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This is only a bullet point summary of a longer and more in-depth paper in the published by the Imperial College London, “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand”. We suggest reading the paper in full on the publisher’s website for a better understanding of the points made here.
- The strategies differ in whether they aim to reduce the reproduction number, R, to below 1 (suppression) – and thus cause case numbers to decline – or to merely slow spread by reducing R, but not to below 1.
- It is important to note at the outset that given SARS-CoV-2 is a newly emergent virus, much remains to be understood about its transmission. In addition, the impact of many of the NPIs detailed here depends critically on how people respond to their introduction, which is highly likely to vary between countries and even communities. Last, it is highly likely that there would be significant spontaneous changes in population behaviour even in the absence of government-mandated interventions.
- In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months (Figure 1A). In such scenarios, given an estimated R0 of 2.4, we predict 81% of the GB and US populations would be infected over the course of the epidemic.
- In an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality.
- For an uncontrolled epidemic, we predict critical care bed capacity would be exceeded as early as the second week in April, with an eventual peak in ICU or critical care bed demand that is over 30 times greater than the maximum supply in both countries
- The most effective combination of interventions is predicted to be a combination of case isolation, home quarantine and social distancing of those most at risk (the over 70s), this “optimal” mitigation scenario would still result in an 8-fold higher peak demand on critical care beds over and above the available surge capacity in both GB and the US.
- Stopping mass gatherings is predicted to have relatively little impact (results not shown) because the contact-time at such events is relatively small compared to the time spent at home, in schools or workplaces and in other community locations such as bars and restaurants.
- Given that mitigation is unlikely to be a viable option without overwhelming healthcare systems, suppression is likely necessary in countries able to implement the intensive controls required.
- All four interventions combined are predicted to have the largest effect on transmission.
- Such an intensive policy is predicted to result in a reduction in critical care requirements from a peak approximately 3 weeks after the interventions are introduced and a decline thereafter while the intervention policies remain in place.
- Once interventions are relaxed (in the example in Figure 3, from September onwards), infections begin to rise, resulting in a predicted peak epidemic later in the year.
- The choice of interventions ultimately depends on the relative feasibility of their implementation and their likely effectiveness in different social contexts.
- Overall, our results suggestthat population-wide social distancing applied to the population as a whole would have the largest impact; and in combination with other interventions – notably home isolation of cases and school and university closure – has the potential to suppress transmission below the threshold of R=1 required to rapidly reduce case incidence.
- To avoid a rebound in transmission, these policies will need to be maintained until large stocks of vaccine are available to immunise the population – which could be 18 months or more.
- We find that school and university closure is a more effective strategy to support epidemic suppression than mitigation; when combined with population-wide social distancing, the effect of school closure is to further amplify the breaking of social contacts between households, and thus supress transmission.
- Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US.
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