The effect of large-scale anti-contagion policies on the COVID-19 pandemic
The effect of large-scale anti-contagion policies on the COVID-19 pandemic
复制标题
DOI：
10.1038/s41586-020-2404-8
复制
发表时间：
2020-06-08
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Wu, Tiffany
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hsiang, Solomon;Allen, Daniel;Wu, Tiffany
对COVID-19感染率的分析表明，在中国、韩国、意大利、伊朗、法国和美国，非药物干预措施取得了巨大、有益和可衡量的健康成果；这些结果可为决定是否或何时应部署、加强或取消这些干预措施提供信息。世界各国政府正在应对由严重急性呼吸系统综合征冠状病毒2 （SARS-CoV-2）引起的2019年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）大流行，采取前所未有的政策，旨在减缓感染的增长速度。许多政策，如关闭学校和限制人口留在家中，给社会带来了巨大而明显的成本；然而，它们的好处不能直接观察到，目前只能通过基于过程的模拟来理解（2-4）。在这里，我们汇编了1700项地方、区域和国家非药物干预措施的数据，这些干预措施是在中国、韩国、意大利、伊朗、法国和美国各地正在进行的大流行中部署的。然后，我们应用简化形式的计量经济学方法，通常用于衡量政策对经济增长的影响（5,6），以经验评估这些抗传染政策对感染增长率的影响。在不采取政策行动的情况下，我们估计COVID-19的早期感染呈现出每天约38%的指数增长率。我们发现，反传染政策显著地、实质性地减缓了这种增长。一些政策对不同的人群有不同的影响，但我们获得了一致的证据，表明为降低传播率而实施的一揽子政策取得了巨大、有益和可衡量的健康成果。我们估计，在这6个国家中，干预措施预防或延迟了约6100万确诊病例，相当于避免了约4.95亿例感染。这些调查结果可能有助于为是否或何时部署、加强或取消这些政策提供决策依据，并可为报告发生COVID-19的180多个其他国家的决策提供支持(7)。
Analyses of COVID-19 infection rates show that non-pharmaceutical interventions achieved large, beneficial and measurable health outcomes in China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France and the United States; these results may inform decisions on whether or when these interventions should be deployed, intensified or lifted.Governments around the world are responding to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic(1), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), with unprecedented policies designed to slow the growth rate of infections. Many policies, such as closing schools and restricting populations to their homes, impose large and visible costs on society; however, their benefits cannot be directly observed and are currently understood only through process-based simulations(2-4). Here we compile data on 1,700 local, regional and national non-pharmaceutical interventions that were deployed in the ongoing pandemic across localities in China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France and the United States. We then apply reduced-form econometric methods, commonly used to measure the effect of policies on economic growth(5,6), to empirically evaluate the effect that these anti-contagion policies have had on the growth rate of infections. In the absence of policy actions, we estimate that early infections of COVID-19 exhibit exponential growth rates of approximately 38% per day. We find that anti-contagion policies have significantly and substantially slowed this growth. Some policies have different effects on different populations, but we obtain consistent evidence that the policy packages that were deployed to reduce the rate of transmission achieved large, beneficial and measurable health outcomes. We estimate that across these 6 countries, interventions prevented or delayed on the order of 61 million confirmed cases, corresponding to averting approximately 495 million total infections. These findings may help to inform decisions regarding whether or when these policies should be deployed, intensified or lifted, and they can support policy-making in the more than 180 other countries in which COVID-19 has been reported(7).