![]() ![]() These school closures will have lasting detrimental effects, MacPherson said. Still, while there were some students who struggled with at-home learning, the paper notes that there were probably those who thrived in a virtual-learning environment.ĭespite early data suggesting that COVID-19 did not pose a serious threat to children, school closures continued into 2022. Others, doubtlessly, didn’t attend or learn at all. Some students attended classes virtually. However, one cannot reasonably argue that they were doing their best with no information,” the paper says.Īcross Canada, and even from school to school in the same community, students received vastly different forms of schooling, the study reports. “One can argue that public health officials were well-intentioned but erroneous in their guidance to close schools. ![]() ![]() The paper also argues that public-health officials should have known that school closures were unlikely to be effective policy, based on prior research on influenza and other coronavirus outbreaks, such as the SARS outbreak and the MERS outbreak in the Middle East. “The consensus of available literature … seems to be that school closures may have helped slow the transmission of COVID-19, but not strongly enough to be detected definitively,” the Fraser Institute paper says. However, the research doesn’t suggest these goals were achieved. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. They also would, hopefully, have prevented kids, who already fall ill multiple times per year, from spreading illnesses, including COVID-19, to their parents or grandparents outside the classroom. When schools were closed, the justification was that they would protect children, including those with immune deficiencies, from falling ill while trying to learn. Initial responses had Canadians washing their vegetables when they came home from the grocery store, for example, for fear that the virus was transmitted by surface contamination. “We won’t know the totality of the damage done by the school closures for some time, but what is clear is that governments didn’t use the best information available to them when deciding to close schools, and students have already suffered and will continue to pay the price,” said Paige MacPherson, associate director of education policy at the Fraser Institute and co-author of the study, in a statement.Īt the outset of the pandemic, as public-health officials and politicians were flailing to come up with ways to bring down case counts, there was a remarkable lack of hard evidence about what to do. A new study by the Fraser Institute, a right-leaning non-partisan think tank, aimed to quantify the effects of COVID-era school closures in terms of lost learning time and whether there were appreciable public-health benefits to keeping kids at home. ![]()
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