Governments in most of the world implemented unprecedented population controls in an effort to save lives after the coronavirus began to spread in 2020. An estimated 3 million people died despite those efforts, and the associated effects — missed cancer screenings, increased mental illness and drug abuse and learning loss — continue to bedevil the world. But a major review of world leaders’ responses to Covid-19 from a British scientific organization says the lockdowns, mask mandates and travel restrictions the officials imposed reduced the spread of the disease in the months before vaccines and more highly transmissible variants arrived. Even so: The assessment, from the U.K. government-funded Royal Society, says lockdowns, mask mandates and travel restrictions were implemented in the absence of evidence that they’d work. “The need for urgent actions took precedence over designing and implementing complex trials,” the report says. And the pandemic didn’t provide a suitable setting for rigorous testing either since “there was no easy means of evaluating uptake and effectiveness.” As a result, the society cites observational data to make the case that the leaders’ decisions reduced Covid’s toll. Given the absence of randomized control trials, the society says it had difficulty evaluating which measures worked best since mitigations like lockdowns and mask mandates were typically used at the same time. It also says relying on observational data allows for the possibility of biased results from confounding factors. Case studies: The society cites three locations that temporarily contained the virus. — In Hong Kong, infected people were required to isolate for three weeks and their contacts for two. The government imposed strict quarantines at the border. Other measures included minimum distancing, restrictions on restaurant hours, bans on large events and work and school closures. Masks were mandatory. — In New Zealand, the government ordered stringent border controls in which incoming travelers were placed in mandatory quarantine for two weeks. The island nation set strict test, trace and isolate measures and locked down regions where the virus was detected. — In South Korea, the government adopted widespread testing early on and coupled it with the use of global-positioning data from mobile phones to monitor its citizens and alert them if they were exposed to Covid. Arriving travelers spent two weeks in mandatory quarantine or were barred entry. What’s next? The society doesn’t prescribe a plan for the next pandemic, instead urging governments to evaluate the benefits and the intervention costs – the latter of which the society says it did not attempt to do.
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