Assessing the Effect of School Closures on the Spread of COVID-19 in Zurich. (11th December 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar, Maria; Hofmann, Felix; Held, Leonhard
• Is Part Of: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Volume 185(2022)Supplement 1
• Page Start: S131
• Page End: S142
• Publication Date: 2022-12-11
• Subjects: COVID-19 -- endemic–epidemic modelling -- surveillance data -- social contacts -- school closure; Social sciences -- Statistical methods -- Periodicals; Statistics -- Periodicals; 300.15195
• DOI: 10.1111/rssa.12910
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0964-1998

Abstract

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 informative to policy makers than summarising the effect of school closures with time-dependent effective reproduction numbers, which are difficult to estimate due to the sparsity of incidence counts within the relevant age groups.