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Comment by starfallg | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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

> 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.

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