Fig. 7: Impact of reduction of school contacts in different age groups on the effective reproduction number in November 2020.

Percentage reduction in school contacts among (a) [0, 5) years old, (b) [5, 10) years old, and (c) [10, 20) years old. In each panel, we varied the number of school contacts in one age group while keeping the number of school contacts in the other two age groups constant. The scenario with 0% reduction describes the situation in November 2020 with R_e of about 1 (partial lockdown intended to prevent the second wave), where all schools are open without substantial additional measures. The reduction of 100% in school contacts represents a scenario with the structure of non-school contacts in society in general as in November 2020 and schools for students in a given age group closed. The solid black line describes the median and the shaded region represents the 95% credible intervals obtained from 2000 parameter samples from the posterior distribution. The red line is the starting value of R_e = 1 (situation November 2020). The green line indicates the value of R_e achieved when schools for a given age group close.