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Fueling the Covid-19 pandemic: summer school holidays and incidence rates in German districts
BACKGROUND: The Robert-Koch-Institute reports that during the summer holiday period a foreign country is stated as the most likely place of infection for an average of 27 and a maximum of 49% of new SARS-CoV-2 infections in Germany. METHODS: Cross-sectional study on observational data. In Germany, s...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Oxford University Press
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8083696/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33765149 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdab080 |
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author | Plümper, Thomas Neumayer, Eric |
author_facet | Plümper, Thomas Neumayer, Eric |
author_sort | Plümper, Thomas |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: The Robert-Koch-Institute reports that during the summer holiday period a foreign country is stated as the most likely place of infection for an average of 27 and a maximum of 49% of new SARS-CoV-2 infections in Germany. METHODS: Cross-sectional study on observational data. In Germany, summer school holidays are coordinated between states and spread out over 13 weeks. Employing a dynamic model with district fixed effects, we analyze the association between these holidays and weekly incidence rates across 401 German districts. RESULTS: We find effects of the holiday period of around 45% of the average district incidence rates in Germany during their respective final week of holidays and the 2 weeks after holidays end. Western states tend to experience stronger effects than Eastern states. We also find statistically significant interaction effects of school holidays with per capita taxable income and the share of foreign residents in a district’s population. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that changed behavior during the holiday season accelerated the pandemic and made it considerably more difficult for public health authorities to contain the spread of the virus by means of contact tracing. Germany’s public health authorities did not prepare adequately for this acceleration. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8083696 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Oxford University Press |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-80836962021-05-03 Fueling the Covid-19 pandemic: summer school holidays and incidence rates in German districts Plümper, Thomas Neumayer, Eric J Public Health (Oxf) Original Article BACKGROUND: The Robert-Koch-Institute reports that during the summer holiday period a foreign country is stated as the most likely place of infection for an average of 27 and a maximum of 49% of new SARS-CoV-2 infections in Germany. METHODS: Cross-sectional study on observational data. In Germany, summer school holidays are coordinated between states and spread out over 13 weeks. Employing a dynamic model with district fixed effects, we analyze the association between these holidays and weekly incidence rates across 401 German districts. RESULTS: We find effects of the holiday period of around 45% of the average district incidence rates in Germany during their respective final week of holidays and the 2 weeks after holidays end. Western states tend to experience stronger effects than Eastern states. We also find statistically significant interaction effects of school holidays with per capita taxable income and the share of foreign residents in a district’s population. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that changed behavior during the holiday season accelerated the pandemic and made it considerably more difficult for public health authorities to contain the spread of the virus by means of contact tracing. Germany’s public health authorities did not prepare adequately for this acceleration. Oxford University Press 2021-03-26 /pmc/articles/PMC8083696/ /pubmed/33765149 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdab080 Text en © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Faculty of Public Health. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) ), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Original Article Plümper, Thomas Neumayer, Eric Fueling the Covid-19 pandemic: summer school holidays and incidence rates in German districts |
title | Fueling the Covid-19 pandemic: summer school holidays and incidence rates in German districts |
title_full | Fueling the Covid-19 pandemic: summer school holidays and incidence rates in German districts |
title_fullStr | Fueling the Covid-19 pandemic: summer school holidays and incidence rates in German districts |
title_full_unstemmed | Fueling the Covid-19 pandemic: summer school holidays and incidence rates in German districts |
title_short | Fueling the Covid-19 pandemic: summer school holidays and incidence rates in German districts |
title_sort | fueling the covid-19 pandemic: summer school holidays and incidence rates in german districts |
topic | Original Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8083696/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33765149 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdab080 |
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