More homeschooling, please

I’ve been reading tweets about school closings as a means of containing epidemics. Turns out they’re highly effective.

Presumably, more homeschooling ought to mean slower contagion of whatever is going around. Another point in its favor!

Speaking of kids and contagion, my brother-in-law, who has been taking care of his new granddaughter one day a week, tells us he’s been chronically sick ever since his daughter went back to work. His granddaughter spends two or three days a week in daycare, and he gets every bug the children get.

Yet studies show that school closures are one of the most beneficial 'non-pharmaceutical interventions' (NPI) that can be employed, more effective even than reactive quarantines or banning of public gatherings. Partly, the reason is that *parents* also stay home as a result. 2/

— Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) March 4, 2020

This thread is good, too.

Pandemic flu in 1918 was so severe that it was possible to estimate the impact of control measures by looking at the mortality rates weekly in different cities with different control measures. Two similar papers, one I was involved in, came out at the same time w similar findings

— Marc Lipsitch (@mlipsitch) February 23, 2020