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• What actually happened to 'R' in March 2020 as a result of school closures in the UK??
  David J Goldsmith, Eric J Orlowski
  Published on: 24 April 2024

• Published on: 24 April 2024

  What actually happened to 'R' in March 2020 as a result of school closures in the UK??

  • David J Goldsmith, Retired Consultant Physician Retired
  • Other Contributors:
    • Eric J Orlowski, PhD Candidate

  The article by Alastair Munro and colleagues (to which this is a rapid response) is of great value and importance, as we can now see, since this article was published, that there has been considerable discussion and interrogation by the COVID inquiry (https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/), about whether the closure of schools, ordered on 18th March 2020 by Boris Johnson's government, and put into effect two days later on 20th March, was ever necessary.

  The rationale for the closure of schools was that it was imperative that the transmission rate of the COVID-19 pandemic, then rapidly spreading in the UK, was brought down at pace. Only three days later, a full, mandated, "lock down" was imposed. This was in the context of a suite of increasingly draconian measures to impose Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) on an increasingly fretful population - on March 12th, 16th, 20th and 23rd.

  The question we pose of the authors of the current paper under discussion is a simple one. What is the actual, real world, evidence that the 'R' value fell as a result of the closure of schools? Is there any real-world, UK-based, 2020 information we can use to answer this question. This question cannot remotely be answered by reference to other countries, or, to mathematical models. The impact of school closures must also be analysed independently of all of the other contemporaneous NPIs.

  If the o...

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  The article by Alastair Munro and colleagues (to which this is a rapid response) is of great value and importance, as we can now see, since this article was published, that there has been considerable discussion and interrogation by the COVID inquiry (https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/), about whether the closure of schools, ordered on 18th March 2020 by Boris Johnson's government, and put into effect two days later on 20th March, was ever necessary.

  The rationale for the closure of schools was that it was imperative that the transmission rate of the COVID-19 pandemic, then rapidly spreading in the UK, was brought down at pace. Only three days later, a full, mandated, "lock down" was imposed. This was in the context of a suite of increasingly draconian measures to impose Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) on an increasingly fretful population - on March 12th, 16th, 20th and 23rd.

  The question we pose of the authors of the current paper under discussion is a simple one. What is the actual, real world, evidence that the 'R' value fell as a result of the closure of schools? Is there any real-world, UK-based, 2020 information we can use to answer this question. This question cannot remotely be answered by reference to other countries, or, to mathematical models. The impact of school closures must also be analysed independently of all of the other contemporaneous NPIs.

  If the opportunity to test the hypothesis that schools were an important source of inter-generational COVID viral spread were not to have been taken, this would be a tragic lost piece of knowledge which could otherwise have informed the best approach to take for future pandemics in the UK. It is our belief that school closures were a part of the pandemic influenza planning, which it now seems was the only pandemic-related planning that had ever occurred in the UK. COVID-19 as we all well know was much less likely to harm children than pandemic influenza. So the medical benefits to children from school closures would have been minimal, possibly nil, while the societal harms caused by school closures were very significant and long-lasting.

  In our paper ( https://doi.org/10.18103/mra.v11i11.4652) we made a comparison with Sweden, where the withdrawal of in-person education for children aged 15 or less was avoided (except for when teachers were unwell and absent). There is much less evidence of educational and psychological damage to children in Sweden (though detailed formal comparisons are naturally very difficult to conduct in retrospect).

  The authors carefully and professionally detail in their work the significant and long-lasting harms that school closures brought to children in the UK. These impacts are still being felt today, late in 2023. It is important to glean whether the sacrifices that children were forced to make in 2020 and 2021 actually resulted in any net societal gain, which most likely would be seen in the segment of the population aged over 60 (in which around 90% of hospitalisation and deaths occurred).

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  Conflict of Interest:
  None declared.

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