BERKELEY, June 9 (WNM/Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security) – A new article published in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2404-8) used data from 1,717 different interventions at the local, regional and national level in the United States, France, Iran, Italy, South Korea, and China.

Based on econometric modeling techniques, which are typically used to evaluate economic impact of events and policies, the researchers evaluated the impact of various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including large-scale social distancing policies, on the epidemic growth. They concluded that interventions in these countries may have prevented 62 million confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide, which corresponds to an estimated 530 million total SARS-CoV-2 infections. These include 4.8 million confirmed cases (60 million infections) in the United States alone:

"We find that anti-contagion policies have significantly and substantially slowed this growth. Some policies have different impacts on different populations, but we obtain consistent evidence that the policy packages now deployed are achieving large, beneficial, and measurable health outcomes. We estimate that across these six countries, interventions prevented or delayed on the order of 62 million confirmed cases, corresponding to averting roughly 530 million total infections. These findings may help inform whether or when these policies should be deployed, intensified, or lifted, and they can support decision-making in the other 180+ countries where COVID-19 has been reported."