Study points to effectiveness of anti-Covid measures in 2020
A large-scale study by Zurich researchers shows the extent to which measures taken at the start of the pandemic in 2020 slowed the spread of the virus in the population.
Researchers led by Tanja Stadler from the federal institute of technology ETH Zurich analysed over 11,000 sequenced coronavirus genomes for the study, published on Wednesday in the Science Translational Medicine journal.
The closure of Swiss borders to all but essential crossings (between March and May 2020) cut the numbers of imported infections by 90%, Stadler told the Keystone-SDA news agency.
This led to a successful decoupling of Switzerland’s domestic Covid-19 efforts from what was happening in countries around, the study said.
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Coronavirus: the situation in Switzerland
Contact tracing
As for the lockdown measures, they managed to cut by half the length of time during which imported Covid-19 viruses circulated in the population, compared to after the lockdown was lifted. Contact tracing was also effective, cutting in half the average number of infections caused by a positive person.
However, from Autumn 2020, when numbers began to spike, the effectiveness of contact tracing disappeared, the study found.
Stadler said that while the epidemiological effectiveness of official measures in 2020 has already been shown by other studies, the advantage of the latest research project – one of the “biggest worldwide for 2020 in this field” – was the sheer amount of quantitative data analysed.
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