Gabrelle Fack Discussion of: Closing Schools?
利用德国2020年暑假和秋假日期的地区差异作为自然实验，估计学校关闭对病毒传播的影响，发现学校关闭和重新开放对病毒传播没有显著影响。
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, school closures have extensively been used by governments as a containment measure to guard against the spread of the virus. On average, countries have experienced 40 weeks of partial or complete school closure during the first 2 years of the pandemic.1 It is therefore very important to weigh the public health benefits of school closures against their negative effects, both for children and their parents. The impact of school closures on the transmission of the virus is however, difficult to establish as these closures are usually implemented along with other containment measures. This paper exploits the regional variation in the dates of summer and autumn school holidays across Germany in 2020 as a natural experiment to disentangle the effect of school closures from the effects of other measures. This quasi-experimental variation provides a credible estimation strategy and findings are reassuring, as they suggest that school closure and reopening did not have a significant impact on the spread of the virus.