Around three million deaths may have been prevented by coronavirus lockdowns across Europe, research suggests.
A modelling study from Imperial College London scientists, involving data from 11 European countries up to early May 2020, found that lockdowns had a “substantial effect” in reducing transmission levels of Covid-19.
European countries began implementing social distancing, school closures and national lockdowns in March, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson putting the UK in lockdown on March 23.
The Imperial researchers estimate that across all 11 countries – the UK, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland – between 12 and 15 million people were infected with Covid-19 up to May 4, representing between 3.2% and 4.0% of the population.
In their paper, published in the Nature journal, they said the results show that major non-pharmaceutical interventions and lockdown in particular have had a “large effect on reducing transmission”.
The paper says: “Continued intervention should be considered to keep transmission of SARS-CoV-2 under control.”
By comparing the deaths predicted under a model with no interventions to the deaths predicted in an intervention model, the researchers calculated that 3.1 million deaths have been averted across the 11 countries due to interventions since the beginning of the epidemic.
Dr Samir Bhatt, study author from the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Jameel Institute (J-IDEA), Imperial College London, said: “This data suggests that without any interventions, such as lockdown and school closures, there could have been many more deaths from Covid-19.
“The rate of transmission has declined from high levels to ones under control in all European countries we study.
“Our analysis also suggests far more infections in these European countries than previously estimated.
“Careful consideration should now be given to the continued measures that are needed to keep SARS-CoV-2 transmission under control.”
Infectious diseases expert, Professor John Edmunds, who attends meetings of the British Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday: “We should have gone into lockdown earlier.
“I think it would have been hard to do it, I think the data that we were dealing with in the early part of March and our kind of situational awareness was really quite poor.
“And so I think it would have been very hard to pull the trigger at that point but I wish we had – I wish we had gone into lockdown earlier. I think that has cost a lot of lives unfortunately.”
Meanwhile, a second study from the University of California, looking at China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France, and the United States, estimates that interventions in those countries prevented or delayed around 530 million cases.
Researchers compiled the data based on 1,717 local, regional, and national non-pharmaceutical interventions.
The paper, also published in Nature, says: “In the absence of policy actions, we estimate that early infections of Covid-19 exhibit exponential growth rates of roughly 38% per day.”
Researchers said they found that anti-contagion policies “significantly and substantially” slowed this growth, adding: “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.”
