Fueling the Covid-19 pandemic: summer school holidays and incidence rates in German districts
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Abstract
Background
The Robert-Koch-Institute reports that during the summer holiday period a foreign country is stated as the most likely place of infection for an average of 27 and a maximum of 49% of new SARS-CoV-2 infections in Germany.
Methods
Cross-sectional study on observational data. In Germany, summer school holidays are coordinated between states and spread out over 13 weeks. Employing a dynamic model with district fixed effects, we analyze the association between these holidays and weekly incidence rates across 401 German districts.
Results
We find effects of the holiday period of around 45% of the average district incidence rates in Germany during their respective final week of holidays and the 2 weeks after holidays end. Western states tend to experience stronger effects than Eastern states. We also find statistically significant interaction effects of school holidays with per capita taxable income and the share of foreign residents in a district’s population.
Conclusions
Our results suggest that changed behavior during the holiday season accelerated the pandemic and made it considerably more difficult for public health authorities to contain the spread of the virus by means of contact tracing. Germany’s public health authorities did not prepare adequately for this acceleration.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.11.20210773: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:There are important limitations to our research design. First, there are the well-known limitations of any ecological study like ours. Ideally, one would employ individual-rather than district-level data. We had to resort to district-level data since data on individuals across Germany do not exist. In an ideal world, one would be able to …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.11.20210773: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:There are important limitations to our research design. First, there are the well-known limitations of any ecological study like ours. Ideally, one would employ individual-rather than district-level data. We had to resort to district-level data since data on individuals across Germany do not exist. In an ideal world, one would be able to trace back infections to individual behaviours during holidays. However, the necessary data do not exist and – due to privacy protection policies – cannot be collected. Second, we can only capture the effect of holiday-related travels triggered by public summer school holidays. Families with children of school-age in particular are dependent on school holidays for their holiday travel and the same holds for the employees of firms that close down for company holidays over the summer school holiday period. Thus, the majority of holiday travels will take place during school holidays. Yet, not all of holiday-related travel takes place during school holidays, which potentially biases downwards our estimate of the effect of holiday-making on Sars-CoV-2 infection.
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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