Impact of Government Intervention in Response to Coronavirus Disease 2019

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) led to the loss of lives and had serious social and economic effects. Countries implemented various quarantine policies to reduce the effects. The countries were divided into low- and high-risk groups based on the differences in quarantine policies and their levels of infection. Quarantine policies that significantly contributed to risk reduction were determined by analyzing 11 quarantine indicators for reducing the spread of COVID-19. The cross-tabulation and Chi-square tests were used to compare the quarantine policies by the groups. Multivariate logistic regression was used to determine the useful quarantine policies implemented by the low-risk group to verify quarantine policies for minimizing the negative effects. The analysis showed that the low- and medium-risk groups showed significant differences for 9 of the 11 indicators, and 4 of these differentiated the low- from the medium-risk group. Countries with strict quarantine policies related to workplace closure and staying at home were more likely to be included in the low-risk group. These policies had a significant impact in the low-risk countries and could contribute to reducing the spread and effects of COVID-19 in countries included in the high-risk group.

Effectiveness of social distancing measures and lockdowns for reducing transmission of COVID-19 in non-healthcare, community-based settings

“…All the included studies were observational, and they estimated the effect of workplace closures at a population level alongside other interventions. Most studies (92%) observed a beneficial effect of workplace closures alone or in combination with other interventions to reduce incidence [15,24,25,27,29,32,46,52,[244][245][246][247][248][249][250] of COVID-19 and transmission [18,23,24,33,35,38,39,43,48,49,251] of SARS-CoV-2. A study that reported the examined effect of workplace closures alone estimated that non-essential workplace closures across 13 countries in Europe from March to May 2020 were estimated to reduce the change in deaths by 4% points (95% CI: 0.5, 7.4 pp).…”