The impact of school closures on pandemic influenza:Assessing potential repercussions using a seasonal SIR model
2012
When a new pandemic influenza strain has been identified, mass-production of vaccines can take several months, and
antiviral drugs are expensive and usually in short supply.
Social distancing measures, such as school closures, thus seem an attractive means to mitigate disease spread.
However, the transmission of influenza is seasonal in nature, and as has been noted in previous
studies,
a decrease in the average transmission rate in a seasonal disease model
may result in a larger final size.
In the studies presented here,
we analyze a hypothetical pandemic using a SIR epidemic model with time- and age-dependent transmission
rates; using this model we
assess and quantify, for the first time, the
the effect of the timing and length of widespread school closures on
influenza pandemic final size and average peak time.
 
We find that the effect on pandemic progression strongly depends on the timing of the start of the school closure.
For instance, we determine that school
closures during a late spring wave of an epidemic
can cause a pandemic to become up to 20% larger, but have the advantage that the
average time of the peak is shifted by up to two months, possibly allowing enough time for development of
vaccines to mitigate the larger size of the epidemic.
Our studies thus suggest that when heterogeneity in
transmission is a significant factor, decisions of public health policy will be particularly
important as to how control measures such as school closures should be implemented.
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