SARS‐CoV‐2 in Argentina: Lockdown, mobility, and contagion

Abstract

There is a debate in Argentina about the effectiveness of mandatory lockdown policies containing severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2 disease. This policy has already 6 months long making it one of the longest in the world. The population effort to comply with the lockdown has been decreasing over time given the economic and social costs that it entails. This contribution analyzes the relationship between mobility and contagion in Argentina at a provincial level. It also models issues of internal political discussion on regional contagion and the effect of protests and unexpected crowd events. I use pool, fixed, and random effects panel data modeling and results show that lockdown in Argentina has been effective in reducing mobility but not in a way that reduces the rate of contagion. Strict lockdown seems to be effective in short periods of time and but extend it without complementary mitigation measures it losses effectiveness. The contagion rate seems to be discretely displaced in time and resurges amidst slowly increasing in mobility.

Dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 mutations reveals regional-specificity and similar trends of N501 and High-Frequency mutation N501Y in different levels of control measures

“…Non-pharmaceutical interventions have been shown to reduce the number of COVID-19 cases [13], the contagion rate [18], the reproductive number [13,15,16], the case fatality rate [17] and the number of SARS-CoV-2 introductions and/or exportations [19,20,35]. Here we showed that international movement is negatively correlated with frequency change of HF mutations (Fig.…”

“…Different studies have evaluated the relationship between non-pharmaceutical interventions and the decrease in the number of cases [13,14], the reproductive number [13,15,16], the case fatality rate [17], the contagion rate [18], and the number of SARS-CoV-2 importations [19,20]. On the other hand, the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions, particularly those related to an international movement, on mutation frequency variation has been less analyzed.…”

“…Different studies have evaluated the relationship between non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and the decrease in the number of cases [18,19], the reproductive number [18,20,21], the case fatality rate [22], the contagion rate [23], and the number of SARS-CoV-2 importations [24,25]. By contrast, the effect of NPIs on specific mutations has been less well-studied.…”

A control framework to optimize public health policies in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…While some countries opted for more liberal approaches to tackle COVID-19, such as Sweden, which relied mostly on responsible behavior, others maintained very strict curfews for extended periods (eg. Argentina) ( 35 ). A reasonable goal should be to keep the health care system below its capacity level, albeit our algorithm permits tuning the parameter Q to make stringency ( u ( t )) more or less flexible, which ultimately impacts economic sectors and social behavior.…”

Infectiousness in omicron variant strain and bA.2 variant in Japan

“…Moreover, mobility was inferred as the main cause of the outbreak dynamics, at least in the first wave in Japan [9] and throughout the world [10][11][12][13]. This study was conducted to estimate vaccine coverage effects on SARS-CoV-2 infectiousness for the outbreak in Japan.…”