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The impact of regular school closure on seasonal influenza epidemics: a data-driven spatial transmission model for Belgium
BACKGROUND: School closure is often considered as an option to mitigate influenza epidemics because of its potential to reduce transmission in children and then in the community. The policy is still however highly debated because of controversial evidence. Moreover, the specific mechanisms leading t...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764028/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29321005 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12879-017-2934-3 |
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author | Luca, Giancarlo De Kerckhove, Kim Van Coletti, Pietro Poletto, Chiara Bossuyt, Nathalie Hens, Niel Colizza, Vittoria |
author_facet | Luca, Giancarlo De Kerckhove, Kim Van Coletti, Pietro Poletto, Chiara Bossuyt, Nathalie Hens, Niel Colizza, Vittoria |
author_sort | Luca, Giancarlo De |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: School closure is often considered as an option to mitigate influenza epidemics because of its potential to reduce transmission in children and then in the community. The policy is still however highly debated because of controversial evidence. Moreover, the specific mechanisms leading to mitigation are not clearly identified. METHODS: We introduced a stochastic spatial age-specific metapopulation model to assess the role of holiday-associated behavioral changes and how they affect seasonal influenza dynamics. The model is applied to Belgium, parameterized with country-specific data on social mixing and travel, and calibrated to the 2008/2009 influenza season. It includes behavioral changes occurring during weekend vs. weekday, and holiday vs. school-term. Several experimental scenarios are explored to identify the relevant social and behavioral mechanisms. RESULTS: Stochastic numerical simulations show that holidays considerably delay the peak of the season and mitigate its impact. Changes in mixing patterns are responsible for the observed effects, whereas changes in travel behavior do not alter the epidemic. Weekends are important in slowing down the season by periodically dampening transmission. Christmas holidays have the largest impact on the epidemic, however later school breaks may help in reducing the epidemic size, stressing the importance of considering the full calendar. An extension of the Christmas holiday of 1 week may further mitigate the epidemic. CONCLUSION: Changes in the way individuals establish contacts during holidays are the key ingredient explaining the mitigating effect of regular school closure. Our findings highlight the need to quantify these changes in different demographic and epidemic contexts in order to provide accurate and reliable evaluations of closure effectiveness. They also suggest strategic policies in the distribution of holiday periods to minimize the epidemic impact. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12879-017-2934-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5764028 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-57640282018-01-17 The impact of regular school closure on seasonal influenza epidemics: a data-driven spatial transmission model for Belgium Luca, Giancarlo De Kerckhove, Kim Van Coletti, Pietro Poletto, Chiara Bossuyt, Nathalie Hens, Niel Colizza, Vittoria BMC Infect Dis Research Article BACKGROUND: School closure is often considered as an option to mitigate influenza epidemics because of its potential to reduce transmission in children and then in the community. The policy is still however highly debated because of controversial evidence. Moreover, the specific mechanisms leading to mitigation are not clearly identified. METHODS: We introduced a stochastic spatial age-specific metapopulation model to assess the role of holiday-associated behavioral changes and how they affect seasonal influenza dynamics. The model is applied to Belgium, parameterized with country-specific data on social mixing and travel, and calibrated to the 2008/2009 influenza season. It includes behavioral changes occurring during weekend vs. weekday, and holiday vs. school-term. Several experimental scenarios are explored to identify the relevant social and behavioral mechanisms. RESULTS: Stochastic numerical simulations show that holidays considerably delay the peak of the season and mitigate its impact. Changes in mixing patterns are responsible for the observed effects, whereas changes in travel behavior do not alter the epidemic. Weekends are important in slowing down the season by periodically dampening transmission. Christmas holidays have the largest impact on the epidemic, however later school breaks may help in reducing the epidemic size, stressing the importance of considering the full calendar. An extension of the Christmas holiday of 1 week may further mitigate the epidemic. CONCLUSION: Changes in the way individuals establish contacts during holidays are the key ingredient explaining the mitigating effect of regular school closure. Our findings highlight the need to quantify these changes in different demographic and epidemic contexts in order to provide accurate and reliable evaluations of closure effectiveness. They also suggest strategic policies in the distribution of holiday periods to minimize the epidemic impact. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12879-017-2934-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2018-01-10 /pmc/articles/PMC5764028/ /pubmed/29321005 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12879-017-2934-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Luca, Giancarlo De Kerckhove, Kim Van Coletti, Pietro Poletto, Chiara Bossuyt, Nathalie Hens, Niel Colizza, Vittoria The impact of regular school closure on seasonal influenza epidemics: a data-driven spatial transmission model for Belgium |
title | The impact of regular school closure on seasonal influenza epidemics: a data-driven spatial transmission model for Belgium |
title_full | The impact of regular school closure on seasonal influenza epidemics: a data-driven spatial transmission model for Belgium |
title_fullStr | The impact of regular school closure on seasonal influenza epidemics: a data-driven spatial transmission model for Belgium |
title_full_unstemmed | The impact of regular school closure on seasonal influenza epidemics: a data-driven spatial transmission model for Belgium |
title_short | The impact of regular school closure on seasonal influenza epidemics: a data-driven spatial transmission model for Belgium |
title_sort | impact of regular school closure on seasonal influenza epidemics: a data-driven spatial transmission model for belgium |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764028/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29321005 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12879-017-2934-3 |
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