Understanding the effectiveness of government interventions against the resurgence of COVID-19 in Europe.
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Authors
Rogers-Smith, Charlie
Snodin, Benedict
Ahuja, Janvi
Sandbrink, Jonas B
Altman, George
Dhaliwal, Gurpreet
Finnveden, Lukas
Norman, Alexander John
Sandkühler, Julia Fabienne
Aitchison, Laurence
Gavenčiak, Tomáš
Mellan, Thomas
Kulveit, Jan
Chindelevitch, Leonid
Publication Date
2021-10-05Journal Title
Nat Commun
ISSN
2041-1723
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Volume
12
Issue
1
Language
eng
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Sharma, M., Mindermann, S., Rogers-Smith, C., Leech, G., Snodin, B., Ahuja, J., Sandbrink, J. B., et al. (2021). Understanding the effectiveness of government interventions against the resurgence of COVID-19 in Europe.. Nat Commun, 12 (1) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26013-4
Abstract
European governments use non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to control resurging waves of COVID-19. However, they only have outdated estimates for how effective individual NPIs were in the first wave. We estimate the effectiveness of 17 NPIs in Europe's second wave from subnational case and death data by introducing a flexible hierarchical Bayesian transmission model and collecting the largest dataset of NPI implementation dates across Europe. Business closures, educational institution closures, and gathering bans reduced transmission, but reduced it less than they did in the first wave. This difference is likely due to organisational safety measures and individual protective behaviours-such as distancing-which made various areas of public life safer and thereby reduced the effect of closing them. Specifically, we find smaller effects for closing educational institutions, suggesting that stringent safety measures made schools safer compared to the first wave. Second-wave estimates outperform previous estimates at predicting transmission in Europe's third wave.
Sponsorship
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/T008784/1)
RCUK | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) (EP/V002910/1, EP/S024050/1), EP/S024050/1)
Identifiers
PMC8492703, 34611158
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26013-4
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/330408
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