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

Jude Bayham; Eli P Fenichel

Using the data on child care obligations provides a first estimate of potential reductions in the healthcare labor force during a school closure. This estimate can be combined with projections of the case reductions from school closures to identify the parameter space where estimates of 1 are important to inform whether school closures would reduce net mortality (Figure 2 ). If the is large, then the increase percent increase in the mortality rate is below , and closing schools saves lives. This is the case when school closures lead to many avoided cases, and few healthcare workforce effects. Conversely, if is near zero, then then it is likely that the percent increase in mortality exceeds and school closure increases the cumulative mortality. This is the case if the school closure reduces the labor force substantially but provides a relatively small reduction in cumulative cases. There is a band where 0 ≪ ≪ ∞, where whether or not closing schools saves lives depends on the value of , which is unknown.