School and community reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic: a mathematical modelling study
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Discuss this preprint
Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Operating schools safely during the COVID-19 pandemic requires a balance between health risks and the need for in-person learning. Using demographic and epidemiological data between 31 July and 23 November 2020 from Toronto, Canada, we developed a compartmental transmission model with age, household and setting structure to study the impact of schools reopening in September 2020. The model simulates transmission in the home, community and schools, accounting for differences in infectiousness between adults and children, and accounting for work-from-home and virtual learning. While we found a slight increase in infections among adults (2.2%) and children (4.5%) within the first eight weeks of school reopening, transmission in schools was not the key driver of the virus resurgence in autumn 2020. Rather, it was community spread that determined the outbreak trajectory, primarily due to increases in contact rates among adults in the community after school reopening. Analyses of cross-infection among households, communities and schools revealed that home transmission is crucial for epidemic progression and safely operating schools, while the degree of in-person attendance has a larger impact than other control measures in schools. This study suggests that safe school reopening requires the strict maintenance of public health measures in the community.
Article activity feed
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.13.21249753: (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:Our analyses have some limitations. Firstly, our school compartment does not include adults, such as teachers, employees, and staff working in the school. However, in the community, we include all three types of contacts between adults and C&Y. When schools are opened, the contact between adults and C&Y in schools can be reflected in the …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.13.21249753: (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:Our analyses have some limitations. Firstly, our school compartment does not include adults, such as teachers, employees, and staff working in the school. However, in the community, we include all three types of contacts between adults and C&Y. When schools are opened, the contact between adults and C&Y in schools can be reflected in the increase of that in the community. Therefore, this reasonable simplification can also fit our purpose within this analysis. Secondly, the age classification in our model only includes adults and C&Y, and no more detailed classification is added, hence the vulnerable person was not included in this study. Due to the incorporation of the household structure, the complexity of our model has significantly increased, the overall model dimension has risen more than 300. In addition, the results of our model have well explained the impact of school opening on the epidemic. Our reasonable simplification of the age structure will not affect our analysis of school opening risks and prevention and control and our model assumptions have been checked with policymakers. When these measures cannot be effectively implemented, the risk of school opening needs to be reconsidered and evaluated. Also, in the long-term forecast, our assumptions about the contact rate in the community and the per-contact transmission probability may be too optimistic. The results of long-term forecasts should be considered as the minimum risk. At the same time, it did not consider...
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.
- No funding statement was detected.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
-
