"What I am confident about saying is that had schools not closed, and based on the evidence we had at the time and I don't think evidence subsequently has undermined that, the peak of the pandemic would have been higher and that would have had obviously direct effect from deaths from Covid in the first wave, but would have increased the risk of all the indirect effects from health services being be unable to function."
"So I think not closing schools would have had a material effect on the pandemic being significantly worse. At the point we did it with the Alpha variant [January 2021], the numbers were incredibly high already, and three or four doubling times from that was an extraordinarily dangerous place for us to get to. So waiting for another couple of doubling times to see what happened would have been, in my view, potentially catastrophic."
Decision makers faced a series of very bad choices during the pandemic, with some options markedly worse than others. Closing schools reduced the peak of infections, lowered direct COVID-19 deaths in the first wave, and limited indirect harms from overwhelmed health services. Failure to close schools would have materially worsened the pandemic. When the Alpha variant emerged in January 2021, case numbers were already very high, and several doubling times ahead would have created an extraordinarily dangerous situation. Waiting for further evidence after more doublings risked a potentially catastrophic surge. Timelines and briefings document measures and announcements from March 2020 to December 2021.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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