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Estimates of the ongoing need for social distancing and control measures post-"lockdown" from trajectories of COVID-19 cases and mortality.

ABSTRACT: By 21 May 2020, severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) had caused more than 5 million cases of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) across more than 200 countries. Most countries with significant outbreaks have introduced social distancing or "lockdown" measures to reduce viral transmission. So the key question now is when, how and to what extent these measures can be lifted.Publicly available data on daily numbers of newly confirmed cases and mortality were used to fit regression models estimating trajectories, doubling times and the reproduction number (R0) of the disease, before and under the control measures. These data ran up to 21 May 2020, and were sufficient for analysis in 89 countries.The estimates of R0 before lockdown based on these data were broadly consistent with those previously published: between 2.0 and 3.7 in the countries with the largest number of cases available for analysis (USA, Italy, Spain, France and UK). There was little evidence to suggest that the restrictions had reduced R far below 1 in many places, with France having the most rapid reductions: R0 0.76 (95% CI 0.72-0.82) based on cases, and 0.77 (95% CI 0.73-0.80) based on mortality.Intermittent lockdown has been proposed as a means of controlling the outbreak while allowing periods of increased freedom and economic activity. These data suggest that few countries could have even 1?week per month unrestricted without seeing resurgence of the epidemic. Similarly, restoring 20% of the activity that has been prevented by the lockdowns looks difficult to reconcile with preventing the resurgence of the disease in most countries.

SUBMITTER: Lonergan M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7263071 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Estimates of the ongoing need for social distancing and control measures post-"lockdown" from trajectories of COVID-19 cases and mortality.

Lonergan Mike M Chalmers James D JD

The European respiratory journal 20200723 1

By 21 May 2020, severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) had caused more than 5 million cases of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) across more than 200 countries. Most countries with significant outbreaks have introduced social distancing or "lockdown" measures to reduce viral transmission. So the key question now is when, how and to what extent these measures can be lifted.Publicly available data on daily numbers of newly confirmed cases and mortality were used to fit regression m ...[more]

PMID: 32482785

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Project description:Social distancing measures are effective in reducing overall community transmission but much remains unknown about how they have impacted finer-scale dynamics. In particular, much is unknown about how changes of contact patterns and other behaviors including adherence to social distancing, induced by these measures, may have impacted finer-scale transmission dynamics among different age groups. In this paper, we build a stochastic age-specific transmission model to systematically characterize the degree and variation of age-specific transmission dynamics, before and after lifting the lockdown in Georgia, USA. We perform Bayesian (missing-)data-augmentation model inference, leveraging reported age-specific case, seroprevalence and mortality data. We estimate that overall population-level transmissibility was reduced to 41.2% with 95% CI [39%, 43.8%] of the pre-lockdown level in about a week of the announcement of the shelter-in-place order. Although it subsequently increased after the lockdown was lifted, it only bounced back to 62% [58%, 67.2%] of the pre-lockdown level after about a month. We also find that during the lockdown susceptibility to infection increases with age. Specifically, relative to the oldest age group (> 65+), susceptibility for the youngest age group (0-17 years) is 0.13 [0.09, 0.18], and it increases to 0.53 [0.49, 0.59] for 18-44 and 0.75 [0.68, 0.82] for 45-64. More importantly, our results reveal clear changes of age-specific susceptibility (defined as average risk of getting infected during an infectious contact incorporating age-dependent behavioral factors) after the lockdown was lifted, with a trend largely consistent with reported age-specific adherence levels to social distancing and preventive measures. Specifically, the older groups (> 45) (with the highest levels of adherence) appear to have the most significant reductions of susceptibility (e.g., post-lockdown susceptibility reduced to 31.6% [29.3%, 34%] of the estimate before lifting the lockdown for the 6+ group). Finally, we find heterogeneity in case reporting among different age groups, with the lowest rate occurring among the 0-17 group (9.7% [6.4%, 19%]). Our results provide a more fundamental understanding of the impacts of stringent lockdown measures, and finer evidence that other social distancing and preventive measures may be effective in reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission. These results may be exploited to guide more effective implementations of these measures in many current settings (with low vaccination rate globally and emerging variants) and in future potential outbreaks of novel pathogens.

Dataset Information

Estimates of the ongoing need for social distancing and control measures post-"lockdown" from trajectories of COVID-19 cases and mortality.

Publications

Estimates of the ongoing need for social distancing and control measures post-"lockdown" from trajectories of COVID-19 cases and mortality.

Similar Datasets

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