The surging omicron variant is creating pressure for schools to return to remote learning. But closing schools would be a tragic mistake, creating far more harm in exchange for little to no public health benefit. Even short-term closures can create long term harms for children played out over a generation of lost opportunities.
Before Covid, the standard pandemic playbook assumed a virus would be deadlier to children and more contagious. Under those assumptions, closing schools would protect students and slow transmission. But now we know that Covid behaves differently. Children have the lowest, not the highest, risk of disease severity and death.
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