ArticlePLoS computational biology2016
Model-Based Comprehensive Analysis of School Closure Policies for Mitigating Influenza Epidemics and Pandemics.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 58 citations in OpenAlex.
- Multi-source agent-based modeling to optimize influenza mitigation strategies in Hong Kong.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The impact of school-based mitigation measures on the transmission of respiratory pathogens: the case of SARS-CoV-2.International journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Evaluating COVID-19 vaccine allocation policies using Bayesian m-top exploration.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Identifying key complex relations between education and healthcare in the Netherlands for future pandemic management.Health research policy and systems · 2025Article
- Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to control influenza spread among children in primary school and kindergarten: class-suspension or symptom-based isolation?BMC infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Article
- Epidemiological characteristics of influenza outbreaks in schools in Jiangsu Province, China, 2020-2023 post-COVID-19 pandemic.BMC infectious diseases · 2024Article
- Decisions and Influential Factors Regarding Class-Specific School Closures Against Seasonal Influenza Outbreak.Cureus · 2024Article
- Evaluating the effect of targeted strategies as control tools for hypervirulent meningococcal C outbreaks: a case study from Tuscany, Italy, 2015 to 2016.Euro surveillance : bulletin Europeen sur les maladies transmissibles = European communicable disease bulletin · 2023Article
- Coupling the Within-Host Process and Between-Host Transmission of COVID-19 Suggests Vaccination and School Closures are Critical.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2022Article
- A decision analytic approach for social distancing policies during early stages of COVID-19 pandemic.Decision support systems · 2022Article
- Percolation across households in mechanistic models of non-pharmaceutical interventions in SARS-CoV-2 disease dynamics.Epidemics · 2022Article
- Characterizing the transmission patterns of seasonal influenza in Italy: lessons from the last decade.BMC public health · 2022Article
- Epidemiological and Clinical Characteristics of Influenza Outbreaks Among Children in Chongqing, China.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
- "We didn't get much schooling because we were fishing all the time": Potential impacts of irregular school attendance on the spread of epidemics.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2022Article
- Within and between classroom transmission patterns of seasonal influenza among primary school students in Matsumoto city, Japan.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Implications of the school-household network structure on SARS-CoV-2 transmission under school reopening strategies in England.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Mental Health Problems Among School-Aged Children After School Reopening: A Cross-Sectional Study During the COVID-19 Post-pandemic in East China.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- A targeted e-learning approach for keeping universities open during the COVID-19 pandemic while reducing student physical interactions.PloS one · 2021Article
- Transforming public health using value lens and extended partner networks.Learning health systems · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
School closure policies are among the non-pharmaceutical measures taken into consideration to mitigate influenza epidemics and pandemics spread. However, a systematic review of the effectiveness of alternative closure policies has yet to emerge. Here we perform a model-based analysis of four types of school closure, ranging from the nationwide closure of all schools at the same time to reactive gradual closure, starting from class-by-class, then grades and finally the whole school. We consider policies based on triggers that are feasible to monitor, such as school absenteeism and national ILI surveillance system. We found that, under specific constraints on the average number of weeks lost per student, reactive school-by-school, gradual, and county-wide closure give comparable outcomes in terms of optimal infection attack rate reduction, peak incidence reduction or peak delay. Optimal implementations generally require short closures of one week each; this duration is long enough to break the transmission chain without leading to unnecessarily long periods of class interruption. Moreover, we found that gradual and county closures may be slightly more easily applicable in practice as they are less sensitive to the value of the excess absenteeism threshold triggering the start of the intervention. These findings suggest that policy makers could consider school closure policies more diffusely as response strategy to influenza epidemics and pandemics, and the fact that some countries already have some experience of gradual or regional closures for seasonal influenza outbreaks demonstrates that logistic and feasibility challenges of school closure strategies can be to some extent overcome.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.