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. 2020 Nov 10:742:140430.
doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140430. Epub 2020 Jun 22.

Effect of the social distancing measures on the spread of COVID-19 in 10 highly infected countries

Tran Phuoc Bao Thu  1 , Pham Nguyen Hong Ngoc  2 , Nguyen Minh Hai  3 , Le Anh Tuan  4
Affiliations

Effect of the social distancing measures on the spread of COVID-19 in 10 highly infected countries

Tran Phuoc Bao Thu et al. Sci Total Environ. .

Abstract

From the end of 2019, an unprecedented novel coronavirus, which was named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO) emerged from Wuhan city, China. Despite rigorous global containment and quarantine efforts, the incidence of COVID-19 has continued to rise, with over 4 million confirmed-cases and over 300,000 deaths worldwide until mid-May. This study aims to present the effect of the promulgation of social distancing measures on the spread of COVID-19 in the cases of 10 highly infected countries. The authors focus on the statistics of the COVID-19 confirmed-cases and deaths in 10 highly infected countries, including The U.S., Spain, Italy, The U.K., France, Germany, Russia, Turkey, Iran and China, and the response to the pandemic of these countries in the period from January 11 to May 2, 2020. The relationships between the social distancing measures and the statistics of COVID-19 confirmed-cases and deaths were analyzed in order to elucidate the effectiveness of the social distancing measures on the spread of COVID-19 in 10 highly infected countries. The results showed it took1-4 weeks since the highest level of social distancing measures promulgation until the daily confirmed-cases and deaths showed signs of decreasing. The effectiveness of the social distancing measures on the spread of COVID-19 was different between the 10 focused countries. This variation is due to the difference in the levels of promulgated social distancing measures, as well as the difference in the COVID-19 spread situation at the time of promulgation between the countries.

Keywords: COVID-19; Decline rate of daily confirmed-cases; Growth rate of daily confirmed-cases; Social distancing measures; Statistics of WHO; Time-series.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Unlabelled Image
Graphical abstract
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Time-series of daily confirmed-cases in 10 countries.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Time-series of daily death-cases in 10 countries.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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