Infectious disease
How much could closing schools slow a close-contact epidemic?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People had fewer and differently mixed contacts at weekends and during school holidays, which would lower an infection's reproduction number enough to suggest school closure could meaningfully slow spread in most countries studied.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Secondary analysis of a one-day social contact diary survey; weighted negative binomial regression of contact counts and age-structured contact matrices used to compute relative changes in the basic reproduction number.
- N
- N=7290 · 7290 participants recording 97904 contacts on one day each; holiday comparisons were possible only for Belgium, Great Britain, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
- Population
- Broadly representative samples of all ages (children and adolescents deliberately oversampled) in Belgium, Great Britain, Finland, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland and the Netherlands, 2005-2006.
- Outcome
- Number of daily conversational and physical contacts, age-by-age contact matrices, and the relative change in R0 for weekends versus the week and holidays versus regular periods.
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Key findings
People reported roughly 30% fewer contacts at weekends than on the average weekday and about 9% fewer during holidays than in regular periods. For close contacts, estimated R0 was 12% to 26% lower at weekends in six countries, with no significant change in Germany and Finland. Holidays lowered R0 by 10% in Belgium, 17% in Great Britain and 45% in the Netherlands, with no significant change in Luxembourg. Weekends and holidays also shifted mixing away from same-age contact toward more contact between generations.
Methodology
The authors reanalysed a large diary survey in which people in eight European countries listed everyone they talked to or touched on one assigned day. They modelled how many contacts people made depending on age, household size, day of the week and holiday period, and built age-by-age contact matrices. Treating weekends and school holidays as natural stand-ins for school closure, they estimated how much the basic reproduction number (R0) of a close-contact infection would change under those mixing patterns.
Limitations
Weekends and holidays are imperfect proxies for pandemic school closure: parents may still work, and in a real pandemic other activities would also stop, so the true effect could differ. The survey was not designed to compare these periods, holiday data existed for only a few countries, and some samples (especially the Dutch holiday estimate and older age groups) were small. R0 changes depend on the assumption that reported conversations and touches stand in for transmission-relevant contacts, and no actual infections were measured.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
School and work days drive contact volume.
Across eight European countries (7,290 participants), people reported about 30% fewer contacts at weekends and about 9% fewer during holidays than on regular weekdays.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
School holidays are a natural experiment suggesting partial, not complete, reductions.
Feeding holiday-period contact matrices into models lowered R0 by amounts that varied widely by country: 10% in Belgium, 17% in Great Britain, 45% in the Netherlands and no significant change in Luxembourg; the single-country Belgian survey estimated a 15.5% reduction (R from 2 to 1.69).
Evidence for the claim as stated.
The European surveys model contact-driven, close-contact respiratory spread; Zika is mosquito-borne, so its reproduction number reflects vector ecology rather than human mixing. The Zika cohort shows how immunity modifies outcomes, not how contact matrices apply to it.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Holiday contact patterns are only a proxy for school closure: during real closures parents may also stop work or children may gather elsewhere, and the surveys are cross-sectional self-reports from 2005-2006.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Open questions
Tensions this paper is part of
From concept pages' “where studies disagree.” Disagreement means the same question; scope means different assays, populations, or outcomes.
The European surveys model contact-driven, close-contact respiratory spread; Zika is mosquito-borne, so its reproduction number reflects vector ecology rather than human mixing. The Zika cohort shows how immunity modifies outcomes, not how contact matrices apply to it.
Holiday contact patterns are only a proxy for school closure: during real closures parents may also stop work or children may gather elsewhere, and the surveys are cross-sectional self-reports from 2005-2006.
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Same topic cluster — not a recommendation engine.