As promised, this is the full op/ed that Ryan Sullivan and I had published in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal on October 21. Because today (Saturday) is my 70th birthday, I will not be working. So I might not reply to comments until Sunday or Monday.
In-person classes turn out not to cause spikes in cases or fatality. But keeping kids home has a high cost.
By David R. Henderson and Ryan Sullivan
Tens of millions of students started the school year completely online, including those in 13 of the 15 largest school districts in the U.S. The primary reason is concern over safety for students and staff. But recent data are shifting the discussion on school safety and infection rates of Covid-19. They argue strongly for opening K-12 schools.
Previous evidence has suggested that schools are not superspreaders. That research came from other countries (whose rates and environments are different) or very specific cases in America, such as YMCA summer camps. While this suggested little impact on infection rates from opening the schools, it was possible that the unique environment of U.S. public schools would cause different outcomes.
But they’re about the same. A group of researchers, spearheaded by Brown University Professor Emily Oster, have created and made available the most comprehensive database on schools and Covid case rates for students and staff since the pandemic started. Her data—covering almost 200,000 kids across 47 states from the last two weeks of September—showed a Covid-19 case rate of 0.13% among students and 0.24% among staff. That’s a shockingly and wonderfully low number. By comparison, the current overall U.S. case rate is 2.6%, an order of magnitude higher.
Other research has shown that hospitalization and fatality rates for school-age children are also extremely low. People 19 and younger account for only 1.2% of Covid-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. during the peak of the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that of all Covid-19 deaths up to Oct. 10, only 74 were of children under age 15. During the 2019-20 flu season, the CDC estimates, 434 children under 18 died of the flu. Yet we don’t shut down schools over the flu.
What about teachers? We still don’t have hard information on the fatality rates for American teachers, but the new data have shown that Covid-19 case rates are low for staff working in the schools. That said, opening schools in other countries has had little impact on the fatality rates of teachers. Sweden never shut its schools, and teachers there have had the same fatality rate during this pandemic as IT technicians, who can often work from home. The cost of reopening the schools, measured in additional cases, hospitalizations, and fatalities, is low.
And there are weighty costs of not opening. A report from McKinsey & Co. found that disrupting in-person classes through January 2021 would result in the loss of $61,000 to $82,000 in lifetime earnings for the average K-12 student in the U.S. Another study led by Georgetown University’s George Psacharopoulos found that shutting down all American schools for only four months would result in $2.5 trillion in lost future wages.
One reason economists care about lost earnings is that they increase the risk of death. Lower incomes mean people aren’t able to buy safer cars and afford healthier foods, which inevitably leads to shorter lifespans. Even if the reports overstate the financial losses dramatically, these are large losses and will surely lead to tragic health outcomes in the future. Moreover, mental-health surveys indicate that keeping young children isolated from each other for months has devastating psychological consequences.
Economists have specific methods to evaluate the trade-offs between lives and economic activity in a cost-benefit framework. The standard methodology is to place a value on the number of lives saved. A reasonable number is $4.5 million per life. This number is based on how much people need to be paid in the labor market to risk death and so is a good approximation of the monetary value of American lives lost during Covid. They then compare that value with lost gross domestic product. How many lives would need to be saved to justify even only a future $1 trillion loss in GDP? Standard economic logic suggests the number would have to be around 222,000. Given the low Covid-19 case and death rates among minors and teachers, the actual number of lives saved by maintaining the school shutdown is almost certainly an order of magnitude lower.
Moreover, keeping schools closed has an immediate impact on working-class families. As one study from the University of Chicago details, roughly 50 million Americans are dealing with child-care issues now, and the lack of in-person schooling exacerbates that. The problem is most critical for single-parent, low-income and minority households.
The school shutdown also increases inequality between the sexes as women drop out of the workforce at shocking levels. In September there were 865,000 fewer women over 19 in the labor force than in August. By contrast, only 216,000 men over 19 left the workforce over that same period. Much of that, probably most, is due to the lack of in-person schooling. Even for parents who stay in the workforce, not holding school causes many to shift work priorities or decrease total hours worked, as a study from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics showed.
The losses from keeping children out of school are huge and the benefits are small. Let’s get kids back into the classroom—and on the playground.
Mr. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Mr. Sullivan is an associate professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
Two notes:
- For Bryan Caplan-type reasons about the value of education, I persuaded my co-author to use an estimate of $1 trillion in human capital losses rather than the $2.5 trillion from the Georgetown study. Given the other psychological losses, though, I’m quite confident that $1 trillion is an underestimate.
- In my post on October 21, commenter Kevin Dick noted a stock-flow error in the last sentence of the third paragraph.
READER COMMENTS
Manuel Onate
Nov 21 2020 at 7:02am
Happy birthday David.
