COVID‐19 pandemic‐related lockdown: response time is more important than its strictness

EMBO Molecular Medicine

Shiran Abadi¹  Itay Mayrose¹  Keren Halabi¹  Natan Nagar²  Noa Ecker²  Oren Avram²  Tal Pupko²  Gil Loewenthal² 

[1] School of Plant Sciences and Food Security George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv Israel;The Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv Israel;

关键词: coronavirus;    COVID‐19;    epidemiology modeling;    lockdown;    mobility data;   

DOI  :  10.15252/emmm.202013171

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Abstract The rapid spread of SARS‐CoV‐2 and its threat to health systems worldwide have led governments to take acute actions to enforce social distancing. Previous studies used complex epidemiological models to quantify the effect of lockdown policies on infection rates. However, these rely on prior assumptions or on official regulations. Here, we use country‐specific reports of daily mobility from people cellular usage to model social distancing. Our data‐driven model enabled the extraction of lockdown characteristics which were crossed with observed mortality rates to show that: (i) the time at which social distancing was initiated is highly correlated with the number of deaths, r2 = 0.64, while the lockdown strictness or its duration is not as informative; (ii) a delay of 7.49 days in initiating social distancing would double the number of deaths; and (iii) the immediate response has a prolonged effect on COVID‐19 death toll.

【 授权许可】

Unknown