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Ranking the effectiveness of worldwide COVID-19 government interventions

Nina Haug, Lukas Geyrhofer, Alessandro Londei

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Elma Dervic, Amélie Desvars-Larrive, Vittorio Loreto, Beate Pinior, Stefan Thurner, Peter Klimek

2020 · Nature Human Behaviour

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Original HN comments, with labels from simple text rules. A label describes the whole comment and may miss context or irony. Read the discussion to make up your own mind. About the labels

8 selected excerpts · 8 total mentions

Scramblejams
Recommendation · rule
I'm very skeptical that schools are quite safe. See https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1346362159446577154 Some key quotes: Here is a study carried out across >200 countries that showed that among all interventions studied, closing educational institutions was the 2nd most effective. Importantly, the impact on R was similar for pre-school, primary & secondary school settings. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0 Another study of >131 countries showed that among different interventions studied, one of the highest changes in R (R ratio) between introducing an intervention & lifting it was for school…
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closures: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... There are more good quotes and citations in that thread, it's worth a read. Anecdotally, the amount of times I've been sick since my daughter enrolled in public school has been mind-blowing. The notion that kids are somehow impervious to contracting this, or don't bring it home to vulnerable family members, would mean this virus behaves very differently from all the other upper respiratory diseases commonly seen out there. That's certainly possible, but based on what I've observed -- for example, I'm 99% certain the coronavirus vector that got me was a child -- it just doesn't pass the smell test with me. (Edit: Moved this from downthread)
Original comment Ontario to enter four-week, province-wide Covid-19 shutdown on Saturday
n4r9
Neutral mention · rule
It's well-established scientifically that lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical measures reduced transmission and deaths considerably. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd9338 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.15.21249884v... https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Original comment They Thought They Were Free (1955)
belorn
Neutral mention · rule
People tend to agree with expert advice when that advice align with their own personal views and values. Sadly both smart and dumb, educated and uneducated people falls for this and the pandemic demonstrated this in waves and continues to do so. Take this study (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0?error=coo...). How many people on HN will agree with the ranking of those interventions? Early restrictions on travel and preventing people from gathering are the most effective measure to prevent an pandemic, but what people want to form sides around are the discussion around masks. Shutting down airports and imposing general self isolation are not in alignment of what either smart and dumb people believes in.
Original comment Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness
gjulianm
Neutral mention · rule
Luckily we have data and not just anecdotes and humble opinions. For example, see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0: ‘Wearing a mask’ exhibits a significant impact on Rt in three methods (ΔRt between −0.018 and –0.12)' It's not a silver bullet, of course, and there are some situations were masks will be useless: for example, when you get in a closed room with no ventilation with other people for a long time, masks won't do too much. Or if you get together to have dinner with others and take your mask off, well, they won't do much obviously. But masks are effective, and a pretty low cost intervention to reduce the incidence. That's a fact.
Original comment Missouri found mask mandates work, but didn’t make findings public
Uberphallus
Neutral mention · rule
> But it was only valid for the first few weeks. The healthcare systems weren't critically overrun anywhere in the world. We live in a different planet? I live across the border with North Italy, and it was only 2 weeks what it took for the situation to go from "oops, looks like there's a problem" to "let's mobilize doctors out of retirement and potentially kill them to save people". There have been different levels of restrictions since. Same in France, Spain, Germany, pretty much anywhere in Europe. > Yes, from time to time not every patient they wanted to put on a ventilator got one, but ventilators doesn't dramatically improve the odds of survival so it wasn't a big…
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deal anyway. Ventilators were abused at the beginning out of ignorance about the disease, but they're still the best last-resort treatment for critical cases. In my region, during the second wave, most deaths happened to people waiting for a ventilator, or during transfer from oxygen to a ventilator, and those on ventilators generally survived. That said, now there's a more defined and effective protocol before reaching a ventilator that requires hospitalization nonetheless, and makes you require one if not followed. > So why did California continue with their measures for a year? They still did among the worst in the world so those measures seems to have had little to no effect at all. California had terrible numbers despite the fact that measures worked. It's been studied ad nauseam and social restrictions is the among most effective measures to be taken in every study, with a solid interval of confidence. One of my favourite studies is [0] because it shows that some things were done right (lockdowns, closing schools, remote work) but some had little to no effect (surface disinfection). [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0
Original comment Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
thom
Neutral mention · rule
I think it’s entirely reasonable to believe that individual kids are more resistant to spreading COVID, but closing schools is a powerful intervention. Schools have _lots_ of kids in them, in close proximity, and _every_ child lives in a household with at least one, but on average more than one, other person. This is not the only study implying closing schools was a sensible step: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0
Original comment Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

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