School closures intended to slow the transmission of the COVID-19 virus could be driving up the mortality rate of hospitalized patients during the pandemic.
This is because a third of health care workers - doctors, nurses, hospital staff - have children ages 3-12 at home. Fifteen percent of those households don't have other adults or older children who can help with child care. Many must stay home with their children; others face the difficult choice of risking their lives to help patients or staying at home to protect their families.
These are realities forecast by Colorado State University economist Jude Bayham in a 2013 study looking at the potential consequences of a global pandemic. Bayham is now repurposing models that got very little attention at the time because hardly anyone imagined the scenarios would ever become a pressing reality.
"It's an 'I told you so' moment,” Bayham said. “I'm not happy about it. It's unfortunate."
The new calculations indicate that if the health care workforce declines by 15 percent, due to the workers now having to care for their children, it could lead to an increase in coronavirus deaths, because the workers aren't there to care for sick people. A coronavirus infection mortality rate increase of just 0.35 percentage points would net a greater number of deaths than would be prevented by the school closures.
These calculations don’t take into account the possibility of state or federal programs to offer child care relief to workers, and they cannot predict the consequences of any particular health care worker's absence.
"We don't know, in terms of a productivity measure, the estimate of one nurse saving this many lives or reducing mortality," Bayham said. "But we think it's not zero. So essentially we are getting at how productive they need to be for us to be concerned about how school closures would undermine the goal of saving lives."
Source: Colorado State University