Closing Schools in the Pandemic Was Bad. Keeping Them All Open Would Have Been Worse.

The debate over school closures during the pandemic is infected with myths, misinformation and ignorance. “What would have happened had schools remained open without any mitigation measures?” asked New York neurologist and psychiatrist Jonathan Howard recently. “One obvious answer,” Howard observes, “is that nearly all children would have gotten COVID, as would everyone they live with, and most school employees.” The number of deaths among children younger than 18, which the CDC pegs at 1,853, “would have been higher had 60 (million) to 70 million unvaccinated children contracted the virus over several months’ time in 2020. It’s reasonable to assume that several thousand children would have died.” Read the article from Governing here.