The impact of varying class sizes on epidemic spread in a university population.

ABSTRACT: A common non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) during the COVID-19 pandemic has been group size limits. Furthermore, educational settings of schools and universities have either fully closed or reduced their class sizes. As countries begin to reopen classrooms, a key question will be how large classes can be while still preventing local outbreaks of disease. Here, we develop and analyse a simple, stochastic epidemiological model where individuals (considered as students) live in fixed households and are assigned to a fixed class for daily lessons. We compare key measures of the epidemic-the peak infected, the total infected by day 180 and the calculated R ₀-as the size of class is varied. We find that class sizes of 10 could largely restrict outbreaks and often had overla

SUBMITTER: Best A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8206692 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature