Model-based Evaluation of School- and Non-school-related Measures to Control the COVID-19 Pandemic

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2021 Mar 13

PMID 33712603

Citations 40

Authors

Ganna Rozhnova

Christiaan H van Dorp

Patricia Bruijning-Verhagen

Martin C J Bootsma

Janneke H H M van de Wijgert

Marc J M Bonten

Mirjam E Kretzschmar

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The role of school-based contacts in the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 is incompletely understood. We use an age-structured transmission model fitted to age-specific seroprevalence and hospital admission data to assess the effects of school-based measures at different time points during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands. Our analyses suggest that the impact of measures reducing school-based contacts depends on the remaining opportunities to reduce non-school-based contacts. If opportunities to reduce the effective reproduction number (R) with non-school-based measures are exhausted or undesired and R is still close to 1, the additional benefit of school-based measures may be considerable, particularly among older school children. As two examples, we demonstrate that keeping schools closed after the summer holidays in 2020, in the absence of other measures, would not have prevented the second pandemic wave in autumn 2020 but closing schools in November 2020 could have reduced R below 1, with unchanged non-school-based contacts.

Citing Articles

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Analysis of the impact of COVID-19 variants and vaccination on the time-varying reproduction number: statistical methods.

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Association of School Instructional Mode with Community COVID-19 Incidence during August-December 2020 in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

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Boldea O, Alipoor A, Pei S, Shaman J, Rozhnova G PNAS Nexus. 2024; 3(2):pgae024.

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