Facilitating school closure if needed

If a local outbreak has the potential to cause severe disruption to either the healthcare system or to the vital functions of society, there's the option of closing schools as one of many "non pharmaceutical interventions", also called "community mitigation strategies".

The idea is that school closure reduces the number of respiratory contacts for students, which reduces the amplification of the outbreak, which slows things down. If it works, it can be a powerful tool, combined with other tools.

Apparently, if what I remember about flu is correct, it doesn't work particularly well if it's used late in the outbreak, but I don't know of models for this particular virus.

This strategy has societal costs: children still have to be cared for, teenage students may still run around in big gangs, sustaining this for long enough looks like a huge challenge, and it affects all parents including those who do vital jobs for the rest of society.

So we need to facilitate it. Meaning make it easier. For as many people as possible. So that it will be a more useable strategy. So that we will use it or not, but not be so afraid of how difficult it is.

How are we going to do this?

There are at least three ways to do this. And a very basic important principle.

0 The very basic important principle

This strategy is aimed at reducing respiratory contacts.

Each student goes from breathing within one meter of say 200 people (classroom, bus, playground, sports, corridors, etc) to far fewer people, say 10 a day.

The same each day.

Small. Stable.

But also ... Sustainable. How? Here are some possibilities. Not recommendations. Just possibilities.

1 Stable mini-tribes

One idea that came up in the old FluWiki (a wiki + forum that was created to deal with a severe flu pandemic) was to have small stable mini-tribes. This was thought of for places like the UK, where living in megacities with flats is not the norm. May be adapted to other places.

The idea is that your family teams up with two other families. Let's say it's a total of 6 adults and 6 children. 2 adults and 6 children go and live in the biggest house of the three, while the 4 adults use the medium-size house and go to work as protected as possible. The third home is used when someone falls ill.

2 Let the student system take care of itself

Ok, let's look at the numbers.

When I looked at my own environment, I found out about the age-groups and the number of students in schools, high-schools and universities. Added the number of teachers. I don't remember if I found the number of non-teachers working in educational centers (administration, bus drivers, people in the kitchen), or just guessed.

My results looked like this, but it may be very different in your location:

• 1 million people
• 25% in the education system
• 40% of those in the education system are 16 years old or older

So the idea would be to say this to people, with real local figures, and suggest that they "sort themselves out" in small groups.

3 Get out of town

This was a strategy that apparently was used in ancient China. On an individual or family scale, this strategy has long been used by people who either own two homes or have rural friends or relatives.

Today, we'd add the possibility to go camping or create hexayurt cities or what not.

4 Combine strategies

Nothing is perfect. The above strategies are going to take care of a certain percentage of the problem. That will have to do.

5 More strategies?

Please send me a tweet, to @lucasgonzalez, maybe using #ImproveNPI.