New Study: Stay-at-Home Requests Don’t Work, Pandemic More Effectively Prevented With Three Restrictions

Professor and Doctor of Medical Sciences Saulius Čaplinskas believes that not all measures are equally effective.

“The main resources should be allocated to those measures that have the greatest effect,” the doctor told Delfi.

Recently, Professor S. Čaplinskas shared the findings of the scientific publication of the journal “Science” on his Facebook account of the social network, whose non-medical interventions are the most effective in reducing the spread of the coronavirus. Seven non-medical interventions were analyzed in 34 European and seven non-European countries.

With the teacher’s permission, we provide your Facebook post:

The journal Science today published a scientific publication evaluating the effectiveness of the seven most common non-medical interventions (NMI) used during the first quarantine (from January to the end of May 2020). The interventions were evaluated in 34 European and 7 non-European countries.

The revision of the article states that the governments of all countries are working to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic through a variety of non-medical interventions. Recent cross-country analyzes show that the concomitant use of different IMNs at different scales has been effective in reducing the viral replication rate R (showing how many people are infected per patient). Until now, it was almost unknown how effective individual NMIs were, so the researchers evaluated their effectiveness, from limiting the number of people who meet, closing businesses, educational institutions, to the requirement to stay at home. It was concluded that the closure of all educational institutions, the restriction of meetings to 10 or fewer people and the closure of face-to-face businesses significantly reduced the transmission of the virus. The additional impact of the “stay home” requirement was relatively small.

The researchers examined the effect of each non-medical intervention on the percentage reduction in the effective reproduction rate (R).

It turns out that:

· Limitation of meetings to 1000 people or less: R reduced by 23% (from 0 to 40%);

· Restriction of meetings to 100 people or less: R reduced by 34% (from 12 to 52%);

· Restriction of meetings to 10 people or less: R reduced by 42% (17-60%);

· Some high-risk face-to-face deals closed: R decreased by 18% (−8 to 40%);

· Most high-risk face-to-face deals closed: R fell 27% (−3 to 49%);

· School and university closures: R reduced by 38% (from 16 to 54%);

· Recommendation to stay at home (as an additional effect on all other NMIs): R decreased by 13% (-5 to 31%).

Note. The researchers noted that they had not been able to make a clear distinction between the effects of school closings and university closures, as the latter interventions were implemented on the same day or in close succession in most countries (except Iceland and Sweden, where only universities were closed). «A single non-medical intervention will be considered for the purposes of this article. https://bit.ly/3muQnry