Author Summary School closure is a non-pharmaceutical intervention, considered for the mitigation of influenza epidemics and pandemics, whose impact and cost-effectiveness are still disputed. We propose the first systematic computational model study assessing the potential impact of different school closure policies. We consider four closure strategies based on school absenteeism: nationwide, countywide, reactive school-by-school, reactive gradual. Mitigation outcomes are highly variable, but under the constraint of a fixed number of weeks lost per student, the optimal implementations of all strategies give comparable results. Gradual and county closures are less sensitive to variations in school absenteeism and thus are slightly more feasible in practice. Our results suggest that health care policy makers may consider school closure as a countermeasure during influenza outbreaks, if put in the condition to properly evaluate the severity of the disease and the subsequent level of effort that a country should be ready to afford.
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