In an effort to prevent the Corona virus from causing high rates of death among the world’s population, every country has taken a set of measures in order to reduce the outbreak, although there is much debate about which methods are effective or ineffective.
One of the ways that has regularly met with large amounts of rejection is through closures and restrictions on movement, including the closure of schools and businesses, and the imposition of severe restrictions on international travel.
According to a newspaper report,Jerusalem Post‘, a systematic review and analysis was conducted by a group of economic experts at Johns Hopkins University in an effort to find out if the shutdowns were effective.
34 previous studies were selected on the effectiveness of government-imposed lockdowns that were evaluated using an empirical approach, although they did not include any numbers focusing on infection or hospitalization rates.
The analysis showed that the closures had a very small impact on the death rates of Corona, as it resulted in a decrease in the death rate by 2.9 percent, while the closures in the United States and Europe reduced the death rate by only 0.2 percent.
On the other hand, Dr. Seth Flaxman, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University, criticized the methods and language used by the authors of this analysis, saying: “The analysis is good but it used techniques used in economics.”
He explained, “The closures do not save lives immediately, because there is a time lag between infection and death, so to know the impact of the closures on Corona deaths, we need to wait about two or three weeks.”
More than 381.77 million people have been infected with the Corona virus worldwide, while the deaths from the virus have reached 6.597 million cases, according to a new statistic by Archyde.com.
Infections with the virus have been recorded in more than 210 countries and regions since the first cases were discovered in China in December 2019.