Economic Cost and Health Care Workforce Effects of School Closures in the U.S.

School closure is an important component of U.S. pandemic flu mitigation strategy, but has important costs. We give estimates of both the direct economic and health care impacts for school closure durations of 2, 4, 6, and 12 weeks under a range of assumptions. We find that closing all schools in the U.S. for four weeks could cost between $10 and $47 billion dollars (0.1-0.3% of GDP) and lead to a reduction of 6% to 19% in key health care personnel.