Thread by @GidMK

One thing that's quite funny to note about the awful @JAMANetworkOpen study that has recently been incompletely corrected is that it implies that school holidays are killing people

https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1348441419698950145

See, the authors assume that, in the US, every additional year of schooling reduces your risk of death by ~46% across the entire lifespan, and that any/all days missed in terms of school are precisely equivalent to missing schooling

This is not some vague sidepoint, but a central assumption underlying the entire model. Every day missed from school is precisely equivalent to missing lifetime schooling by a fixed amount per child

Now, in the US children have (according to Wikipedia) roughly 14 weeks (5 days per week) of holiday per year of schooling, with a total of 12 years of mandatory schooling

So 12*14*5 = 840 days of missed school due to holidays

Translating that using the formulae above, this means that children who have school holidays cause 2.2 years fewer educational attainment for boys and 1.8 years fewer for girls

Using the numbers that the authors have plugged into their study, this would mean that school holidays in the United States cause children to be at a ~75% increased risk of death across their lifespan

In other words, you could save countless lives by abolishing school holidays forever

Of course, in the EU, again based on the authors' arbitrary decisions, this would have no real impact at all

Anyway, just a funny side-point about a truly atrocious study that has in some ways only been made worse by the authors 'correction'