Association of Public Health Interventions With the Epidemiology of the COVID-19 Outbreak in Wuhan, China
Study suggests series of multifaceted public health interventions including cordons sanitaire, traffic restriction, social distancing, home quarantine, centralized quarantine, and universal symptom survey was temporally linked to improved control of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan
Source:
Journal of the American Medical Association
SPS commentary:
According to an editorial, taken as a whole, this study hints at a “tantalizing possibility” of the accessibility of data to support the real-time formative evaluation of public health interventions in an ongoing pandemic. It notes that monitoring infection rates and effective reproduction numbers continuously may effectively allow for quality improvement methods to be used to evaluate public health policies, provided data can be drawn continuously from different sources. It adds that for the time being, non-pharmaceutical interventions are the only tool in the armamentarium for controlling COVID-19, and this report serves to quantify important metrics suggesting their potential effectiveness.