Inferring a cause-effect relationship between lockdown restrictions and COVID-19 pandemic trend during the first wave

• Published in: Health policy (Amsterdam) 2021-11, Vol.125 (11), p.1441-1447
• Main Author: Megna, Rosario
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Communicable Disease Control; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Epidemics; Health policy; Humans; Innovations; Lockdown; Modelling; Pandemics; Pandemics - prevention & control; Public health; SARS-CoV-2; Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; Spain - epidemiology; Vaccines
• ISSN: 0168-8510; 1872-6054; 1872-6054
• DOI: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2021.09.008

•COVID-19 pandemic induced most of the world governments to implement lockdown measures.•We developed an epidemic model for the most affected countries in Europe.•Our model resulted to be matching appropriately with daily and cumulative counts.•We inferred a possible cause-effect relationship between the lockdown and new cases.•Lockdowns created economics damage, but unthinkable results were obtained in brief time. The large number of infected persons due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the need of hospital care for many of them induced the majority of world governments to implement lockdown measures. We developed an analytical model to evaluate the trend of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This model was applied to the first four months of the epidemiological data of the most affected countries in Europe and Russia, in order to evaluate the effect of the lockdown on the epidemic curves during the first wave. According to our model, the difference between the beginning of the lockdown and the slope change of the curve representing the daily distribution of counts was: Germany and Spain 6 days, France 7 days, the United Kingdom 9 days, Italy 21 days, and Russia 30 days. On the basis of these results, we infer a possible cause-effect relationship between the lockdown imposed in countries taken into account and the curve representing the daily distribution of new cases. Lockdown measures imposed by governments slowed the spread of the pandemic and reduced the number of infected persons. In economic terms, the damage was considerable, with entire production sectors in crisis. On the other hand, the efforts and innovations implemented to produce vaccines and effective treatments against the pandemic could be applied also in other fields of public health.