By contrast, three of the four countries with the highest number of deaths and case counts in the world, the United States, Brazil, and India, never closed properly or reopened before their case counts began to decline.
The EU formally agreed on a set of recommendations from 15 countries that it considers safe enough to allow its residents to travel to its territory on Tuesday. To enter the list, countries must check a series of boxes: their new cases per 100,000 citizens during the previous 14 days must be similar or lower than those of the EU, and must have a stable or decreasing trend of new cases during this period compared to the previous 14 days.
The bloc will also consider what measures countries are taking, such as contact tracing, and how reliable each nation’s data is.
The list includes Algeria, Australia, Canada, Georgia, Japan, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Rwanda, Serbia, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia, Uruguay. China, where the virus originated, is also on the list, but the EU will only offer entry to China on the condition of reciprocal agreements.
“I don’t think any human effort has saved so many lives in such a short time. There have been huge personal costs of staying home and canceling events, but the data shows that each day made a profound difference,” said study lead author Solomon. Hsiang, professor and director of the University of California, Berkeley Global Policy Laboratory.
The success of a crash depends on a number of reasons, including whether it was implemented early enough. No two closings are the same, therefore, while people in countries like Italy or Spain face fines if they ventured out of their homes for any non-essential reason, in Japan, staying at home was one more recommendation than an order.
Australia, Canada, New Zealand were quick to restrict travel, while in other countries, such as Algeria, Georgia and Morocco, children were the first to see the impact of the pandemic when schools closed.
Other measures included orders to stay home, non-essential store closings, quarantine, and isolation. Some countries, such as Algeria, Rwanda, Montenegro, and China have seen outbreaks after the restrictions were lifted. That prompted officials to reintroduce some measures at the local level.
In China, the capital city of Beijing underwent a partial shutdown last month after a new cluster linked to a food market. Montenegro again banned mass events last week after seeing a new outbreak of cases after three weeks of being virus-free. And in Rwanda, health authorities put several villages into a new closure last week after new cases emerged there.
But the restrictions put in place to counter the disease have also been very damaging to the economy and have exacerbated existing inequalities in education and the workplace, as well as between genders, races and socioeconomic backgrounds.
When shops and schools closed and almost all travel stopped, hundreds of millions of people around the world suddenly found themselves unemployed. The impact on the economy is one of the reasons that some leaders, including United States President Donald Trump, have been pushing for a swift reopening, even when infectious disease experts warned of lifting the restrictions too much. soon.
Aleesha Khaliq, Dario Klein, Shasta Darlington, Rodrigo Pedroso, Manveena Suri, Paula Newton, Yoko Wakatsuki, Milena Veselinovic and Kocha Olarn contributed to the reports.
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