Early Mandated Social Distancing is a Strong Predictor of Reduction in Peak Daily New COVID-19 Cases

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Objectives

Mandated social distancing has been applied globally to reduce the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, the beneficial effects of this community-based intervention have not been proven or quantified for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Study design

Regional population-level observational study.

Methods

Using publicly available data, we examined the effect of timing of mandated social distancing on the rate of COVID-19 cases in 119 geographic regions, derived from 41 states within the US and 78 other countries. The highest number of new COVID-19 cases per day recorded within a geographic unit was the primary outcome. The total number COVID-19 cases in regions where case numbers had reached the tail end of the outbreak was an exploratory outcome.

Results

We found that the highest number of new COVID-19 cases per day per million persons was significantly associated with the total number of COVID-19 cases per million persons on the day before mandated social distancing (β = 0.66, p < 0.0001). These findings suggest that if mandated social distancing is not initiated until the number of existing COVID-19 cases has doubled, the eventual peak would result in 58% more COVID-19 cases per day. Subgroup analysis on those regions where the highest number of new COVID-19 cases per day have peaked increased β to 0.85 (p < 0.0001). The total number of cases during the outbreak in a region was strongly predicted by the total number of COVID-19 cases on the day before mandated social distancing (β = 0.97, p < 0.0001).

Conclusions

Initiating mandated social distancing when the numbers of COVID-19 cases are low within a region significantly reduces the number of new daily COVID-19 cases and perhaps also reduces the total number of cases in the region.

Highlights

•

Number of COVID-19 cases at the time of mandated social distancing in a region is a strong predictor of peak daily new cases.
•

Early mandated social distancing significantly reduces the number of daily new COVID-19 cases in the region.
•

Early mandated social distancing also likely significantly reduces the total number of COVID-19 cases in the region.

Related collections

Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Public Health

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Public Health

Title: Public Health

Publisher: Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Royal Society for Public Health.

ISSN (Print): 0033-3506

ISSN (Electronic): 1476-5616

Publication date PMC-release: 21 October 2020

Publication date (Electronic): 21 October 2020

Affiliations

[a ]Zeenat Qureshi Stroke Institute and Department of Neurology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, US

[b ]St Cloud Hospital, St Cloud, MN, US

[c ]Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, US

[d ]Zeenat Qureshi Stroke Institute, Columbia, MO, US

Author notes

[∗ ]Corresponding author. St Cloud Hospital Cerebrovascular Diseases, 1406 6th Ave N St Cloud, Minnesota, 56303, United States.

[#]

Joint first authors.

Article

Publisher Item ID: S0033-3506(20)30457-1

DOI: 10.1016/j.puhe.2020.10.015

PMC ID: 7577666

PubMed ID: 33317819

SO-VID: b419d015-76d2-4d8e-b28c-0804de063f78

License:

Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

History

Date received : 16 June 2020

Date revision received : 21 September 2020

Date accepted : 12 October 2020

Comments

Comment on this article

scite_

Cited by 15

See all cited by