Social interventions can lower COVID-19 deaths in middle-income countries

  1. Angel Paternina-Caicedo
  2. Marc Choisy
  3. Christian Garcia-Calavaro
  4. Guido España
  5. José Rojas-Suarez
  6. Carmelo Dueñas
  7. Adrian Smith
  8. Fernando De la Hoz-Restrepo

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Abstract

A novel pandemic coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was first detected in late 2019 in Wuhan (China) 1,2 . COVID-19 has caused 77 national governments worldwide to impose a lockdown in part or all their countries, as of April 4, 2020 3 . The United States and the United Kingdom estimated the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce COVID-19 deaths, but there is less evidence to support choice of control measures in middle-income countries 4 . We used Colombia, an upper-middle income country, as a case-study to assess the effect of social interventions to suppress or mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we show that a combination of social distancing interventions, triggered by critical care admissions, can suppress and mitigate the peak of COVID-19, resulting in less critical care use, hospitalizations, and deaths. We found, through a mathematical simulation model, that a one-time social intervention may delay the number of critical care admissions and deaths related to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a series of social interventions (social and work distance and school closures) over a period of a year can reduce the expected burden of COVID-19, however, these interventions imply long periods of lockdown. Colombia would prevent up to 97% of COVID-19 deaths using these triggered series of interventions during the first year. Our analyses could be used by decision-makers from other middle-income countries with similar demographics and contact patterns to Colombia to reduce COVID-19 critical care admissions and deaths in their jurisdictions.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.16.20063727: (What is this?)

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

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    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).

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.16.20063727v2 on medRxiv
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.16.20063727v1 on medRxiv