Abstract

School closure was in many countries one of the first non-pharmacological policy interventions implemented by governments to try to slow down the spread of the Sars-CoV-2. In particular, in Italy the Campania region implemented the most restrictive measures with regard to schools, and only some judgements of the Regional administrative court (TAR) allowed attending classes in presence, for a few weeks between January and February 2021. In this paper, we analyse the effects of this policy on the spread of the virus, comparing the progress of the pandemic in Campania and Lazio, first with simple descriptive indices, and then with a more complex «Difference-in-Differences» model. According to our results, the impact of school closure on the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Campania region appears to be minimal.