School closures have little impact on COVID-19 control, review finds

Ya think?

Are the school closures only for Tokyo? In my Japanese area the children are supposed to go back to elementary schools on Monday.

It seems nonsensical, knowing what we know now, to apply half measures with a pandemic like this one.

The study has valid criticism since it makes a lot of assumptions without proper basis, for example asymptomatic carriers were not common during the SARS epidemic and this would have a huge impact on the effects of keeping schools open or not, this feels like a purely sociological approach without input from epidemiology experts. Conclusions are not as strong as they are presented.

Especially when all those same kids gather on hoards to play/hang out together anyway.

"Data...are limited...."

That is an important statement. In other words, the conclusion of the article may be completely wrong. Also, this disease hits older people disproportionately, so what happens to bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and teachers who are exposed to infected but asymptomatic children? And what if the conclusion of the article, with its limited data, is wrong, and many more children die than otherwise would have? Will the authors then go, "Oops, sorry!"

The researchers considered that specifically

That is a very different thing. The effect of low transmissibility and high attack rates are heavily dependent on cased being detected and traced, the authors have no information on attack rates of children, only on identified cases, if children are commonly asymptomatic and asymptomatic patients transmit the disease with much less efficiency as symptomatic patients (as it appear to be the case), then the attack rates in children can actually be quite high, and the transmissibility low, exactly the situation where closing the schools is more effective.

This is precisely what I meant with baseless assumptions, to assume that children are not being infected just because not many have symptoms of the infection, and that every contagion was caused by them comes from the very small number that did got seriously sick. Without a proper epidemiological analysis with identification of asymptomatic patients this is not justified.

Most important questions: Who funded this research?

That could well influence the level of bias in the results.

@Ashley: I feel for you. Problem with Japan is if the schools reopen and you decide to not let your child go, they won't see your side of it.