Understanding the effectiveness of government interventions against the resurgence of COVID-19 in Europe

  1. Mrinank Sharma
  2. Sören Mindermann
  3. Charlie Rogers-Smith
  4. Gavin Leech
  5. Benedict Snodin
  6. Janvi Ahuja
  7. Jonas B. Sandbrink
  8. Joshua Teperowski Monrad
  9. George Altman
  10. Gurpreet Dhaliwal
  11. Lukas Finnveden
  12. Alexander John Norman
  13. Sebastian B. Oehm
  14. Julia Fabienne Sandkühler
  15. Laurence Aitchison
  16. Tomáš Gavenčiak
  17. Thomas Mellan
  18. Jan Kulveit
  19. Leonid Chindelevitch
  20. Seth Flaxman
  21. Yarin Gal
  22. Swapnil Mishra
  23. Samir Bhatt
  24. Jan Markus Brauner

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Abstract

European governments use non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to control resurging waves of COVID-19. However, they only have outdated estimates for how effective individual NPIs were in the first wave. We estimate the effectiveness of 17 NPIs in Europe’s second wave from subnational case and death data by introducing a flexible hierarchical Bayesian transmission model and collecting the largest dataset of NPI implementation dates across Europe. Business closures, educational institution closures, and gathering bans reduced transmission, but reduced it less than they did in the first wave. This difference is likely due to organisational safety measures and individual protective behaviours—such as distancing—which made various areas of public life safer and thereby reduced the effect of closing them. Specifically, we find smaller effects for closing educational institutions, suggesting that stringent safety measures made schools safer compared to the first wave. Second-wave estimates outperform previous estimates at predicting transmission in Europe’s third wave.

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  1. Version published to 10.1038/s41467-021-26013-4
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.25.21254330: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a protocol registration statement.

    About SciScore

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2021.03.25.21254330 on medRxiv