In Nature: ‘Whose coronavirus strategy worked best? Scientists hunt most effective policies’
29 April 2020
13:17
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Researchers are already working on models that use data from individual countries to understand the effect of control measures. Models based on real data should be more nuanced than those that, at the start of the outbreak, necessarily predicted the effect of interventions mainly using assumptions. Combining data from around the world will allow researchers to compare countries’ responses. And compared with studies of individual countries, it should also allow them to design models that can make more accurate predictions about new phases of the pandemic and across many nations.
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In Europe, for example, algorithms group Sweden, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands together as countries that acted relatively slowly. In the early stages of their epidemics, all three implemented ‘herd immunity’ strategies, which involved few measures or ones that relied on voluntary compliance, although later, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands switched to more aggressive responses, including country-wide lockdown, says Amélie Desvars-Larrive, an epidemiologist at CSH Vienna and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna.
