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Comment by globular-toast | Hacker News Reader

Mathematics professors know as much about the spread of disease as anyone else here.

The UK is taking measures. The public has been educated and told to stay at home if they show symptoms. If people were uneducated they'd be at work with a slight cough spreading it around. There's a strong social stigma in the UK to not take absence due to a cold. So this is a big deal.

At the end of the day, there's no evidence that the measures other countries are taking will work either. There is a strong argument that closing schools will impact the NHS, even though children aren't very at risk. Other countries are essentially on lockdown indefinitely right now because none of the isolated people have been exposed.

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> There is a strong argument that closing schools will impact the NHS, even though children aren't very at risk.

This is a complete moot point. Other countries have implemented free childcare for healthcare workers when schools are shut. There is no reason why the UK cannot do this for NHS staff.

And because children are not at risk of developing serious symptoms, they can be a huge reservoir for the virus, which then infects the middle-aged and elderly.

> Other countries have implemented free childcare for healthcare workers when schools are shut. There is no reason why the UK cannot do this for NHS staff.

Other countries haven't shown evidence that their approach is more effective. The UK solution is to not close schools.

What has been shown however, is that for sars-cov-2 that young people are asymptomatic carriers at much higher rates than for other infections. And what has also been shown is that the R0 for other respiratory infections is tremendously higher in schools than in the general population.

Though it has not been proven that schools are a hotbed of contagion for sars-cov-2, there is a lot of reason to expect them to be and little reason to expect that they aren't.

An argument against closing the schools is that they will be looked after by their grandparents.

There's already some data regarding this point, because we have countries that have done this early like Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea and none of them have reported this as a major factor in the known cases.

> There is a strong argument that closing schools will impact the NHS, even though children aren't very at risk.

Sweden also made the same point and kept the schools open FYI

> The public has been educated and told to stay at home if they show symptoms. If people were uneducated they'd be at work with a slight cough spreading it around.

The evidence is overwhelming that people who have not developed symptoms are contagious. (It's also extremely likely that people who never develop symptoms are transmitting the virus.) This simply isn't sufficient.

Yeah, they are contagious. We're all going to get this eventually. Unless you want to somehow live in isolation until a vaccine is found (which is unlikely if nobody is working).

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