Impact of lockdown on Covid-19 case fatality rate and viral mutations spread in 7 countries in Europe and North America

Abstract

Background: Severe acute respiratory syndrome CoV-2 (SARS-CoV-2) caused the first coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in China and has become a public health emergency of international concern. SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has been declared a pandemic by WHO on March 11th, 2020 and the same month several Countries put in place different lockdown restrictions and testing strategies in order to contain the spread of the virus. Methods: The calculation of the Case Fatality Rate of SARS-CoV-2 in the Countries selected was made by using the data available at https ://githu b.com/owid/covi-19-data/tree/maste r/publi c/data. Case fatality rate was calculated as the ratio between the death cases due to COVID-19, over the total number of SARS-CoV-2 reported cases 14 days before. Standard Case Fatality Rate values were normalized by the Country-specific ρ factor, i.e. the number of PCR tests/1 million inhabitants over the number of reported cases/1 million inhabitants. Case-fatality rates between Countries were compared using proportion test. Post-hoc analysis in the case of more than two groups was performed using pairwise comparison of proportions and p value was adjusted using Holm method. We also analyzed 487 genomic sequences from the GISAID database derived from patients infected by SARS-CoV-2 from January 2020 to April 2020 in Italy,

Comparison of the clinical performance and usefulness of five SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests

“…To control the pandemic, diagnostic tests such as reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) methods were developed [ 1 ]. The results of these RT-PCR tests were used for taking political decisions such as imposing lockdown in several countries [ 2 , 3 ]. However, since RT-PCR tests are feasible only within three weeks since symptom onset, it is inconvenient for epidemiological investigations.…”

What Is the Impact of Lockdowns on Dengue?

“…In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries around the world had to resort to lockdowns with strict mobility restrictions and social distancing [ 1 ]. Lockdowns indeed showed great success in containing the COVID-19 outbreak in the initial epicentre in Wuhan, China [ 2 ] and flattened the curve in many other countries [ 3 ]. Each country has taken different approaches to lockdowns with the restrictiveness, adherence, target population and duration of lockdowns varying considerably between countries [ 4 ].…”

COVID-19 in Hong Kong – Public health, food safety, and animal vectors perspectives

“…The strategies used in Hong Kong are different from countries that have failed to prevent widespread community outbreaks resulting in the need to implement stringent lockdown strategies ( Melnick and Ioannidis, 2020 ; Pachetti et al, 2020 ). There are a number of key factors fundamental to Hong Kong’s successful experience in the current COVID-19 especially during the first 6 months of the pandemic( Centers for Disease Control, 2020 ; Lam et al, 2020 ).…”