Reopening Italy's schools in September 2020: a Bayesian estimation of the change in the growth rate of new SARS-CoV-2 cases.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

COVID-19's second wave started a debate on the potential role of schools as a primary factor in the contagion resurgence. Two opposite positions appeared: those convinced that schools played a major role in spreading SARS-CoV-2 infections and those who were not. We studied the growth rate of the total number of SARS-CoV-2 infections in all the Italian regions, before and after the school reopening (September-October 2020), investigating the hypothesis of an association between schools and the resurgence of the virus.

Methods

Using a Bayesian piecewise linear regression to scrutinise the number of daily SARS-CoV-2 infections in each region, we looked for an estimate of a changepoint in the growth rate of those confirmed cases. We compared the changepoints with the

SUBMITTER: Casini L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8251679 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature