Scientists are often quick to remind people: no model is perfect.
After a computer model by Professor Neil Ferguson suggested in March that 500,000 people in the UK would die from coronavirus without a down-down action, the UK quickly abandoned its crowdfunding strategy and resorted to closing schools and businesses.
A June review in the journal Nature showed that some researchers were able to reproduce Ferguson’s findings, but software engineers said the code was flawed and some public-health experts said the results were unreliable.
One finding in particular didn’t make sense: this model showed that the closure of UK schools and universities during the lockdown resulted in more COVID-19 deaths than when schools remained open.
A new peer-to-peer report released Wednesday at BMJ suggests the takeaway may be accurate.
“Our first thought was that it was a mistake, but after a little work on the code, we copied the result,” wrote the study’s author, Grimland Cland. “The basic explanation for this anti-intuitive outcome is an intervention that significantly suppresses the first wave of the epidemic, while leading to a stronger second wave after the interventions are removed.”
Other experts still can’t be sure.
Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said in a statement that the results were accurate, and perhaps unrealistic, applicable to the scenario and should not be interpreted as a prediction.
The model assumes that people behave in a certain way during lockdown: that is, suspicious cases are isolated from the home, homes are voluntarily quarantined, and people over the age of 70 distance themselves from others. Experts say the next step is proving difficult to implement.
“Very sensitive people need the care of other members of the population,” said Matt Keeling, professor of population and disease at the University of Warwick. “While it is easier to turn off this component in this model, it is more difficult to achieve this.”
Under all scenarios of the model, the lockdown measures are fully lifted after three months. The model also assumes that the lockdown will be eliminated before an effective vaccine becomes available.
This gives rise to a bunch of bizarre scenes where the second wave is allowed to progress uncontrollably, Keeling said.
Indeed, Land Clande acknowledged that “results are achieved only if there is no successful vaccination program for a few years.”
Infections can peak after schools reopen
There is a natural rationale for closing schools during an epidemic: fewer interactions mean fewer chances of the virus being transmitted from one person to another.
A July study found that spring U.S. School closures could be associated with 1.37 million fewer cases during the 26-day period and 40,600 fewer deaths during the 16-day period. Surveys in Wuhan and Shanghai also found that school closures reduced peak infections in those cities by up to 60%.
The UK model does not deny that school closures can reduce transmission. But it suggests that reopening schools could have its own dire consequences: the case could spike again dramatically, leading to higher demand for ICU beds than the first wave of infection. When the ICU becomes more dense, the risk of death of infected people increases.
In Tampa, Florida, on August 6, 2020, teachers protested against the reopening of the school.
Octavio Jones / Getty Images
U.S. Cases are already on the rise in response to the resumption of colleges: a September study still awaiting a peer review found that more than 20,000,000 new coronavirus cases have been added to the U.S. every day since July.
But local spread depends on how much the virus spreads when the school reopens. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci has suggested reopening the school at the transmission level in each community for this reason.
Many schools have also implemented strict mask policies – a measure that could prevent cases above the pre-lockdown level. Germany, for example, reopened schools without major outrage in the major gusts. There are many students taking halls and need to wear masks in school buses.
Israel, meanwhile, saw an increase in infections after school resumed, but teachers there reported that masks and social distance were not strictly enforced.
“Israel [closed schools] “Other countries didn’t shut down and they didn’t,” Wowne Maldonado, a professor of epidemiology at Stanford University, told Business Insider. The team has this issue, but they were also very careful. “
The cost of keeping schools open
Elementary students in Prague, Czech Republic attend on May 11, 2020.
Gabriel Kukta / Getty Images
The UK model assumes that some school-age children would have developed immunity to the virus if schools had remained open. Since this group is less susceptible to serious infections, fewer deaths may occur in this scenario compared to school closure.
“If you lock everyone up, the virus is spreading to everyone, while if you leave the virus to spread to people who are not really dead, then by the end of the epidemic, death is more concentrated in the elderly group,” Land Clande told the BBC on Thursday. “Today” said on the radio show.
But those are the obvious consequences of the strategy. Young people can still get very sick or develop long-term symptoms that last for several months or more. People who become infected can also transmit the virus to more susceptible people.
Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the University of F. North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The virus transmits as easily as it does, so targeting an age-old population wouldn’t have had much of an impact,” Rachel Graham told Business Insider. “If you let all your school-age kids roam free and move with each other and that, they’ll have to go to the parents ‘and grandparents’ house.”
Nevertheless, the model emphasizes that lockdown is a short-term solution to the epidemic. In the long run, Graham said, there are only two possible outcomes: vaccination or bunch immunity.
“A vaccine definitely shortens the time that measures should be as strict as possible,” he said. “The only other option is to establish a significant mob immunity. And the only way you can do that is if you infect more people. This is a significant human cost that I don’t think anyone is really willing to take at this stage.”
