Social distancing measures in the spring of 2020 effectively curbed the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, study finds

Date:
September 28, 2021
Source:
University of Cologne
Summary:
Early contact restrictions and school closures prevented over 80
per cent of COVID-19 infections and over 60 per cent of deaths in
Germany within three weeks, a new study finds.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
The measures adopted in mid-March 2020 to contain the COVID-19 pandemic
both greatly reduced people's mobility and effectively prevented the
spread of COVID-19 in the following three weeks. That is the result of
a recent study by an international team of economists led by Junior
Professor Dr Emanuel Hansen at the University of Cologne's Faculty
of Management, Economics, and Social Sciences and Professor Dr Ulrich
Glogowsky at Johannes Kepler University in Linz (Austria). The results demonstrate how important the early policy measures were for the further
course of the coronavirus pandemic in Germany. The study has appeared
in the interdisciplinary open-access journal PLoS ONE.


==========================================================================
In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading rapidly
across Europe. After initial hesitation, in mid-March the German
government and the Conference of Federal State Prime Ministers (Ministerpra"sidentenkonferenz) decided in quick succession on a series
of measures to restrict social contacts, including the closing of schools, childcare facilities, and shops.

Even private meetings of people from different households were
limited. German policy-makers thus implemented rapid and far-reaching
contact restrictions. In the early stages of the first wave of the virus,
masks were not yet mandatory.

Neither vaccinations nor rapid tests were available. Within a few weeks,
COVID- 19 infections in the country declined sharply, causing contact restrictions to be gradually relaxed again beginning on 20 April 2020.

Despite the rapid decline in infections in Germany, the effectiveness
of the contact restrictions has been disputed repeatedly, both by the
public and by experts. In particular, it was argued that even without
the enacted measures, the spread of the virus would have been curbed by automatic changes in people's behaviour.

To answer this controversial question, the team of authors led by Junior Professor Dr Emanuel Hansen estimated the causal effect of the policy
measures using detailed figures from the Robert Koch Institute as well
as anonymized movement data from private mobile phone providers from the
more than 400 German districts in a quasi-experimental analysis. The
analysis exploits that the first COVID-19 infections occurred in some
districts before the contact restrictions began, while in other districts
they occurred much later. By comparing districts with early and late
outbreaks, the researchers estimated how citizens' behaviour and the
infection rate would have evolved in Germany without social distancing measures. The causal effect of all measures thus corresponds to the
difference between the inferred hypothetical development without social distancing and the actual development with contact restrictions in place.

Based on this analysis, the authors derived the following results: In a
first step, based on the mobile phone data they found that the policies
in fact reduced people's spatial movements by an average of 30 per cent,
as they were intended to do. In a second step, they found evidence of
the effective containment of the pandemic: already within the first three weeks, contact restrictions in Germany prevented more than 80 per cent of
COVID infections and more than 60 per cent of the deaths that would have followed. Put differently, the researchers estimate that there would have
been about 500,000 additional infections and about 5,400 additional deaths without the German measures by early April alone. Further analysis shows
that the contact restrictions have greatly slowed the rate of infections
in all population groups. However, in the age group of over 60-year-olds,
the containment rate was somewhat weaker than in younger people. The researchers see one plausible explanation for this in that the closing of schools and childcare facilities had a more direct and pronounced effect
on children and their parents than on the generation of grandparents.

"The results of our study show that the early measures to contain the
COVID-19 pandemic in Germany were successful -- contrary to repeated
claims in parts of the public," Emanuel Hansen remarked. "Without
these contact restrictions, Germany would probably have experienced an
overload of the healthcare system, like some other European countries
did." With no other tools available in the early stages of the pandemic
like vaccination or rapid testing, there was no viable alternative,
Hansen added, despite the economic and social costs of closing schools
and businesses. The study focused exclusively on the first COVID-19 wave
in Germany and does not allow conclusions on the effects of policies in
later waves of the pandemic.

Junior Professor Dr Emanuel Hansen is a member of the UoC's Faculty of Management, Economics, and Social Sciences, the Center for Macroeconomic Research (CMR) und the Center for Social and Economic Behavior (C-SEB).

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Cologne. Note: Content
may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Ulrich Glogowsky, Emanuel Hansen, Simeon Scha"chtele. How
effective are
social distancing policies? Evidence on the fight
against COVID-19. PLOS ONE, 2021; 16 (9): e0257363 DOI:
10.1371/journal.pone.0257363 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/09/210928102237.htm

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