Effects of strict containment policies on COVID-19 pandemic crisis: lessons to cope with next pandemic impacts

Abstract

The goal of the study here is to analyze and assess whether strict containment policies to cope with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic crisis are effective interventions to reduce high numbers of infections and deaths. A homogenous sample of 31 countries is categorized in two sets: countries with high or low strictness of public policy to cope with COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The findings here suggest that countries with a low intensity of strictness have average confirmed cases and fatality rates related to COVID-19 lower than countries with high strictness in containment policies (confirmed cases are 24.69% vs. 26.06% and fatality rates are 74.33% vs. 76.38%, respectively, in countries with low and high strictness of COVID-19 public policies of containment). What this study adds is that high levels of strict restriction policies may not be useful measures of control in containing the spread and negative impact of pandemics similar to COVID-19 and additionally a high strictness in containment policies generates substantial social and economic costs. These findings can be explained with manifold socioeconomic and environmental factors that support transmission dynamics and circulation of COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, high levels of strictness in public policy (and also a high share of administering new vaccines) seem to have low effectiveness to stop pandemics similar to COVID-19 driven by mutant viral agents. These results here suggest that the design of effective health policies for prevention and preparedness of future pandemics should be underpinned in a good governance of countries and adoption of new technology, rather than strict and generalized health polices having ambiguous effects of containment in society.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; Containment policy; Fatality rates; Health policy; Infections; Medical ventilation; New technology; Non-pharmaceutical interventions; Stringency index.

Fig. 1

Map of countries with a high and low strictness in policy responses to cope with COVID-19 pandemic. Countries with high strict policies of containment have red color: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, UK, and USA. Countries with low strictness in containment policies have a color yellow in the map: Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, and Switzerland

Fig. 2

Comparative analysis of health and economic indicators between countries with a high and low strictness in restrictions to cope with COVID-19 pandemic crisis (cf., Table 2 for significance of differences)

Fig. 3

Comparative analysis between countries with a high and low level of medical ventilators per 100,000 people: fatality rate is considered on 31 December 2020, before the COVID-19 vaccination to show the real technological effect of medical ventilators on health system, when this technology was the only approach to treating this new infectious disease because effective drugs lacked