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Preliminary data indicate that closing schools completely may only have a small effect on limiting the spread of COVID-19, researchers reported yesterday (April 6) in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health.
“Data on the benefit of school closures in the coronavirus outbreak is limited, but what we know shows that their impact is likely to be only small,” one of the study coauthors, Russell Viner, a professor of adolescent health at University College London, tells the BBC. The team notes that more research needed to be done to confirm the result.
To draw this conclusion, Viner and colleagues performed a meta-analysis of 16 studies, nine of them peer-reviewed publications and seven of them preprints. The papers reported on school closures as part of containment measures against the first SARS outbreak in 2003 or against COVID-19, modeled the transmission of SARS, and analyzed the effect of ...
