Lack of correlation between school reopening and trends in adult COVID-19 hospitalisations and death rates during the Delta and early Omicron periods: An ecological analysis of five countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: In this ecological study, we describe SARS-CoV-2 case incidence and COVID-19 hospitalisation and death rates for school-aged and adult populations during the Delta and early Omicron periods, before and after schools reopened in five countries. METHODS: Data were extracted from government websites. Cases and COVID-19 hospitalisation and death incidence rates were calculated during the Delta and early Omicron periods in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland and the United Kingdom, for two weeks preceding and six weeks after schools reopened. We summarised stringency of public health measures (GRI), COVID-19 vaccination rates by age and SARS-CoV-2 testing rates. RESULTS: During Delta, cases increased in 2/7 sites after schools reopened, hospitalisations increased in 1/5 sites, while deaths decreased in one and increased then decreased in another. During Omicron, cases increased in 2/8 sites, hospitalisations increased in 1/6 sites and deaths increased in 1/4 sites. The hospitalisation and death rate trends that commenced before schools reopened continued on the same trajectory after schools reopened. Vaccination rates in ≥70-year-olds were 75-100% during Delta and 95-100% during Omicron. Wide variations in testing rates may explain differences in case incidence. GRI were higher and more variable during Delta than during Omicron. CONCLUSIONS: Reopening schools did not change the existing trajectory of COVID-19 rates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".