ArticleEuropean journal of public health2021
Impact of winter holiday and government responses on mortality in Europe during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Article in European journal of public health, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Do school closures and school reopenings affect community transmission of COVID-19? A systematic review of observational studies.BMJ open · 2021Pooled it
- Trying to create order in chaos-healthcare workers' perspective of COVID-19 intensive care (a qualitative study).BMJ open quality · 2025Article
- Time series anomaly detection in helpline call trends for early detection of COVID-19 spread across Sweden, 2020.Scientific reports · 2025Article
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- Regional excess mortality in France during COVID-19 pandemic: the first three epidemic periods (March 2020-June 2021).European journal of public health · 2024Article
- Inequality and COVID-19 in Sweden: Relative risks of nine bad life events, by four social gradients, in pandemic vs. prepandemic years.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Waves of inequality: income differences in intensive care due to Covid-19 in Sweden.European journal of public health · 2023Article
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- COVID-19 in people aged 18-64 in Sweden in the first year of the pandemic: Key factors for severe disease and death.Global epidemiology · 2022Article
- Back to basics: measuring the impact of interventions to limit the spread of COVID-19 in Europe.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2022Article
- How a school holiday led to persistent COVID-19 outbreaks in Europe.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The Emergence of SARS-CoV-2 Variant(s) and Its Impact on the Prevalence of COVID-19 Cases in the Nabatieh Region, Lebanon.Medical sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- COVID-19 case doubling time associated with non-pharmaceutical interventions and vaccination: A global experience.Journal of global health · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThis aggregated population study investigated the impact of the seemingly quasi-randomly assigned school winter holiday in weeks 6-10 (February to early March) on excess mortality in 219 European regions (11 countries) during the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring 2020. A secondary aim was to evaluate the impact of government responses to the early inflow of infected cases.
methodsData on government responses weeks 8-14 were obtained from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. Regional data on total all-cause mortality during weeks 14-23 in 2020 were retrieved from Eurostat and national statistical agencies and compared with the average mortality during same period 2015-2019. Variance-weighted least square regression was used with mortality difference as dependent variable with adjustment for country, population density and age distribution.
resultsBeing a region with winter holiday exclusively in week 9 was in the adjusted analysis associated with 16 weekly excess deaths [95% confidence interval (CI) 13-20] per million inhabitants during weeks 14-23, which corresponds to 38% of the excess mortality in these regions. A more stringent response implemented in week 11, corresponding to 10 additional units on the 0-100 ordinal scale, was associated with 20 fewer weekly deaths (95% CI 18-22) per million inhabitants.
conclusionsWinter holiday in week 9 was an amplifying event that contributed importantly to the excess mortality observed in the study regions during the spring 2020. Timely government responses to the resulting early inflow of cases reduced the excess in mortality.
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