A Transnational and Transregional Study of the Impact and Effectiveness of Social Distancing for COVID-19 Mitigation

We present an analysis of the relationship between SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and a social distancing metric from data for all the states and most populous cities in the United States and Brazil, all the 22 European Economic Community countries and the United Kingdom. We discuss why the infection ra...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2021-11, Vol.23 (11), p.1530
Main Authors: Filho, Tarcísio M Rocha, Moret, Marcelo A, Mendes, José F F
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age groups
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
COVID-19 vaccines
Disease control
Disease transmission
epidemiological model
Fatalities
Infections
Masks
Pandemics
Population
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
Social distancing
social isolation
Time series
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Summary:We present an analysis of the relationship between SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and a social distancing metric from data for all the states and most populous cities in the United States and Brazil, all the 22 European Economic Community countries and the United Kingdom. We discuss why the infection rate, instead of the effective reproduction number or growth rate of cases, is a proper choice to perform this analysis when considering a wide span of time. We obtain a strong Spearman's rank order correlation between the social distancing metric and the infection rate in each locality. We show that mask mandates increase the values of Spearman's correlation in the United States, where a mandate was adopted. We also obtain an explicit numerical relation between the infection rate and the social distancing metric defined in the present work.
ISSN:1099-4300
1099-4300
DOI:10.3390/e23111530