Model-based evaluation of school- and non-school-related measures to control the COVID-19 pandemic
Published in Nature Communications, 2021
Before vaccines and antivirals became available, non-pharmaceutical interventions were the only way to curb the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. School closures were one of these interventions. In this paper, we used a age-structured, Bayesian transmission model fit to hospitalization and seroprevalence data to study the effect of school closures on SARS-CoV-2 spread. We made use of different contact matrices, inferred from contact surveys conducted prior to the pandemic and during the first “lockdown”. We show that the effect of school closures is relatively small. However, when the effective reproduction number is close to one, then closing schools can have a major impact.
Recommended citation: Rozhnova G et al (2021). "Model-based evaluation of school- and non-school-related measures to control the COVID-19 pandemic." Nature Communications 12, 1614.
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