Open Schools, Covid-19, and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden

doi:10.1056/nejmc2101280

Cited by 18 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…These findings are especially important in light of the preponderance of the evidence suggesting that schools can generally reopen safely in person and that schools are not major contributors to overall community transmission or COVID-19 hospitalizations (Christakis, Van Cleve, and Zimmerman, 2020;Harris, Ziedan, and Hassig, 2021;Honein, Barrios, and Brooks, 2021;Ludvigsson et al, 2021;Oster, 2020;UNICEF, 2020). At the same time, recent data suggest that keeping schools closed for in-person instruction in 2020 has had unintended consequences ranging from substantial learning losses to mental health issues (Christakis, Van Cleve, and Zimmerman, 2020;Green, 2021;Lee, 2020;McKinsey and Company, 2020;UNICEF, 2020;Varas, Menon, and Bellafiore, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…UNICEF (2020:5) reported that "data from 191 counties collected from February to September 2020 show no consistent association between school reopening status and COVID-19 infection rates." Ludvigsson et al (2021) examined data from Sweden, a country that largely kept schools open in person in 2020, found that 0.90 children between the ages of 7 and 16 per 100,000 were admitted to an ICU for Covid-19 and that "no child with Covid-19 died." Ludvigsson et al (2021) also found that the sex-and age-adjusted risk ratio of intensive care among schoolteachers was 0.43 relative to other occupations excluding healthcare workers.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ludvigsson et al (2021) examined data from Sweden, a country that largely kept schools open in person in 2020, found that 0.90 children between the ages of 7 and 16 per 100,000 were admitted to an ICU for Covid-19 and that "no child with Covid-19 died." Ludvigsson et al (2021) also found that the sex-and age-adjusted risk ratio of intensive care among schoolteachers was 0.43 relative to other occupations excluding healthcare workers. Billingsley et al (2020) also examined data from Sweden and noted that "one other finding worth discussing on its own is the low Covid-19 mortality risk of children's and adolescents' teachers.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

DeAngelis

Makridis

2021

Social Science Quarterly

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Objective. The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread school closures affecting millions of K-12 students in the United States in the spring of 2020. Groups representing teachers have pushed to reopen public schools virtually in the fall because of concerns about the health risks associated with reopening in person. In theory, stronger teachers' unions may more successfully influence public school districts to reopen without in-person instruction. Methods. We examine the relationship between teachers' union strength and the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States using regression analyses. Results. We find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers' unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control semiparametrically for differences in local demographic characteristics. These results are robust to four measures of union strength, various potential confounding characteristics, a further disaggregation to the county level, and various analytic techniques and datasets. We do not find evidence that measures of COVID-19 risk are correlated with school reopening decisions. Conclusion. Our findings that school closures are uncorrelated with the actual incidence of the virus, but are rather strongly associated with unionization, implies that the decision to close schools has been a political-not scientific-decision.School reopening-when and how to do it-has become one of the largest and most politicized policy deliberations amid the coronavirus pandemic. At least 55 million students from over 120,000 public and private schools have been affected by closures since March 2020. 1 While only time will tell the ramifications that the absence of in-person learning will have on students' human capital development, a large body of literature suggests that higher academic achievement is associated with improved life outcomes (e.g., Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, 2014;Hanushek, 2011). However, Gross and Opalka (2020) found that only about one-third of the 477 public school districts operating remotely in their analysis required teachers to deliver remote instruction, as opposed to no instruction, in the spring of 2020. They also found that less than half of the districts expected teachers to take attendance or check in with students regularly.School closures have had an even more immediate effect on the U.S. labor market. Because roughly 32 percent of households have children under the age of 14 living with them, coupled with the collapse in the childcare market (Ali, Herbst, and Makridis, 2021), the inability to reopen schools will necessarily affect the ability for the United States to fully reopen its labor market and attain traditional levels of full-time employment since many parents will be unable to return to work.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

DeAngelis

Makridis

2021

Social Science Quarterly

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“…By many measures, South Korea is in fact a 'more' restrictive country. As explained in one of the letters, 3 it had one of the longest school closures in the world, and school closures are considered as one of the strictest NPI as the recent heated debate over this measure has shown (eg see 8,9 ). This idea is even reinforced by looking at the stringency index 10 for all specified countries as calculated by OurWorldInData, 11 we can see that South Korea is one of the countries that implemented much stricter NPIs during the time period examined (see Figure 1).…”

Section: Country Classificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges in determining causality: An ongoing critique of Bendavid et al’s ‘Assessing mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID‐19’

Besançon

Meyerowitz-Katz

Chini

et al. 2021

Eur J Clin Investigation

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We are happy to respond to Bendavid et al. on the matter of their paper [1] (the authors, henceforth). Given the subject matter impacts on lives across the globe, we are pleased to have the opportunity to continue this worthwhile discussion. While the authors have written a response [2] to our initial concerns [3,4,5], we feel that it falls short in a number of key ways, and thus the paper still does not propose a useful assessment of the efficacy of Non‐Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) against COVID‐19.

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“…This paper proposes a good indicator of the pandemic by the number of daily deaths instead of the number of cases. The number of daily deaths due to COVID-19 is a really good indicator for policymakers (Takefuji 2021 ). However, the average lag between daily COVID-19 cases and deaths was 8 days (Jin 2021 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deathdaily: A Python Package Index for predicting the number of daily COVID-19 deaths

Takefuji

2022

Netw Model Anal Health Inform Bioinforma

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This paper presents a new open-source program called deathdaily for predicting the number of daily COVID-19 deaths in the next 7 days. The predictions can be used by policymakers to determine whether current policies should be strengthened/mitigated or new policies should be challenged to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Although vaccines have been mitigating the pandemic initially, the recent resurgence with new variants has been observed in many vaccinated countries. This paper shows how to use deathdaily to detect symptoms of resurgence. The proposed deathdaily is available in public and can be installed by a Python package manager PyPI. The deathdaily has been downloaded by 15,964 users worldwide, according to https://pepy.tech/project/deathdaily . The fact shows that the applicability, practicality, and usefulness of the proposed program have been duly evaluated.

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Open Schools, Covid-19, and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden

Cited by 18 publications

References 45 publications

Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

Challenges in determining causality: An ongoing critique of Bendavid et al’s ‘Assessing mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID‐19’

Deathdaily: A Python Package Index for predicting the number of daily COVID-19 deaths

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