School and day-care centre openings in Germany—a murderous herd immunity experiment Restrictions on face-to-face teaching and the impact of the Christmas and winter holidays led to a substantial drop in new infections and deaths in recent weeks, proving once again the central role that schools and day-care centres have played in the COVID-19 pandemic. This impressively underscores the urgent need for a European-wide school and general strike to defeat the pandemic and prevent the avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. In Germany alone, COVID-19 continues to claim an average of 400 lives every day, and across Europe 4,000 deaths are daily added to the grim toll.