Are curfews slowing the coronavirus?

Maria Polyakova, an economist at Stanford University, has studied the effects of the pandemic on the US economy. “In general,” she says, “we expect staying home to mechanically slow down the pandemic, as it reduces the number of interactions between people.

“The trade-off is that the reduction in economic activity is particularly damaging to many workers and their families in the large service sector of the economy,” she added. So is the curfew worth the price?

She doesn’t understand the logic. “Assuming that nightclubs and the like are already closed anyway, for example, prohibiting people from walking around the neighborhood with their families at night is unlikely to reduce interactions,” said Dr Polyakova.

In addition, the virus grows indoors and clusters of infection are common in families and households. A daunting question, then, is whether forcing people into these environments for longer periods of time slows down transmission – or speeds it up.

“You can think of it that way,” said William Hanage, epidemiologist at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, “what proportion of transmission events are occurring during the period in question? And how will the curfew stop them?

A study, published recently in Science, analyzed data from Hunan Province, China, at the start of the epidemic. Curfews and lockdowns, the researchers concluded, have had a paradoxical effect: These restrictions reduced the spread within the community, but increased the risk of infection within households, Kaiyuan Sun reported. , postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, and colleagues.

Dr Longini and his colleagues incorporated lockouts and curfews into pandemic models in the United States and concluded that they could be an effective way to reduce transmission.