Did border closures slow SARS-CoV-2?

Friesen, Paul; Janabi, Hawraa Al; Beling, Elizabeth; Falcone, Jonathan; Feddern, Lukas; Hirst, Cora; Murphy, Nora A.; Stifel, Elizabeth; Straight, Erin; Tao, Dongying; Tutaj, Erin; Weiss, Mark A.; Shiraef, Mary A.

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-05482-7

Cited by 48 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“… 109 However, a 2022 study found no evidence that border closures reduced the spread of COVID-19. 110 Border measures can work only if they are timely, comprehensive, and complemented by policies to suppress local outbreaks that will continue to occur even with comprehensive travel measures.…”

Section: Section 2: a Review Of The Global Regional And National Resp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic

et al. 2022

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Section: Section 2: a Review Of The Global Regional And National Resp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic

et al. 2022

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“…Many authors tried to assess the effectiveness of different non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). The authors of [ 19 , 109 – 111 ] also partially focused on economic development and provided evidence for the effectiveness of lockdowns. The authors of [ 112 , 113 ] derived confidence intervals for the effect of fine-grained NPIs such as school or workplace closures or gathering bans based on data for 149 and 41 countries, respectively.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While this is intuitively appealing, its utility and practicality in a real-world scenario remains yet to be demonstrated. Recently, the authors of [ 111 ] found evidence in favor of domestic lockdowns to reduce the spread of the disease. On the other hand, the authors could not find any results in favor of border closures such that alternative strategies need to be found.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regional opening strategies with commuter testing and containment of new SARS-CoV-2 variants in Germany

et al. 2022

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Background Despite the vaccination process in Germany, a large share of the population is still susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. In addition, we face the spread of novel variants. Until we overcome the pandemic, reasonable mitigation and opening strategies are crucial to balance public health and economic interests. Methods We model the spread of SARS-CoV-2 over the German counties by a graph-SIR-type, metapopulation model with particular focus on commuter testing. We account for political interventions by varying contact reduction values in private and public locations such as homes, schools, workplaces, and other. We consider different levels of lockdown strictness, commuter testing strategies, or the delay of intervention implementation. We conduct numerical simulations to assess the effectiveness of the different intervention strategies after one month. The virus dynamics in the regions (German counties) are initialized randomly with incidences between 75 and 150 weekly new cases per 100,000 inhabitants (red zones) or below (green zones) and consider 25 different initial scenarios of randomly distributed red zones (between 2 and 20% of all counties). To account for uncertainty, we consider an ensemble set of 500 Monte Carlo runs for each scenario. Results We find that the strength of the lockdown in regions with out of control virus dynamics is most important to avoid the spread into neighboring regions. With very strict lockdowns in red zones, commuter testing rates of twice a week can substantially contribute to the safety of adjacent regions. In contrast, the negative effect of less strict interventions can be overcome by high commuter testing rates. A further key contributor is the potential delay of the intervention implementation. In order to keep the spread of the virus under control, strict regional lockdowns with minimum delay and commuter testing of at least twice a week are advisable. If less strict interventions are in favor, substantially increased testing rates are needed to avoid overall higher infection dynamics. Conclusions Our results indicate that local containment of outbreaks and maintenance of low overall incidence is possible even in densely populated and highly connected regions such as Germany or Western Europe. While we demonstrate this on data from Germany, similar patterns of mobility likely exist in many countries and our results are, hence, generalizable to a certain extent.

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“…Many authors tried to assess the effectiveness of different non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). The authors of [109, 110, 111, 19] also partially focused on economic development and provided evidence for the effectiveness of lockdowns. The authors of [112, 113] derived confidence intervals for the effect of fine-grained NPIs such as school or workplace closures or gathering bans based on data for 149 and 41 countries, respectively.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regional opening strategies with commuter testing and containment of new SARS-CoV-2 variants in Germany

Kuehn

Abele

Binder

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Background: Despite the accelerating vaccination process, a large majority of the population is still susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. In addition, we face the spread of novel variants. Until we overcome the pandemic, reasonable mitigation and opening strategies are crucial to balance public health and economic interests. Methods: We model the spread of SARS-CoV-2 over the German counties by a graph-SIR-type model with particular focus on commuter testing. We account for political interventions by varying contact reduction values in private and public locations such as homes, schools, workplaces, and other. We consider different levels of lockdown strictness, commuter testing strategies, or the delay of intervention implementation. We conduct numerical simulations to assess the effectiveness of the different intervention strategies after one month. The virus dynamics in the counties are initialized randomly with incidences between 75-150 weekly new cases per 100,000 inhabitants (red zones) or below 10 (green zones) and consider 25 different initial scenarios of randomly distributed red zones (between 2 and 20 % of all counties). To account for uncertainty, we consider an ensemble set of 500 Monte Carlo runs for each scenario. Results: We find that the strength of the lockdown in regions with out of control virus dynamics is most important to avoid the spread into neighboring regions. With very strict lockdowns in red zones, commuter testing rates of twice a week can substantially contribute to the safety of adjacent regions. In contrast, less strict lockdowns with the same commuter testing rate quickly and substantially lead to overall higher infection dynamics. A further key contributor is the potential delay of the intervention implementation. In order to keep the spread of the virus under control, strict regional lockdowns with minimum delay and commuter testing of at least twice a week are advisable.

show abstract

Did border closures slow SARS-CoV-2?

Cited by 48 publications

References 28 publications

The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic

The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic

Regional opening strategies with commuter testing and containment of new SARS-CoV-2 variants in Germany

Regional opening strategies with commuter testing and containment of new SARS-CoV-2 variants in Germany

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