Can closing schools slow pandemic?

Suddenly, every country in the world has to decide whether or not to close schools to slow the Covid-19 pandemic. France will, as of Monday; the UK won’t, and so on. Within federal systems like the US and Germany, states or school districts have to make the decision. In Germany, tiny Saarland is shuttering its schools, while other states are holding off. Who’s right and who’s wrong?
The short answer is: It’s complicated. In some cases, it does make sense to close schools. But in the absence of a runaway outbreak, as in northern Italy, there is also a case against closing kindergartens and schools for young children.
There’s certainly no disagreement that the pandemic, which no country can hope to avoid or lock out (that’s what “pandemic” means), must be slowed as much as possible. Even if, theoretically, 100% of the population is destined to become infected eventually, it helps to spread out the caseload. A spike can overwhelm hospitals. This can put doctors with scarce resources in a position of having to triage whom to try to save. With a slow progression, by contrast, more of those with severe symptoms can hope for decent treatment, and lives will be saved.
Nor is there disagreement that the best way to slow the spread of the virus, besides obvious measures like more hand-washing, is to reduce and even eliminate social mixing. No matter the
economic cost, no matter
the damper on conviviality, many events — from trade fairs to birthday parties and soccer matches, and probably even the Olympics — should be called off. Where possible, people should, for the time being, eat in and work from home.
But schools are different, in several ways. First, the coronavirus, for reasons we don’t yet understand, seems not to make children very sick. So the young are not the primary population needing to be protected for their own sake. But the spread among the young can accelerate the epidemiological math of the overall outbreak. At some point — and this is the logic of the British coronavirus strategy — a majority of children will have been exposed, knowingly or not, and will have built up antibodies to it.
—Bloomberg

Andreas Kluth is a member of Bloomberg’s editorial board. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist