As some countries start to relax their COVID-19 restrictions, scientists around the world are evaluating the impact of lockdowns, school closures, travel bans and social distancing have had in curbing the coronavirus epidemic.
Two recent studies published in the respected scientific journals Science and Nature have found such restrictions have had a significant impact on the spread of the virus.
The studies show that social distancing in Shanghai and Wuhan was enough to bring the epidemic under control.
Modeling work in one study suggested that in Shanghai, school closures alone would not have stopped the epidemic. But the school closures did lower the number of new infections per day at the epidemic’s peak, which relieved stress on hospitals.
Another study showed that quick detection and isolation of infected people were the most effective steps for containing COVID-19 in China. But even with those efforts in place, the number of cases would have soared if officials had not restricted travel and social interactions.
A study led by Dr Lai Shengjie at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, and published in Nature last month, found the quick detection of infections and isolation of infected people were the most effective steps for containing COVID-19 cases in China
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Professor Adrian Barnett, a statistician with Queensland University of Technology’s School of Public Health and Social Work, said social distancing has been proven to reduce the rate of transmission of COVID-19.
At the same time, it has had a negative impact on the economy and created other health issues, said Barnett.
Research by the University of Western Australia (UWA) has shown social distancing measures such as working from home, self-isolation and community contact reduction were highly effective in reducing the number of cases of COVID-19 in Australia.
Researchers found the two most effective social distancing measures were self-isolation and a 70 percent reduction in community-wide contact, which is defined as any social contact outside of school, work or home.
Professor George Milne, from UWA’s School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, who led the research, said modeling suggested that school closure was the least effective single social distancing measure and it was highly disruptive as adults needed to care for younger children.
“Its moderate effectiveness arises from our assumption that children still have contact in the wider community when schools are closed,” he said.
Another study, led by University College London and the University of Sydney, also found school closures did not have a significant impact on the spread of infections during coronavirus outbreaks.
The study, published in April in Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, was the first to look at the evidence and emerging data on the benefit of school closures and other school social distancing interventions in outbreaks such as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) and COVID-19.
The study highlights that data from influenza outbreaks, which show benefits of school closures, cannot necessarily be applied to coronaviruses and that school closures have only small effects in infections with a high reproductive number, such as COVID-19, where children are not the main drivers of infection.
Professor Russell Viner, at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in London and president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said: “We know from previous studies that school closures are likely to have the greatest effect if the virus has low transmissibility and attack rates are higher in children. This is the opposite of COVID-19.”
At the time the study was written on March 18, 107 countries had implemented national school closures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A study led by Dr Lai Shengjie at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, and published in Nature last month, found the quick detection of infections and isolation of infected people were the most effective steps for containing COVID-19 cases in China.
“But even with those efforts in place, the number of cases would have soared if officials hadn’t restricted travel and social interactions as well.
“If epidemic control actions had been delayed by only three weeks, the number of infected people in China might have been 18 times higher,” the study found.
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A study led by Dr Marco Ajelli of the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento, Italy, Dr Yu Hongjie at Fudan University in Shanghai, and their colleagues, found that after authorities mandated a stringent lockdown, people in Shanghai and Wuhan cut their encounters with others from 15-20 per day to roughly 2 per day.
“This drastic social distancing was enough to bring the epidemic under control in the two cities,” the study, published in Science in April, said.
The authors found that social distancing alone, as implemented in China during the outbreak, was sufficient to control COVID-19, while proactive school closures alone did not interrupt transmission.
“The study provides evidence that the interventions put in place in Wuhan and Shanghai, and the resulting changes in human behavior, drastically decreased daily contacts, essentially reducing them to household interactions,” the authors said.
