivity rates down.
B. Making assumptions based on low symptomatic case rates. Asymptomatic carriers don't typically get tested unless they know that they were exposed to someone who is symptomatic. This results in a lower rate of detection among subgroups that are much less likely to show symptoms.
Short of random testing showing rates at or below the community, you don't have evidence; you have speculation. And even if you do see rates at or below the community levels, that still isn't enough, because you're still making assumptions about whether families with kids take risks at the same rate as the community (which almost certainly isn't true). To make a valid comparison, you have to control for all of those things, which basically means ignoring the data from families that aren't self-isolating so that you can get an actual, verifiable rate of community transmission in the schools.
And we need that data not just in places with relatively few new cases per capita (New York in October), but also in places with relatively high numbers of cases per capita (North Dakota now). I'm pretty sure that the data just plain doesn't exist, unfortunately, and IMO, it seems dubious to try to draw conclusions from the limited data that is available.
There's little question that if you compare two groups of families, both of whom self-isolate, one of whom have kids who are getting in-person education, the other of whom have kids who are getting distance education, the group whose kids are getting in-person education will have higher rates of coronavirus. The question is how much higher, and whether those numbers are worth the reduced quality of education.
Unfortunately, the answer to the last part of that question depends highly on the school district, the parents' education level, whether the kids have good access to solid Internet connections, whether the teachers are doing a good job of doing education online, etc.; it's probably an almost impossible question to answer.
