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Comment by cameldrv | Hacker News Reader

This is not true. The experiment has been run. In June, 47% of COVID cases in Israel were from schools. The schools there are now closed.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/israeli-data-show-school-openi...

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The road from anti-coronavirus paradigm to rampant infection in this country of 9 million people followed two months of almost total lockdown. May 17 also was the day Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former rival Benny Gantz swore in their “corona emergency government,” whose sole declared purpose is to fight the spread of the virus. Netanyahu’s decree that the nation’s entire school system would reopen was a political flourish to signal everything was under control.

One would think that coronavirus was one of those mind-control fungi that makes you do stupid things that increase its spread.

There are several other studies that are indicating that spread isn't as high among children as adults. See https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/children-over-age-...

The article is arguing a point, but it also links to a lot of the other papers I've seen.

Note that "not as transmissible" doesn't mean "not transmissible". It's entirely possible for the disease to be harder to transmit in kids but still be enough to sustain community spread. I think we don't know yet.

That's not a full-throated endorsement of reopening schools, but it should inform a risk/reward based approach to what institutions should close or open and when.

Sure, look at the risks and the rewards. It's quite clear that if we run the fall semester in person, we will get a burn-through. It's not so much of a risk as it is a cost.

Currently, the virus is out of control. We might be able to bring it back under control. The Israeli experience suggests that, since half their cases were from schools, opening schools doubles R. There's no measure that will be realistically implemented in the next month that would cut R in half.

It could be that this is the least bad of a set of options. Convince me.

> There's no measure that will be realistically implemented in the next month that would cut R in half

Universal masking can cut R substantially, but it requires high levels of compliance [1]

[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.037...

That’s why I say realistically. You could do a $50 billion blitz campaign to promote/provide masks, and you could increase usage, but the holdouts now are the ones that are difficult to convince.

Schools are a particular problem. Getting kids to consistently and correctly wear masks is hard. Getting kids to follow social distancing rules is hard too.

Bringing a bunch of poorly compliant people together to sit in the same room with 25 other people is gonna be a big challenge.

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