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From the perspective of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), it is still too early to assess the effects of the current partial lockdown. Wait, RKI President Lothar Wieler said in Berlin on Thursday. How quickly the infection process can be slowed depends on people’s behavior.
Wieler again called for compliance with the measures: rules such as keeping your distance, wearing mouth and nose protection, hygiene and ventilation would accompany people for a long time. “We will have to pinch our glutes for a few more months,” he said. It makes him cautiously optimistic that the numbers haven’t risen that much recently. “But we still don’t know if it is a stable development.”
What do you know about the places of infection?
Unfortunately, in many cases it cannot be traced to where people are infected. And even if those affected know where and from whom they were infected, this information is not always passed on to the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, so the place of origin remains unclear for at least 75 percent of the new infections reported.
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But there is a whole series of studies that indicate that the pandemic is mainly driven by so-called “super spread events”. This means that some infected people find themselves in situations or places where conditions are such that they infect many others: especially where several people stay in closed rooms for a long time.
This is the conclusion of an analysis by a research team led by Jure Leskovec of Stanford University in California, which analyzed demographic data, information on the epidemiology of Covid-19 and anonymous data from cell phones in the US.
Using computer models, he was able to study the contact behavior of around 98 million Americans in ten American metropolitan regions, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York.
The model simulates the stays of people in about 553,000 locations such as restaurants, gyms, churches or hardware stores with such precision that it correctly shows the number of cases in Chicago between March and April based solely on contact behavior.
According to the researchers, the simulations show that reopening restaurants without any restriction on distance maintenance leads to the largest increase in new infections, followed by gyms, cafes and hotels. Opening the restaurants on May 1 would have caused around 600,000 multiple infections in weeks, and allowing any event would have infected 3.3 million people.
Can the results be transferred to other countries?
This is only possible to a limited extent, due to differences in contact behavior, for example in the frequency of restaurant visits. The models would have to be fed with local data.
But there are already comparable analyzes and models in this country, such as the “Modus Covid” project at the Technical University of Berlin, the “Research based on models of school closings and other measures to contain Covid-19”, in which the researcher Kai Nagel Mobility Real Movement Data from People use it to help politicians make decisions about which areas of life might be particularly relevant to human contact and therefore the infection process.
Current figures from Berlin show that the virus is mainly spreading in private homes. According to a list from the health administration at the request of CDU deputy Christian Goiny, only 28 percent of all outbreaks could be assigned in October. Private households accounted for 54.7 percent of this, nursing homes and retirement homes for 8.6 percent, hospitals for 6.3 percent, and schools and daycare centers for 4.1 percent.
Do the incidence values of 35 and 50 still make sense?
The sense and purpose of the limit values for containment measures was and is to prevent a situation in which so many people contract Covid-19 that adequate treatment can no longer be guaranteed, either from medical practice or in serious cases in hospitals and there. especially in intensive care units.
The problem is that the number of new infections only partially predicts when and how many intensive care patients can be expected. Based on past experience, hospital admissions for Covid-19 patients began to accumulate three weeks after reaching the 50 cap.
The idea of allowing many more new infections per day and 100,000 inhabitants on average weekly instead of 50, or even reacting only with store closures or other measures when intensive care units are already full, would increase the risk of falling into a situation overload.
After a new infection, it takes a few days for the disease to manifest itself, and it takes more days before it worsens to the point where hospitalization and transfer to the intensive care unit are necessary. Therefore, the increasing number of patients is due to infections before the blockage began.
The fact that the limit of 50 is well chosen is demonstrated by the fact that, at around the same time, the health authorities raised the alarm that they could not follow the follow-up of contacts with newly infected people and the imposition of measures quarantine.
Not surprising: 50 new infections per day per 100,000 inhabitants means that a health department like the one in Steglitz-Zehlendorf cautiously estimates 250 new cases, each of which has between ten and one hundred initial contacts, or 2,500. to 25,000 cases to process per day.
That cannot be achieved and means that at this time not all infected people can be identified, the definition of an epidemic that is “out of control”.
Only in the next few days will it become clear whether the lockdown occurred on time or too late, that is, if more patients were arriving in wards or if the upward trend was at least broken. In any case, many stations now report that they are “at the limit”.
If it stays that way and you want to use it as a benchmark for health system “peak depletion” then the warning value of 50 seems to be tight enough. In any case, it is obviously not “too alarmist”, as has sometimes been claimed. Especially since it took politicians a few weeks to decide and implement the “Lockdown Light”.
