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School environments are thought to play an important role in the communityspread of airborne infections (e.g., influenza) because of the high mixingrates of school children. The closure of schools has therefore been proposed asefficient mitigation strategy, with however high social and economic costs:alternative, less disruptive interventions are highly desirable. The recentavailability of high-resolution contact networks in school environmentsprovides an opportunity to design micro-interventions and compare the outcomesof alternative mitigation measures. We consider mitigation measures thatinvolve the targeted closure of school classes or grades based on readilyavailable information such as the number of symptomatic infectious children ina class. We focus on the case of a primary school for which we havehigh-resolution data on the close-range interactions of children and teachers.We simulate the spread of an influenza-like illness in this population by usingan SEIR model with asymptomatics and compare the outcomes of differentmitigation strategies. We find that targeted class closure affords strongmitigation effects: closing a class for a fixed period of time -equal to thesum of the average infectious and latent durations- whenever two infectiousindividuals are detected in that class decreases the attack rate by almost 70%and strongly decreases the probability of a severe outbreak. The closure of allclasses of the same grade mitigates the spread almost as much as closing thewhole school. Targeted class closure strategies based on readily availableinformation on symptomatic subjects and on limited information on mixingpatterns, such as the grade structure of the school, can be almost as effectiveas whole-school closure, at a much lower cost. This may inform public healthpolicies for the management and mitigation of influenza-like outbreaks in thecommunity.

Mitigation of infectious disease at school: targeted class closure vs school closure