Commentary: Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe

Kuhbandner, Christof; Homburg, Stefan

doi:10.3389/fmed.2020.580361

Cited by 25 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 6 publications

(7 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…A more realistic number is at least 2X lower, well fewer than 5.2 million deaths "saved." It is also worth mentioning that the efficacy of lockdown has been questioned in several studies, reducing the benefit of lockdown potentially markedly further ( Supplementary Table 4) (149)(150)(151)(152)(153)(154)(155). Second, consider the costs of lockdown (144,(156)(157)(158).…”

Section: Cost-benefit Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink

Joffe

2021

Front. Public Health

101

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) worldwide pandemic in 2020. In response, most countries in the world implemented lockdowns, restricting their population's movements, work, education, gatherings, and general activities in attempt to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19 cases. The public health goal of lockdowns was to save the population from COVID-19 cases and deaths, and to prevent overwhelming health care systems with COVID-19 patients. In this narrative review I explain why I changed my mind about supporting lockdowns. The initial modeling predictions induced fear and crowd-effects (i.e., groupthink). Over time, important information emerged relevant to the modeling, including the lower infection fatality rate (median 0.23%), clarification of high-risk groups (specifically, those 70 years of age and older), lower herd immunity thresholds (likely 20–40% population immunity), and the difficult exit strategies. In addition, information emerged on significant collateral damage due to the response to the pandemic, adversely affecting many millions of people with poverty, food insecurity, loneliness, unemployment, school closures, and interrupted healthcare. Raw numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths were difficult to interpret, and may be tempered by information placing the number of COVID-19 deaths in proper context and perspective relative to background rates. Considering this information, a cost-benefit analysis of the response to COVID-19 finds that lockdowns are far more harmful to public health (at least 5–10 times so in terms of wellbeing years) than COVID-19 can be. Controversies and objections about the main points made are considered and addressed. Progress in the response to COVID-19 depends on considering the trade-offs discussed here that determine the wellbeing of populations. I close with some suggestions for moving forward, including focused protection of those truly at high risk, opening of schools, and building back better with a economy.

show abstract

Section: Cost-benefit Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink

Joffe

2021

Front. Public Health

101

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Availability of effective and safe vaccines may also affect risk-benefit ratios of NPI measures of different aggressiveness and different duration of implementation. It is noted that other investigators [33] , [34] , [35] have raised similar concerns using alternative approaches.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Effect estimates of COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions are non-robust and highly model-dependent

Chin

Ioannidis

Tanner

et al. 2021

Journal of Clinical Epidemiology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Objective : To compare the inference regarding the effectiveness of the various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for COVID-19 obtained from different SIR models. Study design and setting: We explored two models developed by Imperial College that considered only NPIs without accounting for mobility (model 1) or only mobility (model 2), and a model accounting for the combination of mobility and NPIs (model 3). Imperial College applied models 1 and 2 to 11 European countries and to the USA, respectively. We applied these models to 14 European countries (original 11 plus another 3), over two different time horizons. Results: While model 1 found that lockdown was the most effective measure in the original 11 countries, model 2 showed that lockdown had little or no benefit as it was typically introduced at a point when the time-varying reproduction number was already very low. Model 3 found that the simple banning of public events was beneficial, while lockdown had no consistent impact. Based on Bayesian metrics, model 2 was better supported by the data than either model 1 or model 3 for both time horizons. Conclusions: Inferences on effects of NPIs are non-robust and highly sensitive to model specification. In the SIR modeling framework, the impacts of lockdown are uncertain and highly model dependent.

show abstract

“…The function R(t) can be influenced by NPIs and voluntary behavioral changes. However, in the case of a finite population, the effective reproduction number decreases automatically and necessarily over time because the number of infections would diverge otherwise ( Kuhbandner & Homburg, 2020 ). The model was run for the data obtained for Zone 4 as a model-testing step by keeping the trained parameters unchanged.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grappling with COVID-19 by imposing and lifting non-pharmaceutical interventions in Sri Lanka: A modeling perspective

Jayaweera

Dannangoda

Dilshan

et al. 2021

Infectious Disease Modelling

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The imposition and lifting of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to avert the COVID-19 pandemic have gained popularity worldwide and will continue to be enforced until herd immunity is achieved. We developed a linear regression model to ascertain the nexus between the time-varying reproduction number averaged over a time window of six days (R ts ) and seven NPIs: contact tracing, quarantine efforts, social distancing and health checks, hand hygiene, wearing of facemasks, lockdown and isolation, and health-related supports. Our analysis suggests that the second wave that emerged in Sri Lanka in early October 2020 continued despite numerous NPIs. The model indicates that the most effective single NPI was lockdown and isolation. Conversely, the least effective individual NPIs were hand hygiene and wearing of facemasks. The model also demonstrates that to mitigate the second wave to a satisfactory level (R ts <1), the best single NPI was the contact tracing with stringent imposition (% of improvement of R ts was 69.43 against the base case). By contrast, the best combination of two NPIs was the lockdown & isolation with health-related supports (% of improvement was 31.92 against the base case). As such, many health authorities worldwide can use this model to successfully strategize the imposition and lifting of NPIs for averting the COVID-19 pandemic.

show abstract

Commentary: Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe

Cited by 25 publications

References 6 publications

COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink

COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink

Effect estimates of COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions are non-robust and highly model-dependent

Grappling with COVID-19 by imposing and lifting non-pharmaceutical interventions in Sri Lanka: A modeling perspective

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About