IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/33849.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Spillovers from Public Health Policies in Schools: Evidence from COVID Mask Mandates

Author

Listed:
  • Matthew A. Guzman
  • Scott A. Imberman
  • Neil R. Filosa
  • Tara Kilbride
  • Nat Malkus

Abstract

Schools have long played a frontline role in efforts to contain infectious diseases and prevent spread to the wider community. These include vaccination requirements, school closures during periods of high illness, and the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) during outbreaks. In this paper we investigate the impact of mask mandates in schools on COVID spread. We use event study and difference-in-differences models that exploit the removal of mask mandates in districts serving 50% of public school students in the U.S. surrounding the revocation of CDC guidance recommending school masking in February and early March of 2022. We estimate that going from 0% to 100% mandated masking in a county reduces COVID deaths by 0.57 per 100k people. We further estimate that the removal of mandates during this time contributed to 21800 COVID deaths through the rest of 2022, 9% of the U.S. total that year. Due to the fact that COVID deaths among students and, to a lesser extent, school staff were rare in the U.S. given school age profiles, we argue that the bulk of these deaths were from spillovers to residents in the wider community.

Suggested Citation

  • Matthew A. Guzman & Scott A. Imberman & Neil R. Filosa & Tara Kilbride & Nat Malkus, 2025. "Spillovers from Public Health Policies in Schools: Evidence from COVID Mask Mandates," NBER Working Papers 33849, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33849
    Note: CH ED EH
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w33849.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33849. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.