Assessing the effect of school closures on the spread of COVID-19 in Zurich.

ABSTRACT: The effect of school closure on the spread of COVID-19 has been discussed intensively in the literature and the news. To capture the interdependencies between children and adults, we consider daily age-stratified incidence data and contact patterns between age groups which change over time to reflect social distancing policy indicators. We fit a multivariate time-series endemic-epidemic model to such data from the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland and use the model to predict the age-specific incidence in a counterfactual approach (with and without school closures). The results indicate a 17% median increase of incidence in the youngest age group (0-14 year olds), whereas the relative increase in the other age groups drops to values between 2% and 3%. We argue that our approach is more informa

SUBMITTER: Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9878126 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature