Don’t go cold turkey — at least not when it comes to easing lockdown restrictions.
That’s the message of a new study that uses mathematical modeling to show that governments shouldn’t just turn off lockdown measures all at once for everyone, after infection rates have slowed, unless they want to risk a spike in coronavirus cases that threatens to overwhelm their health care system.
“Decision makers — pay attention to the math: emerging from lockdowns requires a gradual and phased approach to keep infection under control,” said Michael Bonsall from the Mathematical Ecology Research group at the University of Oxford, who helped lead the study team.
“Without this attention, you run the risk of burdening health systems with further waves of infection,” Bonsall told CNN.
Lockdown restrictions, or “anti-contagion strategies,” have varied from country to country and state to state but include travel bans, school closures, work from home/stay at home orders, quarantining and isolation. They can reduce infection rates, spreading infections over a longer period in an approach known as flattening the curve.
Thanks to lockdown measures, an estimated 60 million coronavirus infections were prevented in the United States, and 285 million in China, according to a separate study recently published in the journal Nature.
But lockdowns have huge emotional costs and have crippled economies across the globe, including officially plunging the United States into a recession.
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