ArticleBMC medicine2021
Estimating the impact of reopening schools on the reproduction number of SARS-CoV-2 in England, using weekly contact survey data.
Article in BMC medicine, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions as implemented in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic: a rapid review.Journal of public health (Oxford, England) · 2025Pooled it
- Measures implemented in the school setting to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2024Pooled it
- Effectiveness of social distancing measures and lockdowns for reducing transmission of COVID-19 in non-healthcare, community-based settings.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2023Pooled it
- Postpandemic Social Contact Patterns: A Cross-Sectional Survey in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam.Infectious diseases and therapy · 2026Article
- The impact of public health and social measures on social contact patterns and transmission of COVID-19 in Hong Kong.BMC medicine · 2026Article
- Counterfactual evaluation of elementary and secondary school policies in the COVID-19 pandemic.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Mobility-driven synthetic contact matrices as a scalable solution for real-time pandemic response modeling.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Individual and neighborhood based socioeconomic factors relevant for contact behaviour and epidemic control.Communications medicine · 2025Article
- 'Bern, get ready', BEready, a household-based cohort study for pandemic preparedness research in Switzerland: pilot study.BMJ open · 2025Article
- Assessing the role of children in the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium using perturbation analysis.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Social contact patterns in South Korea: an analysis of a survey conducted in 2023-2024.BMC infectious diseases · 2025Article
- COVID-19 outbreak investigations in a school in greater Gaborone, Botswana.The Pan African medical journal · 2025Article
- Estimating the impact of school closures on the COVID-19 dynamics in 74 countries: A modelling analysis.PLoS medicine · 2025Article
- Assessing COVID-19 transmission through school and family networks using population-level registry data from the Netherlands.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Social contact patterns following the COVID-19 pandemic: a snapshot of post-pandemic behaviour from the CoMix study.Epidemics · 2024Article
- Non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce COVID-19 transmission in the UK: a rapid mapping review and interactive evidence gap map.Journal of public health (Oxford, England) · 2024Review
- Real-time estimation of the effective reproduction number of COVID-19 from behavioral data.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Evaluating the use of social contact data to produce age-specific short-term forecasts of SARS-CoV-2 incidence in England.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Dynamics of non-household contacts during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 in the Netherlands.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Trends in SARS-CoV-2 infection prevalence during England's roadmap out of lockdown, January to July 2021.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundSchools were closed in England on 4 January 2021 as part of increased national restrictions to curb transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The UK government reopened schools on 8 March. Although there was evidence of lower individual-level transmission risk amongst children compared to adults, the combined effects of this with increased contact rates in school settings and the resulting impact on the overall transmission rate in the population were not clear.
methodsWe measured social contacts of > 5000 participants weekly from March 2020, including periods when schools were both open and closed, amongst other restrictions. We combined these data with estimates of the susceptibility and infectiousness of children compared with adults to estimate the impact of reopening schools on the reproduction number.
resultsOur analysis indicates that reopening all schools under the same measures as previous periods that combined lockdown with face-to-face schooling would be likely to increase the reproduction number substantially. Assuming a baseline of 0.8, we estimated a likely increase to between 1.0 and 1.5 with the reopening of all schools or to between 0.9 and 1.2 reopening primary or secondary schools alone.
conclusionOur results suggest that reopening schools would likely halt the fall in cases observed between January and March 2021 and would risk a return to rising infections, but these estimates relied heavily on the latest estimates or reproduction number and the validity of the susceptibility and infectiousness profiles we used at the time of reopening.
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