A simple method to quantify country-specific effects of COVID-19 containment measures
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Most of the world is currently fighting to limit the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Italy, the Western country with most COVID-19 related deaths, was the first to implement drastic containment measures in early March, 2020. Since then most other European countries, the USA, Canada and Australia, have implemented similar restrictions, ranging from school closures, banning of recreational activities and large events, to complete lockdown. Such limitations, and softer promotion of social distancing, may be more effective in one society than in another due to cultural or political differences. It is therefore important to evaluate the effectiveness of these initiatives by analyzing country-specific COVID-19 data. We propose to model COVID-19 dynamics with a SIQR (susceptible – infectious – quarantined – recovered) model, since confirmed positive cases are isolated and do not transmit the disease. We provide an explicit formula that is easily implemented and permits us to fit official COVID-19 data in a series of Western countries. We found excellent agreement with data-driven estimation of the day-of-change in disease dynamics and the dates when official interventions were introduced. Our analysis predicts that for most countries only the more drastic restrictions have reduced virus spreading. Further, we predict that the number of unidentified COVID-19-positive individuals at the beginning of the epidemic is ∼10 times the number of confirmed cases. Our results provide important insight for future planning of non-pharmacological interventions aiming to contain spreading of COVID-19 and similar diseases.
Article activity feed
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.07.20057075: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The German government imposed partial lockdown from March 17, closing all non-essential shops, and imposing limitation restaurants and banning leisure activities, which was followed by further restrictions in the following days. On March 16 the government of Austria prohibited gatherings of groups of more than five people in public, and …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.07.20057075: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The German government imposed partial lockdown from March 17, closing all non-essential shops, and imposing limitation restaurants and banning leisure activities, which was followed by further restrictions in the following days. On March 16 the government of Austria prohibited gatherings of groups of more than five people in public, and all schools were closed from March 17. On this latter date, the closure of restaurants was also ordered. People were recommended to leave home only for purchasing necessary goods (medications, groceries), for assisting other people, or for important professional activities. The date-of-change estimated by our model (March 20) corresponds nicely to the dates of these restrictions, demonstrating their effectiveness in limiting the growth rate of the epidemics. For Italy we saw no effect of school closures. However, the worst hit Northern regions closed schools immediately after the first cases were registered on February 20-21, 2020. These dates coincides with the beginning of the carnival school holidays. Hence, the date of school closure may not show up in the data since schools were shut anyway. The fact that the initial estimated growth rate in Italy is slightly slower than in e.g. France and Spain may reflect that schools were closed from the beginning of the epidemic in Italy. For Italy, we estimated that the growth rate changed on 12/3, coinciding with the complete lockdown that was introduced March 9–11, 2020. France closed schools betwe...
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.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
-
