School closures to mitigate influenza spread: two studies based on SocioPatterns data

Published: February 2, 2017

In order to fight and mitigate emerging epidemics, non-pharmaceutical interventions can become necessary. Among these, school closure is typically regarded as a viable mitigation strategy: children indeed are known to play an important role in the propagation of infectious diseases, due to their high rate of contacts at school.

School closure is however a costly measure whose applicability remains uncertain and whose implementation should carefully be weighed on the basis of cost-benefit considerations.

In two successive studies published in BMC Infectious Diseases, we have used high resolution data on the contact patterns of children that we collected in a primary school,(i) to define and investigate alternative, less costly mitigation measures such as the targeted and reactive closure of single classes whenever symptomatic children are detected, at the scale of a single school and (ii) to evaluate the effectiveness of several such gradual reactive school closure strategies at the scale of entire municipalities.

Our results highlight a potential beneficial effect of reactive gradual school closure policies in mitigating influenza spread. Moreover, the suggested strategies are solely based on routinely collected and easily accessible data (such as student absenteeism irrespective) and thus they appear to be applicable in real world situations.

References:

Mitigation of infectious disease at school: targeted class closure vs school closure