Researchers say COVID-19 school closures were unnecessary, three years too late

• By Tamara Ugolini

PETITION: Let Our Kids Go Back To Class

Ontario students who suffered from the devastating effects of school closures due to government-mandated COVID restrictions will be locked out of their classrooms again as the education workers' union announces a strike. If you agree that kids must remain in the classroom, sign this petition.

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Researchers at McMaster University have concluded, after a fulsome two-year review published in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health journal on Thursday, that school and daycare settings had little impact on COVID-19 transmission.

“School settings do not substantially contribute to community incidence, hospitalizations, or mortality,” the findings indicated.

According to The Lancet journal:

Masks might reduce transmission, test-to-stay policies might not increase transmission risk compared with mandatory quarantine, cohorting and hybrid learning might make little to no difference in transmission (low certainty), and the effect of surveillance testing within schools remained inconclusive (very low certainty).

Ontario Premier Doug Ford gloated about having some of the “strictest regulations in the world” in the spring of 2022, which resulted in school children facing some of the harshest and longest unscientific school closures.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford admits he had some of "the strictest regulations in the world."

See all of our past lockdown coverage at: https://t.co/qZEknwgqNN pic.twitter.com/NCHfZc5uew

— Rebel News (@RebelNewsOnline) April 4, 2022

It was evident by August 2020 that children were at a higher risk of death travelling to school by bus than of COVID-19.

It took researchers @ McMaster ~3 years to conduct a fulsome review of school closure literature

But it was easy to do a risk-benefit analysis showing how nonsensical school closures were by August 2020

I did it here:https://t.co/9Pbb5wdzKE

— Tamara Ugolini 🇨🇦 (@TamaraUgo) February 16, 2024

Teachers wanted to be in class teaching, too. They also expressed genuine concern about the psychological, mental and emotional health of their students if schools remain closed.

Data by the summer of 2021 showed that school closures caused far-reaching harm to children’s mental and physical well-being. However, Premier Ford continued with rolling restrictions until 2022, when parents finally started to stand up and say, 'enough is enough.'

On Sunday, January 9, a group of concerned families and educators gathered in downtown Toronto at Queen’s Park, Ontario's legislature to advocate against Premier Doug Ford's indiscriminate province-wide school closures.

FULL REPORT by @TamaraUgo: https://t.co/jHAn41xemq

— Rebel News (@RebelNewsOnline) January 10, 2022

They urged the government to get kids back to class, knowing that the fallout of these knee-jerk government-imposed policies will haunt Canadian children for a lifetime.