Fifty days of strict lockdowns followed by 30 days where measures are eased could be an effective strategy for reducing Covid-19 deaths while ensuring some level of economic protection, scientists claim.
In an EU-backed study published on Wednesday, a cohort of researchers from nine countries simulated how various lockdown strategies would impact the spread of the coronavirus.
There have been almost 5 million cases of Covid-19 confirmed globally, with over 300,000 deaths from the virus worldwide, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Many governments have imposed some form of lockdown to mitigate transmission of the virus. But policymakers around the world are now calculating ways to gradually lift those measures as the pandemic weighs heavily on economic activity.
Scientists suggested in the new report that an alternative, more effective approach to indefinite or milder lockdowns could be alternating stricter measures with intervals of relaxed social distancing. Effective testing, contact tracing and isolation strategies, as well as efforts to shield society’s most vulnerable, would be consistently kept in place.
They modeled several different scenarios on 16 countries, including Australia, Mexico, Belgium, South Africa and Nigeria.
In the first scenario, no mitigation or social-distancing measures were imposed. In every single country, this led to the number of patients requiring treatment in intensive care units (ICUs) quickly and significantly exceeding available capacity. Ultimately, this would result in 7.8 million deaths across the countries included in the analysis, researchers said, and the duration of the epidemic would be almost 200 days in the majority of those nations.
