Modeling the impact of school reopening on SARS-CoV-2 transmission using contact structure data from Shanghai

Mathematical modeling studies have suggested that pre-emptive school closures alone have little overall impact on SARS-CoV-2 transmission, but reopening schools in the background of community contact reduction presents a unique scenario that has not been fully assessed.

We adapted a previously published model using contact information from Shanghai to model school reopening under various conditions. We investigated different strategies by combining the contact patterns observed between different age groups during both baseline and "lockdown" periods. We also tested the robustness of our strategy to the assumption of lower susceptibility to infection in children under age 15 years.

We find that reopening schools for all children would maintain a post-intervention R₀ < 1 up to a baseline R₀ of approximately 3.3 provided that daily contacts among children 10-19 years are reduced to 33% of baseline. This finding was robust to various estimates of susceptibility to infection in children relative to adults (up to 50%) and to estimates of various levels of concomitant reopening in the rest of the community (up to 40%). However, full school reopening without any degree of contact reduction in the school setting returned R₀ virtually back to baseline, highlighting the importance of mitigation measures.

These results, based on contact structure data from Shanghai, suggest that schools can reopen with proper precautions during conditions of extreme contact reduction and during conditions of reasonable levels of reopening in the rest of the community.