Reopening Italy’s schools in September 2020: a Bayesian estimation of the change in the growth rate of new SARS-CoV-2 cases

Abstract

Studying the rate of growth of daily SARS-CoV-2 cases in all the regions provides some evidence in favour of a link between school reopening and the resurgence of the virus. The number of factors that could have played a role is too many to give a definitive answer. Still, the temporal correspondence warrants further systematic experiments to investigate on potential confounders that could clarify how much reopening schools mattered.