Abstract
As rates of new COVID-19 cases decline across Europe due to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing policies and lockdown measures, countries require guidance on how to ease restrictions while minimizing the risk of resurgent outbreaks. Here, we use mobility and case data to quantify how coordinated exit strategies could delay continental resurgence and limit community transmission of COVID-19. We find that a resurgent continental epidemic could occur as many as 5 weeks earlier when well-connected countries with stringent existing interventions end their interventions prematurely. Further, we found that appropriate coordination can greatly improve the likelihood of eliminating community transmission throughout Europe. In particular, synchronizing intermittent lockdowns across Europe meant half as many lockdown periods were required to end community transmission continent-wide.
Highlights
Data from mobile phones can help address this by informing connectivity patterns, contact rates, and the effect of various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on mobility
For the COVID-19 pandemic, mobile phone data have been valuable in assessing NPI effectiveness [3, 4], and remain at the forefront of understanding whether populations are adhering to social distancing policies [15,16,17,18]
We quantify how coordination could influence regionally interrupted transmission of COVID-19, testing the importance of synchronized NPIs if countries phase them to limit economic impact. We accomplished this by (i) estimating pre-COVID-19 mobility using a novel anonymized and aggregated call data record (CDR) dataset from Vodafone and an anonymized and aggregated continental NUTS3 (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) mobility dataset from Google, (ii) measuring mobility reductions due to NPIs using a separate COVID-19 Google dataset, and (iii) propagating these reductions in an epidemiological model
Summary
We provide an evidence base for coordinated exit strategies across Europe using mobile phone data and a metapopulation model of COVID-19 transmission [21]. We started transmission on 20 March 2020 because this predates large reductions in mobility (Fig. 2, right), allowing the disease to spread initially in a datadriven way that can help account for spatial biases in reporting and testing.
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