Model-based evaluation of school- and non-school-related measures to control the COVID-19 pandemic

Ganna Rozhnova (), Christiaan H. Dorp, Patricia Bruijning-Verhagen, Martin C. J. Bootsma, Janneke H. H. M. Wijgert, Marc J. M. Bonten and Mirjam E. Kretzschmar
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Ganna Rozhnova: University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University
Christiaan H. Dorp: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Patricia Bruijning-Verhagen: University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University
Martin C. J. Bootsma: University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University
Janneke H. H. M. Wijgert: University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University
Marc J. M. Bonten: University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University
Mirjam E. Kretzschmar: University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: 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 (Re) with non-school-based measures are exhausted or undesired and Re 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 Re below 1, with unchanged non-school-based contacts.

Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21899-6

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