Abstract
Prolonged school closure has been adopted worldwide to control COVID-19. Indeed, UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization figures show that two-thirds of an academic year was lost on average worldwide due to COVID-19 school closures. Such pre-emptive implementation was predicated on the premise that school children are a core group for COVID-19 transmission. Using surveillance data from the Chinese cities of Shenzhen and Anqing together, we inferred that compared with the elderly aged 60 and over, children aged 18 and under and adults aged 19–59 were 75% and 32% less susceptible to infection, respectively. Using transmission models parametrized with synthetic contact matrices for 177 jurisdictions around the world, we showed that the lower susceptibility of school children substantially limited the effectiveness of school closure in reducing COVID-19 transmissibility. Our results, together with recent findings that clinical severity of COVID-19 in children is lower, suggest that school closure may not be ideal as a sustained, primary intervention for controlling COVID-19.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Data science approach to infectious disease surveillance’.
Highlights
As the COVID-19 pandemic began to hit different locations during the first wave, many jurisdictions around the world had pre-emptively implemented school closure to suppress and mitigate its local spread [1,2]
An early analysis of contact tracing and surveillance data from Shenzhen suggested that age had no effect on susceptibility to COVID-19 infection [13], more recent studies indicated that children might only be 35–50% as susceptible as adults [14,15,16]
To gauge the relative effectiveness of school closure in comparison with other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), we estimated the reduction in infectious contacts made in non-school settings that would be needed in order to achieve the reduction in transmissibility or schoolchildren infection attack rate (IAR) conferred by school closure
Summary
As the COVID-19 pandemic began to hit different locations during the first wave, many jurisdictions around the world had pre-emptively implemented school closure to suppress and mitigate its local spread [1,2]. The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimated that during April, May and June 2020, around 1.6, 1.2 and 1.1 billion (90%, 68% and 62%) of enrolled learners around the world were affected by country-wide or localized school closure (https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse) Such swift and widespread adoption of prolonged school closure (which lasted weeks to months) was largely predicated on the premise that school children would be a core group for COVID-19 transmission as they are for influenza [2]. We aim to assess the potential impact of school closure in reducing the spread of COVID19 in different parts of the world To this end, we first inferred the effect of age on COVID-19 susceptibility and infectiousness using detailed surveillance and contact tracing data from Shenzhen and Anqing, China (the raw data from Shenzhen was the same as that in [13]) as well as published estimates from Guangzhou and Hunan, China [15,16]. To gauge the relative effectiveness of school closure in comparison with other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), we estimated the reduction in infectious contacts made in non-school settings that would be needed in order to achieve the reduction in transmissibility or schoolchildren infection attack rate (IAR) conferred by school closure
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