Study: Coronavirus Lockdown Saved 3.1 Million European Lives, Prevents 60 Million US Infections

LONDON (VINnews) — Just over two months ago, scientists at the Imperial College, London, released a report showing that lockdowns across Europe had saved 120,000 lives up to March 30.

The Imperial College has now published fresh data in the magazine Nature demonstrating that had European governments not moved swiftly to impose social distancing measures, shutter schools and ban large public gatherings, the virus’s carnage would have been far worse. The college claims that an estimated 3.1 million lives were saved across the continent.

The countries studied were: France, the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.

The researchers compared the number of deaths – based on official figures from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) – with the number of deaths that there would have been without these measures, according to mathematical modelling.

The Nature article also said that the measures had reduced the spread of the virus – meaning the number of people contaminated by each infected person – by 82% on average. This allowed the number (sometimes also written as R, R0 or Rx) to drop below 1, which is the threshold needed to stop the virus from spreading.

The number of averted deaths is highest in France at 690,000 while lockdowns in Italy and Germany are thought to have saved 630,000 and 560,000 people, respectively. Despite the study’s positive findings, it cautioned that only 3-4% of the population across the 11 countries contracted COVID-19 which means that there is still a long way to go towards herd immunity and that there’s a real risk of a second wave of the virus emerging as lockdowns are relaxed.

The researchers concluded that: “We estimate that, for all the countries we consider, current interventions have been sufficient to drive the reproduction number below 1…and achieve epidemic control.

“Our results show that major non-pharmaceutical interventions and lockdown in particular have had a large effect on reducing transmission. Continued intervention should be considered to keep transmission of SARS-CoV-2 under control.”

At the same time, another study using different methods was published in the same Nature magazine demonstrating that shutdown orders prevented about 60 million novel coronavirus infections in the United States and 285 million in China, The study’s leader, Solomon Hsiang, director of the Global Policy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, noted the swift rate of infection by the virus and stated in an interview with reporters that “the global response to covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, resulted in “saving more lives in a shorter period of time than ever before,”