Model-based evaluation of school- and non-school-related measures to control the COVID-19 pandemic
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Abstract
The role of school-based contacts in the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 is incompletely understood. We used an age-structured transmission model fitted to age-specific seroprevalence and hospital admission data to assess the effects of school-based measures at different time points during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands. Our analyses suggest that the impact of measures reducing school-based contacts depends on the remaining opportunities to reduce non-school-based contacts. If opportunities to reduce the effective reproduction number (R e ) with non-school-based measures are exhausted or undesired and R e is still close to 1, the additional benefit of school-based measures may be considerable, particularly among older school children. As two examples, we demonstrate that keeping schools closed after the summer holidays in 2020, in the absence of other measures, would not have prevented the second pandemic wave in autumn 2020 but closing schools in November 2020 could have reduced R e below 1, with unchanged non-school-based contacts.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.07.20245506: (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: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our modelling approach has several limitations. For estimating disease susceptibility we could only model children as group of 0 to 20 years old. As disease susceptibility increases with age, it seems obvious that effects of reduced school contacts are most prominent in older children. Assuming equal susceptibility across these ages may have underestimated to some extent the effect of reducing school contacts for children between 10 …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.07.20245506: (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: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our modelling approach has several limitations. For estimating disease susceptibility we could only model children as group of 0 to 20 years old. As disease susceptibility increases with age, it seems obvious that effects of reduced school contacts are most prominent in older children. Assuming equal susceptibility across these ages may have underestimated to some extent the effect of reducing school contacts for children between 10 and 20 years. At the same time, we assumed that school contact patterns in August-November 2020 reflect the pre-pandemic situation. Yet, universal control measures in the Netherlands such as stay at home orders for symptomatic persons probably lower infectious contacts in school settings too, meaning that some reduction compared to pre-pandemic levels of contacts could already be present in schools. Effects of these measures in school settings should be smaller than in the general population and are hard to estimate due to a large number of asymptomatic cases among children, and therefore were not taken into account. In this respect, the results reported here describe the maximum possible reduction in the effective reproduction number due to school interventions. Furthermore, the contact matrices available did not allow differentiation between various types of contacts outside schools (like work, leisure, transport etc.), as these were not available for periods during the pandemic. Therefore, we could not model the impact of reducing work-related ...
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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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.07.20245506: (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: Thank you for sharing your data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
Our modelling approach has several limitations. For estimating disease susceptibility we could only model children as group of 0 to 20 years old. As disease susceptibility increases with age, it seems obvious that effects of reduced school contacts are most prominent in older children. Assuming equal susceptibility across these ages may have underestimated to some extent the effect of reducing school contacts for children between 10 and 20 …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.07.20245506: (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: Thank you for sharing your data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
Our modelling approach has several limitations. For estimating disease susceptibility we could only model children as group of 0 to 20 years old. As disease susceptibility increases with age, it seems obvious that effects of reduced school contacts are most prominent in older children. Assuming equal susceptibility across these ages may have underestimated to some extent the effect of reducing school contacts for children between 10 and 20 years. At the same time, we assumed that school contact patterns in August-November 2020 reflect the pre-pandemic situation. Yet, universal control measures in the Netherlands such as stay at home orders for symptomatic persons probably lower infectious contacts in school settings too, meaning that some reduction compared to pre-pandemic levels of contacts could already be present in schools. Effects of these measures in school settings should be smaller than in the general population and are hard to estimate due to a large number of asymptomatic cases among children, and therefore were not taken into account. In this respect, the results reported here describe the maximum possible reduction in the effective reproduction number due to school interventions. Furthermore, the contact matrices available did not allow differentiation between various types of contacts outside schools (like work, leisure, transport etc.), as these were not available for periods during the pandemic. Therefore, we could not model the impact of reducing work-related ...
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.
About SciScore
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