It’s been more than two years since the world went into lockdown and schools, like most institutions, closed their doors. But the most devastating consequences of this policy are only just coming to light. Thousands of disadvantaged children have fallen behind.
It didn’t have to be this way. One country did it differently.
Late in the evening of 12 March 2020, journalists waited in a government building in Stockholm for the Swedish minister for education, Anna Ekström, to deliver a statement. Most of them expected the Swedish government to announce school closures. The night before in Copenhagen, the Danish prime minister, Mette Fredriksen, had declared that all preschools, schools, and universities in Denmark would close. Just a few hours earlier, Norway had followed suit. In Sweden, Ekström had just had a meeting with representatives of school principals and government agencies.
When she finally emerged and delivered her verdict, she explained that the government had chosen to keep the schools open. “It’s a clear recommendation from the Public Health Agency, and they are very keen to see it followed,” she said.
What no one at the time knew was that, behind the scenes, a retired epidemiologist had won his first battle. Seventy-year-old Johan Giesecke had been Sweden’s state epidemiologist between 1995 and 2005, and had a good relationship with Anders Tegnell, the man who now held the title. Decades earlier, Giesecke had hired Tegnell because he appreciated what appeared to be Tegnell’s complete indifference to what other people thought of him. Now, Giesecke referred to Tegnell as “his son”.
Both men, at the start of the pandemic, advocated for keeping schools open.
They did this for a number of reasons. Firstly, no one knew if school closures worked. On the one hand, there was some historic support for the policy: experiences from school holidays during influenza outbreaks in France, and the varying responses to the 1918 pandemic in the US, suggested that the number of cases could “maybe” be reduced by 15% by closures, in an optimistic scenario. But it also suggested that those gains would likely be lost if the children weren’t completely isolated when staying home from school.
And the intervention came at a high cost. The bill for closing British schools for 12 weeks was estimated at 1% of the country’s GDP in a Lancet article (among the authors were both Anders Tegnell and Neil Ferguson). In the US, an equivalent intervention cost 6% of the GDP according to the same article.
It was a hard decision to make — unless you were Johan Giesecke. He was completely convinced that closing schools was the wrong route to take. Above all, he thought, it would be unfair on the children. Everyone in the public health business knew that school absences had an adverse effect on children’s living conditions (see here, here, here and here) well into later life.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe