By April 2020, 1 month after the World Health Organization (WHO) characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic, 173 countries had closed schools, affecting 84.3% of the world’s enrolled students 1.
School closures have been widely implemented as a non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) to reduce the spread of COVID-19 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Our null results suggest that policies on school closures should be reexamined given the potential negative consequences for children and parents.
We do not find any evidence that school closures in Japan reduced the spread of COVID-19. By matching each municipality with open schools to a municipality with closed schools that is the most similar in terms of potential confounders, we can estimate how many cases the municipality with open schools would have had if it had closed its schools. Here we assess the causal effect of school closures in Japan on reducing the spread of COVID-19 in spring 2020. To date, studies have not reached a consensus about the effectiveness of these policies at mitigating community transmission, partly because they lack rigorous causal inference. However, school closures bring about substantial costs, such as learning loss. Among tool kits to combat the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, school closures are one of the most frequent non-pharmaceutical interventions.