Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness

March 15, 2021

Model-Based Evaluation of School- and Non-School-Related Measures to Control the COVID-19 Pandemic

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  • An age-structured SARS-CoV-2 transmission model fitted to data from the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands suggested that if methods to reduce the effective reproduction number (Re) of non-school-based contacts with non-school-based measures are exhausted or undesired and Re is still near 1, school-based prevention measures may be beneficial, particularly among older students. The authors provide examples from summer and autumn 2020 as evidence that keeping schools closed after summer of 2020 likely would not have prevented the fall wave of infections, but closing schools in November 2020 may have reduced Re.

Rozhnova et al. (Dec 12, 2021). Model-Based Evaluation of School- and Non-School-Related Measures to Control the COVID-19 Pandemic. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21899-6