The Effects of Stringent and Mild Interventions for Coronavirus Pandemic

Abstract

The pandemic of COVID-19 has caused severe public health consequences around the world. Many interventions of COVID-19 have been implemented. It is of great public health and social importance to evaluate the effects of interventions in the pandemic of COVID-19. With the help of a synthetic control method, the regression discontinuity, and a state-space compartmental model, we evaluated the treatment and stagewise effects of the intervention policies. We found statistically significant treatment effects of broad stringent interventions in Wenzhou and mild interventions in Shanghai to subdue the epidemic’s spread. If those reduction effects were not activated, the expected number of positive individuals would increase by 2.18 times on February 5, 2020, for Wenzhou and 7.69 times on February 4, 2020, for Shanghai, respectively. Alternatively, regression discontinuity elegantly identified the stringent (p-value: <0.001) and mild interventions (p-value: 0.024) lowered the severity of the epidemic. Under the compartmental modeling for different interventions, we understood the importance of implementing the interventions. The highest level alert to COVID-19 was practical and crucial at the early stage of the epidemic. Furthermore, the physical/social distancing policy was necessary once the spread of COVID-19 continued. If appropriate control measures were implemented, then epidemic would be under control effectively and early. Supplementary materials for this article, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work, are available as an online supplement.