Impact of Governmental interventions on epidemic progression and workplace activity during the COVID-19 outbreak

Didier Sornette,Sumit Kumar Ram

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-01276-5

Abstract

In the first quarter of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a state of paralysis. During this period, humanity saw by far the largest organized travel restrictions and unprecedented efforts and global coordination to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Using large scale human mobility and fine grained epidemic incidence data, we develop a framework to understand and quantify the effectiveness of the interventions implemented by various countries to control epidemic growth. Our analysis reveals the importance of timing and implementation of strategic policy in controlling the epidemic. We also unearth significant spatial diffusion of the epidemic before and during the lockdown measures in several countries, casting doubt on the effectiveness or on the implementation quality of the proposed Governmental policies.

Highlights

In the first quarter of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a state of paralysis
Epidemiological data and clinical data across ten countries, we develop a modelling framework to quantify the effectiveness of the interventions implemented by various countries to control epidemic growth
Using the daily number of confirmed cases and the generation time model (see Fig. (S1)), we estimate the time evolution of the effective reproduction number Rt—which is defined as the actual average number of secondary cases per primary case—with a Sequential Bayesian estimation

Summary

Introduction

In the first quarter of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a state of paralysis During this period, humanity saw by far the largest organized travel restrictions and unprecedented efforts and global coordination to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Epidemiological data and clinical data across ten countries, we develop a modelling framework to quantify the effectiveness of the interventions implemented by various countries to control epidemic growth. This shock provides a real-life natural experiment to falsify the effectiveness of different organisations and interventions and policies, with the goal of informing and guiding future plans against potential second and third waves of the epidemics as well as future outbreaks in general. We observe non-monotonic and fluctuating time dependence of Rt in different regions

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion