Effects of School Closure on Incidence of Pandemic Influenza in Alberta, Canada

Earn, David J. D.; He, Daihai; Loeb, Mark; Fonseca, Kevin; Lee, Bonita E.; Dushoff, Jonathan

doi:10.7326/0003-4819-156-3-201202070-00005

Cited by 184 publications

(197 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Previous reports based on actual school closures showed that whole school closures decreased H1N1 reproductive number [17] or halved the transmission rate among school-age children [18]. These reports showed that school closure is effective against infection spread.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…Our findings also showed that the effects of closure were related to the duration of the closure. Because an epidemic may be influenced by several factors, such as transmission within households [22,28], the severity or transmissibility of the strain of influenza [15] or weather [18], further detailed investigations that include these factors are required to clarify the effects of school closure.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Measures instituted to prevent the transmission of H1N1 included school closures [12][13][14][15]. The effects of school closures were evaluated in simulation models [14][15][16] and some reports have shown the effects of actual closures [17,18].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Effect of short-term school closures on the H1N1 pandemic in Japan: a comparative case study

et al. 2012

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Purpose. The 2009 worldwide influenza A/H1N1 pandemic particularly affected younger people, including schoolchildren. We assessed the effects of class/school closure during the pandemic on the spread of H1N1 infection in Japan. Methods. We prospectively monitored 2141 schoolchildren in 57 classes at 2 elementary schools and 2 junior high schools in Japan, and we evaluated the effects of class/school closures on the spread of H1N1 using descriptive epidemiological methods.Results. The cumulative rate of H1N1 infection among these children was 40.9% (876 children). There was a total of 53 closures of 40 classes, including school closures, during the pandemic. Time-course changes in the epidemic curve showed that school closure reduced the following epidemic peak more than class closure. A Poisson regression model showed that a longer duration of closure was significantly related to decreased H1N1 occurrence after the resumption of classes. Conclusions. School closure more effectively inhibits subsequent epidemic outbreaks than class closure. Longer school closures are effective in reducing the spread of infection, and school closure should be implemented as early as possible.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Effect of short-term school closures on the H1N1 pandemic in Japan: a comparative case study

et al. 2012

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“…Evaluating the effect of SVs on the spread of influenza is difficult, as typically the influenza season does not overlap with the school summer vacation. The early initiation of the pandemic has enabled one to examine and confirm the curtailing impact of SVs on influenza transmission [10,12,[15][16][17][18][19][20]. In Israel, the early initiation resulted in the pandemic overlapping not only with the summer vacation during July and August, but also with the Jewish New Year holidays in October (figure 1a).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Model-based reconstruction of an epidemic using multiple datasets: understanding influenza A/H1N1 pandemic dynamics in Israel

Yaari

Katriel

Stone

et al. 2016

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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Intensified surveillance during the 2009 A/H1N1 influenza pandemic in Israel resulted in large virological and serological datasets, presenting a unique opportunity for investigating the pandemic dynamics. We employ a conditional likelihood approach for fitting a disease transmission model to virological and serological data, conditional on clinical data. The model is used to reconstruct the temporal pattern of the pandemic in Israel in five age-groups and evaluate the factors that shaped it. We estimate the reproductive number at the beginning of the pandemic to be R ¼ 1.4. We find that the combined effect of varying absolute humidity conditions and school vacations (SVs) is responsible for the infection pattern, characterized by three epidemic waves. Overall attack rate is estimated at 32% (28-35%) with a large variation among the age-groups: the highest attack rates within school children and the lowest within the elderly. This pattern of infection is explained by a combination of the age-group contact structure and increasing immunity with age. We assess that SVs increased the overall attack rates by prolonging the pandemic into the winter. Vaccinating school children would have been the optimal strategy for minimizing infection rates in all age-groups.

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“…Successful modelling of observed epidemic patterns requires access to high-quality data, including disease incidence [4,5] (or disease-induced mortality [6,7]), demography (especially birth rates [8,9]) and changes in contact patterns (e.g. resulting from school vacations [10][11][12]). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A century of transitions in New York City's measles dynamics

Hempel

Earn

2015

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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Infectious diseases spreading in a human population occasionally exhibit sudden transitions in their qualitative dynamics. Previous work has successfully predicted such transitions in New York City's historical measles incidence using the seasonally forced susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) model. This work relied on a dataset spanning 45 years , which we have extended to 93 years . We identify additional dynamical transitions in the longer dataset and successfully explain them by analysing attractors and transients of the same mechanistic epidemiological model.

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Effects of School Closure on Incidence of Pandemic Influenza in Alberta, Canada

Abstract: Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and Public Health Agency of Canada.

Cited by 184 publications

References 44 publications

Effect of short-term school closures on the H1N1 pandemic in Japan: a comparative case study

Effect of short-term school closures on the H1N1 pandemic in Japan: a comparative case study

Model-based reconstruction of an epidemic using multiple datasets: understanding influenza A/H1N1 pandemic dynamics in Israel

A century of transitions in New York City's measles dynamics

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