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School closures thus cause extensive health harm to children. There is no good substitute for in-person schooling, as the events of last spring demonstrated and as Ontario parents are seeing again this week. Remote teaching leads to worse learning outcomes and increases socioeconomic disparities.
Public health scholar Dimitri Christakis and co-authors quantified some of the health harm from U.S. school closures in a study recently published in a journal of the American Medical Association. The findings suggest that early deaths due to school closures last spring will cost U.S. children 13.8 million life years. To put this number in some context, the study also estimated that the 88,241 COVID deaths in the U.S. during the same period cost 1.5 million life years.
How many life years would Ontario’s children gain if schools were opened now as opposed to weeks or months later? Until the Ontario government is pressured to give an answer, closing schools will remain the safer option politically. We stare at daily scorecards of COVID cases and deaths, whereas the early deaths caused by school closures are not yet counted.
The moment the Ontario government is forced to acknowledge this simple fact — that opening schools will save lives by improving the current and future health status of our children — the politics of school closures change markedly.
From then on, it will be apparent that casting advocates of school reopening as callous toward human lives has been deeply mistaken. Keeping kids from school poses a far greater public health threat than does reopening schools.
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