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. 2021 Feb;49(1):37-40.
doi: 10.1177/1403494820961293. Epub 2020 Sep 26.

Lockdowns and the COVID-19 pandemic: What is the endgame?

Theodore Lytras  1   2 , Sotirios Tsiodras  1   3
Affiliations

Lockdowns and the COVID-19 pandemic: What is the endgame?

Theodore Lytras et al. Scand J Public Health. 2021 Feb.

Abstract

An overall long-term strategy for managing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is presented. This strategy will need to be maintained until herd immunity is achieved, hopefully through vaccination rather than natural infection. We suggest that a pure test-trace-isolate strategy is likely not practicable in most countries, and a degree of social distancing, ranging up to full lockdown, is the main public-health tool to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Guided by reliable surveillance data, distancing should be continuously optimised down to the lowest sustainable level that guarantees a low and stable infection rate in order to balance its wide-ranging negative effects on public health. The qualitative mixture of social-distancing measures also needs to be carefully optimised in order to minimise social costs.

Keywords: COVID-19; epidemiology; herd immunity; pandemic; social distancing; surveillance.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of conflicting interests: The authors declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: S.T. is a spokesman for the Hellenic Ministry of Health; the views expressed here are his own.

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