School Closures Had No Effect On Transmission in Japan
Back in June of last year, I wrote about a Swedish study which found that keeping schools open had only a minor impact on the spread of Covid. This study was noteworthy because of the rigorous methods it employed to tackle the question at hand.
The authors compared parents whose youngest child was in the last year of lower-secondary school to those whose youngest child was in the first year of upper-secondary school. (Since upper-secondary schools were closed, whereas lower-secondary schools remained open, this allowed them to isolate the impact of school closures.)
They found that there was only one additional positive PCR test per 1,000 parents among those whose youngest child was in the last year of lower-secondary school. This implied, the authors calculated, that keeping schools open led to only 620 additional cases of Covid (in a country that had seen more than 53,000 by the end of the study period).
A Japanese study published in October of last year reaches similar conclusions. Kentaro Fukumoto and colleagues compared the rate of daily new confirmed cases of Covid between municipalities that did and did not implement school closures. (In Japan, this policy was decided at the level of municipalities – of which there are more than 1,700.)
School Closures Had No Effect On Transmission in JapanRead More