A new study found that people who were proactive and stayed home even before shutdown orders were implemented in the United States may have helped slow the spread of the new coronavirus in March and April.
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Peggy Knapp, a resident of the Havenwood Home for the Elderly, kisses Lloyd, her daughter’s dog, out the window during a Mother’s Day visit on May 10, 2020, in Minnetonka, Minnesota.
The study, published Wednesday in The Lancet, shows that in the top 25 most affected counties in the US, people began to stay home longer than normal, almost a week or a month before policies were established. stay in your state’s home.
The decrease in movement was strongly correlated with reduced growth in COVID-19 cases in those counties during March and April. This suggests that social distancing before the application of the policy played an important role in controlling the spread of the virus.
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“If no action was taken at the individual level and social distancing behavior were delayed until the directives were implemented at the state level, COVID-19 would have been able to circulate without mitigation for additional weeks in some places, inevitably leading to more infections and deaths ” said Dr. Lauren Gardner, lead author of the study and an engineer at the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
“This shows that it is within the power of every resident of the United States to help curb the spread of COVID-19,” said Gardner.
“Intuitively, it makes sense that when it comes to a contagious respiratory virus that spreads from person to person over relatively short distances, if you distance yourself socially or physically from others, the risk of transmission will decrease,” said Dr. Todd Ellerin. , the director of infectious diseases at South Shore Health.
The study demonstrates people’s movements through the use of anonymous and aggregated data from cell phones, which increases the journey from one destination to another, called the mobility index (MR) correlated with the increasing number of cases of COVID-19.
“This removed the virus from the fuel it needs to spread from person to person, and was potentially the single most important intervention to reduce COVID hot spots,” said Ellerin.
The researchers said that one of the biggest limitations they faced in completing their study was that it was difficult to accurately quantify the impact of social distancing.
However, the Lancet study shows evidence that supports the idea that social distancing is an essential tool to minimize spread.
“The good news in this article is that social distancing often began before states ordered it, and we need to continue this preventive strategy as individuals,” said Ellerin. “We cannot wait for our hospitals to reach full capacity with COVID and non-COVID patients before we enact this fundamental principle of infection control.”
Alexis E. Carrington, MD, who is currently completing her preliminary year of internal medicine at Elmhurst Hospital in New York City, is a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit.
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