Member-only story
Swedish Public Health Agency guidance helped schools stay open. CDC guidance did the opposite.
The disease control agency‘s March 2020 guidance was an exercise in equivocation.
In March 2020, as governments around the world were essentially panicking in response to the rapidly escalating pandemic, the United States CDC issued a brief document entitled “Considerations for School Closure.” Many individuals might be surprised to learn that the document did not explicitly encourage school districts to shutter their buildings — it more nuanced. I want to share and unpack this document, because I think it’s important to begin to litigate why U.S. schoolchildren suffered from the rich world’s longest school closures. A few days ago, I shared and discussed a March 2020 Web page on the same topic from the Swedish Public Health Agency. Today, I will analyze CDC guidance about schools from the same month.
Because CDC’s archive tool is fairly appalling and borderline impossible to use, I put a link from a March 14, 2020 CNN article on the school closure issue into the archive(dot)today Web site in order to generate an important artifact from the early days of the pandemic.
A major difference between this CDC guidance and that issued by the Swedish Public Health Agency is that the Swedish guidance was much more explicit about the ineffectiveness of school closures, essentially ruling them out.
The Swedish Public Health Agency considers that the suspension of healthy school children is not an effective measure. It is unlikely that healthy children would cause the spread of infection. None of the outbreaks we have seen so far of coronavirus are linked to schools or children. There is also no conclusive scientific evidence that the suspension of healthy school children or the closure of schools would reduce the risk of the spread of infection in society even if school children were infected.
In contrast, CDC’s guidance was an exercise in equivocation. Unlike the Swedish guidance, which basically rejected keeping healthy children out of school, CDC was more non-committal and said “there is a role for school closure” and discussed the potential value of varying lengths of school closures from “a few days” to “4–8 weeks or…
