The Effectiveness of Closing Schools and Working at Home During the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

In this chapter we show the results of simulations of two widely adopted measures that were taken in order to stop the spreading of the COVID-19 virus, namely closing of schools and working from home. We take these two measures together because in practice they are often instated together and at least parents with young children will have to stay at home if the children cannot go to school. We will simulate different scenarios in order to separately examine the effects of closed schools and people working from home on the number of infections, hospitalisations and social contacts, and the effect of the combination of the two measures. Although we expected a positive impact to come from people working from home, we see that closing of schools has the best results on decreasing the number of infected people. Working remotely has a negative effect as infections and hospitalisations are higher when people work from home. We will look into where and how many social contacts take place and how this results in the transmission of the virus. We will see that a decrease in physical social interaction is not enough to suppress infections by imposing these measures. The behaviour of people will change in such a way that smaller gatherings at busy locations cause almost as many infections as without the imposed measures.