A woman demonstrates the use of plastic films for customers to test sofas, at the Heal main store which reopens in central London on June 8. Tolga Akmen / AFP / Getty Images
Don’t go cold turkey – at least not when it comes to reducing lock restrictions.
That’s the message of a new study that uses mathematical modeling to show that governments should not just turn off locking at once for everyone, after infection rates slow down, unless they want to risk spikes coronavirus case who threatened to overwhelm their health care system.
“Decision makers – pay attention to mathematics: emerging from lock requires a gradual and gradual approach to keeping infections under control,” said Michael Bonsall of the Mathematical Ecology Research group at Oxford University, who helped lead the study team.
“Without this attention, you risk to burden the health system with a wave of further infections,” Bonsall told CNN.
Locking restrictions, or “anti-transmission strategies,” have varied from country to country and country to country but include travel bans, school closures, work from home / residential orders, quarantine and isolation. They can reduce infection rates, spread infections over a longer period in an approach known as flatten the curve.
Thanks to locking measures, an estimated 60 million coronavirus infections are prevented in the United States, and 285 million in China, according to separate study recently published in the journal Nature.
But lockdowns have huge emotional costs and cripple economies around the world, including officially plunging the United States into recession.