John Smith
Nov 21 2020 at 7:27am
$5 million is wrong. The standard value used by the Federal government is $10 million.
Greg G
Nov 21 2020 at 8:18am
I don’t know what the right Covid policy is but I do know I hope you have the happiest possible birthday David.
Wil W
Nov 21 2020 at 10:09am
This reasonable approach makes at least one bad assumption: that individual school administrators can competently setup separations and handle exposure events. Perhaps if the guidance were clear and apolitical, then I would be able to trust that most schools could pull off appropriate measures.
In my own child’s school they are doing hybrid. Most students are in class, but you may (such as my child) be remote into the classroom. While the system does not work well, it does allow me to see a large portion of how well their protective measures are working. With small class sizes and ability to separate teachers from each other it has been OK. However some teachers have not done well following the mask or separation guidelines.
Perhaps that there has only been one known exposure event should comfort me, but from my point of view it would appear that it is merely a matter of time. (currently in our community the testing centers are having to turn people away)
Tyler Wells
Nov 21 2020 at 12:34pm
Despite the low risk to children and young adults, they seem to bear the brunt of the containment efforts. I am lucky enough to be able to work from home now that my child’s middle school is closed, but many children are left unattended. As many extra-curricular activities are also curtailed or cancelled, the children are left bereft of socialization opportunities. For my child, this is an age in which they crave interactions with their peers the most. Children left home alone find video games and phones much more appealing than schooling.
However, the cost of keeping children home and isolated goes much beyond education and socialization. In a nation of fat people that don’t get enough exercise, we are encouraging inactivity in a very critical stage of human development. No child will die from this in the short term, but many will have negative health outcomes now and long-term complications down the road. Plus, there is evidence that vitamin D deficiency has at least some role in Covid and we are keeping kids at home and away from activities outdoors.
There is no such thing as the “right Covid policy”, everything that can be done will have costs and tradeoffs. David, you are one of the few that keep pointing out the costs and for that I salute you; happy birthday!
David Henderson
Nov 21 2020 at 5:39pm
Thanks, Manuel, Greg, and Tyler.
And good points, Tyler.
Thomas Hutcheson
Nov 22 2020 at 9:33am
This makes a of of good points, but fails to show how they should apply to specific schools/school systems with different capacities to limit in-school transmission, to test students and staff and different socioeconomic demographics, community rates of prevalence, parental attitudes, etc.
Alice Temnick
Nov 22 2020 at 4:43pm
If this finding is true, “that shutting down all American schools for only four months would result in $2.5 trillion in lost future wages”, perhaps we will need to revisit the “worthlessness of public education” debate post-pandemic.
David Henderson
Nov 23 2020 at 9:49am
Good point, Alice.
Thus my skepticism that I’ve expressed in other posts for Bryan Caplan-type reasons. Also that’s why I dialed it down to $1 trillion.
David Lilienfeld
Nov 27 2020 at 1:35pm
I’m looking at this question as an epidemiologist, a physician, and an engineer.
At a starting point, I fully accept the proposition that in-person schooling fosters social maturation and norming (particularly for adolescents), both important for adult life. And there is real economic pain resulting from an inability to go to work because of a need for often unavailable child care.
However, the argument that children present no risk in a pandemic is specious at best. Frankly stated, we don’t know that to be the case. Let’s review what we do know:
Children aged 10 years and older shed Covid-19 virus much as adults do.
The incidence rate of children being low compared with adults is meaningless given that schools were closed in late winter and parents generally kept their children from interacting with other children. Exposures were minimal at most. You’d expect a low incidence rate–but that doesn’t reflect what might be going on in schools wrt virus circulation.
Asymptomatic infected children have been observed to have pathological changes consistent with symptomatic ones–and adults. Take such a child’s chest x-ray and you will see signs of scarring, for instance. Significance? Not known. It may be quite significant in child growth; it may not.
In 1918, there were reductions in childhood growth. We have no idea if we are seeing that in this pandemic–unless you assume that infection is minuscule in children and that the consequences of infections are none, there’s no reason to think that childhood growth would not be affected by an virus targeting the cardiovascular system (growth plates are oxygen sensitive).
There are few organized systems have been implemented to follow what’s happening among school children wrt Covid-19 infections and sequelae.
One must wonder what the psychological effects of socially distanced classrooms and partial in-person might be. The assumptions implicit in the “Reopen the schools!” arguments are that the health consequences of doing so are minimal. We don’t really know that, given that in-person education doesn’t resemble what it was a year ago.
It is difficult not to question whether the “Re-open the schools!” groups have less concern for children (the future of the country) than
Notice that I haven’t explicitly included issues related to infections at home, strictly those involving the child.
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