Opening Schools and Trends in SARS-CoV-2 Transmission in European Countries
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Abstract
Objectives: Benefits of school attendance have been debated against SARS-CoV-2 contagion risks. This study examined the trends of contagion before and after schools reopened across 26 countries in the European Union.
Methods: We compared the average values of estimated R t before and after school reopening, identifying any significant increase with a one-sample t -test. A meta-analysis and meta-regression analysis were performed to calculate the overall increase in R t for countries in the EU and to search for relationships between R t before schools reopened and the average increase in R t afterward.
Results: The mean reproduction number increased in 16 out of 26 countries. The maximum increase in R t was reached after a mean 28 days. We found a negative relationship between the R t before school reopening and its increasing after that event. By 45 days after the first day of school reopening, the overall average increase in R t for the European Union was 23%.
Conclusion: We observed a significant increase in the mean reproduction number in most European countries, a public health issue that needs strategies to contain the spread of COVID-19.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.26.21252504: (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 study has a major limitation that needs to be mentioned: we investigated changes in the slopes of SARS-CoV-2 contagion after schools reopened, but this does not imply a causal inference. “Before and after” analyses typically suffer from several internal validity issues, one of which may concern the effect of the passage of time: …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.26.21252504: (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 study has a major limitation that needs to be mentioned: we investigated changes in the slopes of SARS-CoV-2 contagion after schools reopened, but this does not imply a causal inference. “Before and after” analyses typically suffer from several internal validity issues, one of which may concern the effect of the passage of time: changes in an outcome measure might be due to some other influential event(s) occurring in the meantime. In our scenario, for instance, the reopening of sports facilities or seasonal temperature changes (which induce people to engage in different leisure activities) could have affected our outcome variable. In other words, the reopening of sports facilities, greater access to leisure activities, and a more frequent use of public transport may have contributed to the rise in disease transmission rates recorded after schools reopened 2. The management of school closures as a measure to contain the COVID-19 pandemic has represented a major challenge in European countries. Governments have faced a hard trade-off between safeguarding the population’s health and assuring young people’s education. In many cases, the reopening of schools during the pandemic was hotly criticised by the public. However, one-hundredseven countries by March 18, 2020 and 192 countries by April, 2020 implemented national school closures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic 2, 15. The duration of school closures, and thus the timing of re-opening, has been very heterogeneous acr...
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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