Background Various forms of contact restrictions have been adopted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Around February 2021, rapid testing appeared as a new policy instrument. Some claim it may serve as a substitute for contact restrictions. We study the strength of this argument by evaluating the effects of a unique policy experiment: In March and April 2021, the city of Tübingen set up a testing scheme while relaxing contact restrictions. Methods We compare case rates in Tübingen county to an appropriately identified control unit. We employ the synthetic control method. We base interpretations of our findings on an extended SEIR model. Findings The experiment led to an increase in the reported case rate. This increase is robust across alternative statistical specifications. This is also due to more testing leading initially to more reported cases. An epidemiological model that corrects for ‘more cases due to more testing’ and ‘reduced testing and reporting during the Easter holiday’ confirms that the overall effect of the experiment led to more infections. Interpretation The number of rapid tests were not sufficiently high in this experiment to compensate for more contacts and thereby infections caused by relaxing contact restrictions.
Over the last decades, many social scientists have diagnosed a ‘disappearance of space’ (Paul Virilio). Others, however, have presented persuasive arguments for a ‘spatial turn’ (Edward W. Soja) that is the demand to recognise space as a key factor for the social sciences and humanities. Following the latter argument, the article shows the importance of space which is not just a neutral box in which history takes its course. On the contrary, humans are always thrown into a historically specific world and thus linked with their environment. They are both being influenced by the world around them and constructing a social understanding of their surroundings, and it is thus the challenge for studies of space and place to situate themselves between the two reductionist positions of spatial voluntarism and spatial determinism. The survey of more theoretical and empirical studies also shows the key importance of human attachment to ‘their place’ in identity formation, on a local, regional, national and transnational level as well as through qualitative features of landscape such as mountains or plains, rich or sparse vegetation, or the question of access to rivers, lakes and the sea. Such senses of belonging or Heimat are a key aspect of human existence and political action ranging from providing an important sense of community to a dangerous exclusion of alleged ‘others’.
Various forms of contact restriction have been adopted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only recently, rapid testing appeared as a new policy instrument. If sufficiently effective, it may serve as a substitute for contact restrictions. Against this background we evaluate the effects of a unique policy experiment: on March 16, the city of Tuebingen set up a rapid testing scheme while relaxing lockdown measures-in sharp contrast to its German peers. Comparing case rates in Tuebingen county to an appropriately defined control unit over a four-week period, we find an increase in the reported case rate, robustly across alternative specifications. However, the increase is temporary and about one half of it reflects cases that would have gone undetected in the absence of extra testing.
The city of Augustusburg allowed for opening of, inter alia, restaurants and hotels joint with large-scale testing. We evaluate this testing & opening (T&O) experiment by comparing the evolution of case rates in Augustusburg with the evolution in other communities of Saxony. We have access to small-scale SARS-CoV-2 infection data at the community level (Gemeinde) instead of the county level (Landkreis) usually used for disease surveillance. Despite data challenges, we conclude that T&O did not lead to any increase in case rates in Augustusburg compared to its control county. When we measure the effect of T&O on cumulative cases, we find a small increase in Augustusburg. This difference almost completely disappears when we control for the effect of higher case rates due to more testing. Generally speaking, T&O worked much better than in comparable projects elsewhere.
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