The Effectiveness of Social Distancing in Mitigating COVID-19 Spread: a modelling analysis

Abstract

Organisation as a pandemic due to its worldwide spread. The ability of countries to contain and control transmission is critical in the absence of a vaccine. We evaluated a range of social distancing measures to determine which strategies are most effective in reducing the peak daily infection rate, and consequential pressure on the health care system.Methods Using COVID-19 transmission data from the outbreak source in Hubei Province, China, collected prior to activation of containment measures, we adapted an established individual based simulation model of the city of Newcastle, Australia, population 272,409. Simulation of virus transmission in this community model without interventions provided a baseline from which to compare alternative social distancing strategies. The infection history of each individual was determined, as was the time infected. From this model-generated data, the rate of growth in cases, the magnitude of the epidemic peak, and the outbreak duration were obtained.Findings The application of all four social distancing interventions: school closure, workplace non-attendance, increased case isolation, and community contact reduction is highly effective in flattening the epidemic curve, reducing the maximum daily case numbers, and lengthening outbreak duration. These were also found to be effective even after 10 weeks delay from index case arrivals. The most effective single intervention was found to be increasing case isolation, to 100% of children and 90% of adults.

Australian Quarantine Policy: From Centralization to Coordination with Mid‐Pandemic COVID‐19 Shifts

“…Potentially new COVID‐19‐related empirical research on border closures (e.g., Adekunle et al ; Costantino, Heslop, and MacIntyre ; Liebig et al ) and social distancing (e.g., Chang et al ; Milne and Xie ; Neufeld and Khataee ; Williem et al ) is under review. Ongoing policy actions within Australia's COVID‐19 response and its post‐COVID action plans will be enhanced as policy learning and epidemiological learning accelerates.…”

Effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 transmission in 190 countries from 23 January to 13 April 2020

“…A study conducted in China showed that social distancing and epicentre lockdown might reduce the number of new infection cases by up to 98.9% ( Zhang et al, 2020 ), while another study indicated that social distancing reduced the growth rate of confirmed cases in five countries (Austria, Belgium, Italy, Malaysia and South Korea) by 52.37% on average (SD 13.37%) ( Hernandez et al, 2020 ). A few studies investigated the effectiveness of multiple NPIs in China ( Cowling et al, 2020 , Lai et al, 2020 , Milne and Xie, 2020 , Pan et al, 2020 ), Europe countries ( Flaxman et al, 2020 ), the United Kingdom ( Davies et al, 2020 ), and Singapore ( Koo et al, 2020 ). Their results showed that the implementation of multiple NPIs was associated with a reduction in the transmission of COVID-19.…”

Factors impacting social distancing measures for preventing coronavirus disease 2019 [COVID-19]: A systematic review

“…In this study, we found major factors, enablers or barriers, impacting SDMs emphasising the positive roles of SDMs, public health interventions, behaviour changes, people's worries and concerns, myths and stigma and physical and psychological impact including the debatable role of media. Similar issues have been documented in different literatures [54,55]. The purpose of social distancing is to inhibit the intensity of transmission (R o) to reduce R o to <1 or "contain the outbreak within a manageable duration" [56, p.2].…”