Overview
- England’s chief medical officer said he could not see an infection-control rationale for limiting time outside and would have preferred a more liberal approach to children’s play.
- He testified that playgrounds were kept closed too long, noting Sage judged by mid-April 2020 that outdoor settings were far safer than indoor ones.
- Schools in England shut to most pupils on March 20, 2020, and he said keeping them open would have raised the peak and increased deaths in the first wave.
- Whitty said the evidence cannot precisely isolate the effect of school closures from other behavioural changes, though he believes closures significantly drove infections down.
- He cited March 18, 2020 data showing a rapid upswing in cases and modelling that closures would materially reduce the R value, while warning about risks from households mixing at school gates.