Surely that wasn’t the only tightened restriction or change in behavior during the case surge, though?

There are a lot of confounding variables in these analyses. It’s going to take years to tease them apart, and we may never truly know for certain in some cases.

Perhaps, but do you lock everything down mid-spike when you know the current rate will lead to extreme triage measures within two weeks, or do you wait two weeks to act and start rejecting patients as they continue to flood in?

"the rise in cases only reversed after we shut down schools both times" implies a causal relationship, though, while ignoring the other mitigations that went into effect.

The point is not "is it wise to take precautions"; that's obvious. The point is we don't necessarily have great data on which precautions work better than others because they're largely all being put into effect at the same time.

> point is we don't necessarily have great data on which precautions work better than others

We actually do, though, and it's preventing close contact of non-household members and preventing sharing enclosed spaces with non-household members for long periods of time.

People spread the virus before they even know they're sick, and a subset of sick people either need to go to work despite being sick, or they just don't care.

Again, all those restrictions were typically implemented at the same time - distancing, capacity limits, masking, etc.

It's going to take time and years of research to tease out things like "did closing schools specifically help".

I just haven't been following the news that closely, especially for Ontario (I'm not in ON). No intent to "conveniently" hide information, though thanks for clarifying.