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

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_e) with non-school-based measures are exhausted or undesired and R_e 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

SUBMITTER: Rozhnova G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7955041 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature