The Impact of School Closure for COVID-19 on the US Healthcare Workforce and the Net Mortality Effects

Jude Bayham; Eli P Fenichel

For the United States, and for most states within the US, the is not sufficently higher or lower to know which way a school closure will turnout without more information on . Consider an example that uses Cauchemez et al.'s (2008) estimate of a reduciton of cases of 15% from a school closure and assume baseline mortality to COVID-19 of 2%. Assume an epidemiological forcast without a school closure predicts 16,000 cases (about a 1/5 th of the cases currently reported in China), which implies 320 deaths (Italy has already reported 463 deaths with 9,172 cases). The school closure reduces cases to 13,600. The for this scenario is 0.176, with an associate 0.024. Therefore, the mortality rate after the closure must rise to at least 2.35% as a result of the 15% loss in the healthcare workforce in order to undo the benefits of school closures. This implies the percent increase in patient survival by avoiding a 15% reduction in the health workforce, an elasticity measuring healthcare worker "prodcutivity," is 0.024. This means that doubling the healthcare workforce must not save more than 2.4% more patients or school closures could lead to more deaths. However, there is substantial variation across the country. For example, in South Dakota this elasticity is 1.7%, wheres in Washington DC it is 4.1%.