Clinical Public Health
development

Period. 23 - 29 March 2020

Lancet: The effect of control strategies to reduce social mixing on outcomes of the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan, China: a modelling study (Prem et al. 2020)

Findings

Projections show that physical distancing measures were most effective if the staggered return to work was at the beginning of April; this reduced the median number of infections by more than 92% and 24% in mid-2020 and end-2020, respectively. There are benefits to sustaining these measures through April in order to delay and reduce the height of the peak, median epidemic size, and providing health-care systems more time to expand and respond.

Interpretation

Premature and sudden lifting of interventions could lead to an earlier secondary peak, which could be flattened by relaxing the interventions gradually.

This development is part of the digest;