The blockades have not had a major impact on death rates from coronaviruses worldwide, scientists say.
Dozens of countries have been forced to tell people to stay home and close stores in an attempt to stop the Covid-19 pandemic since it erupted in January.
But now a study has claimed that drastic measures don’t even work. They discovered whether or not a country was closed “not associated” with the death rate.
Instead, the health of each nation before the pandemic played an important role, including obesity rates and age.
It could explain why countries like Britain, with some of the worst obesity rates in Europe, have had such a high number of deaths.
The early closure of international borders seemed to reduce cases, but it did not translate into real lives saved.
The blockades have not had a major impact on death rates from coronaviruses worldwide, scientists say. In the photo, a closed store in Great Britain
The study compared death rates and cases in 50 different countries most affected by the pandemic through May 1.
Experts from the University of Toronto and the University of Texas calculated that among these severely affected nations, only 33 out of every million people had died from the virus.
However, that rate has increased dramatically and is now 80 per million globally, and continues to rise. Britain has seen 670 deaths per million.
The researchers built a mathematical model to measure the impact of each country’s response on coronavirus cases and deaths.
They then compared this to demographic factors such as age, smoking, and obesity.
Dr. Sheila Riazi and her colleagues found that the imposition of blocking measures managed to prevent health systems from being overwhelmed by a sudden increase in patients.
This was the main objective of the UK government when it imposed restrictions in March: to protect the NHS and ultimately save lives.
But while this increased the chance that someone with Covid would recover from the virus, it didn’t actually translate into a significant reduction in death rates.
Movement restriction and border closures also had no significant impact on Covid-19 deaths, even if early border closings appear to significantly reduce cases and decrease transmission spike, preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed.
Countries with widespread mass testing did not appear to have fewer critical cases or deaths per million, according to the study.
‘Government actions such as border closure, total closure, and a high COVID-19 testing rate were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.
‘The number of days for any border closure was associated with the number of cases per million.
“This suggests that full closings and early border closings may decrease the transmission peak and therefore prevent excess capacity of the health system, which would facilitate higher recovery rates.”
But the scientists found no evidence that this actually saved lives.
It was demographics of the population and underlying health, particularly obesity rates, that determined which countries were most affected by the virus, the researchers found.
Nations with above-average obesity rates were 12% more likely to have significantly higher death rates than those without.
It is relevant to Britain, which has one of the biggest obesity problems in Europe, with two thirds of adults and one third of children being overweight.
The authors wrote: “Based on COVID-19 outcome data reported from Europe, the United States, and China, the highest number of cases and overall mortality were associated with comorbidities such as obesity.”
Countries with a higher mean population age were 10% more likely to have a large workload.
A surprising finding was that nations with higher smoking rates had fewer deaths.
It adds weight to the emerging argument that tobacco use may protect against coronavirus, with a series of studies that found unusually low levels of smoking among hospital patients.
However, the researchers cautioned that the findings may simply be because countries with a high prevalence of smoking tend to be those with younger populations.
Young people are less likely to become seriously ill from the coronavirus, and therefore countries with a younger population have tended to be less affected by the pandemic.
The team also found that wealthier nations had fared worse, likely because international travel meant more cases were imported at the start of the crisis.
This, they believe, is due to “accessibility to air travel and international vacations,” as “travel was identified as a major factor contributing to international viral spread.”
The team, writing in Lancet’s online journal EClinicalMedicine, said: ‘Government actions such as border closure, total closure, and a high Covid-19 test rate were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or general mortality. ‘
However, some experts are skeptical of the findings, suggesting that the findings have been overstated.
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter of the University of Cambridge said: “A large number of possible predictors are put into a model with only 50 observations, and then the resulting formulas are over-interpreted.”
Dr. Louise Dyson of the University of Warwick said: “ While population demographics, such as median age and prevalence of obesity, were found to be associated with increased mortality, this should not be interpreted. as an implication that this was more important than government interventions, such as blockades. ‘
It comes amid growing concern that the large-scale shutdown of the British movement will have devastating consequences.
The resulting economic impact is expected to increase both short-term and long-term physical and mental health problems.
Professor Mark Woolhouse, an infectious disease expert at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies, warned earlier this month: “ When the time comes, we may find that the cure turned out to be much worse than the disease. ‘
But other British scientists have insisted that the blockade was necessary, and it was so important that it should have been implemented weeks before, on March 23.
Professor Neil Ferguson, the academic whose work led to the closure of Britain, says that the closure likely saved nearly half a million lives in the UK alone.
His team at Imperial University London found that coronavirus blocks in Europe likely prevented up to three million Covid-related deaths.
Professor Lockdown has also acknowledged that, in retrospect, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved if the crash had occurred a week earlier.
A separate study also published in June suggested that around 500 million cases of Covid-19 were prevented by confinements in six countries, including the United States.
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