Understanding the effectiveness of government interventions against the resurgence of COVID-19 in Europe

Mrinank Sharma ,Laurence Aitchison ,Sebastian Oehm ,Sören Mindermann ,Samir Bhatt ,Jan Kulveit ,Thomas A Mellan ,Seth Flaxman ,Gurpreet Dhaliwal ,Jonas B Sandbrink ,George T Altman ,Gavin Leech ,Charlie Rogers-Smith ,Janvi Ahuja ,Alexander John Norman ,Leonid Chindelevitch ,Tomáš Gavenčiak ,Joshua Teperowski Monrad ,Swapnil Mishra ,Benedict E K Snodin ,Julia Fabienne Sandkühler ,Lukas Finnveden ,Yarin Gal ,Jan Brauner

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26013-4

Abstract

European governments use non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to control resurging waves of COVID-19. However, they only have outdated estimates for how effective individual NPIs were in the first wave. We estimate the effectiveness of 17 NPIs in Europe’s second wave from subnational case and death data by introducing a flexible hierarchical Bayesian transmission model and collecting the largest dataset of NPI implementation dates across Europe. Business closures, educational institution closures, and gathering bans reduced transmission, but reduced it less than they did in the first wave. This difference is likely due to organisational safety measures and individual protective behaviours—such as distancing—which made various areas of public life safer and thereby reduced the effect of closing them. Specifically, we find smaller effects for closing educational institutions, suggesting that stringent safety measures made schools safer compared to the first wave. Second-wave estimates outperform previous estimates at predicting transmission in Europe’s third wave.

Highlights

European governments use non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to control resurging waves of COVID-19
The first wave of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, resulted in dramatic excess mortality across many European countries from approximately February to June 2020. Most of these countries implemented a suite of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including business closures, school suspensions, and gathering bans[1,2,3,4]
Since NPI effectiveness estimates can be sensitive to modelling decisions[16,28], we evaluate robustness to changes in the data, model, epidemiological assumptions, and potential unobserved confounding factors

Summary

Introduction

European governments use non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to control resurging waves of COVID-19. If organisational safety measures and personal protective behaviours stay in place, second-wave estimates are likely more similar to current, yet to be studied, NPI effects and more relevant to current policy decisions.

Results

Conclusion