New Paper (Other): Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand

[rdvelazquez]

Title: Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand

General Information

Please paste a link to the paper or a citation here:

Link: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

What is the paper's Manubot-style citation?

Citation: [@doi:10.25561/77482]

Is this paper primarily relevant to Background or Pathogesis?

• [x] Background
• [ ] Pathogenesis
• [ ] Methods

Please list some keywords (3-10) that help identify the relevance of this paper to COVID-19

• Modeling
• Forecasting
• Healthcare demand
• United States
• Great Britain

Which areas of expertise are particularly relevant to the paper?

• [ ] virology
• [x] epidemiology
• [x] biostatistics
• [ ] immunology
• [ ] pharmacology
• [x] other: public health policy

[rdvelazquez]

Summary

NOTE:I'm not a scientist; the summary below is from a layman's perspective.

Suggested questions to answer about each paper:

• What did they analyze? They forecast the effects of:
  • Case Isolation
  • Home Quarantine
  • Social Distancing
  • School/university Closure

and combinations of the above on health care demand (hospitalization, critical care cases) and mortality.

• What methods did they use? A "modified individual-based simulation model developed to support pandemic influenza planning"

• Does this paper study COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, or a related disease and/or virus? COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2

• What is the main finding (or a few main takeaways)? Their simulation suggests that:

  • Unmitigated, COVID-19 would cause ~2.2 million US and ~500,000 deaths in GB.
  • If mitigated, but not suppressed, COVID-19 would cause ~1.15 million US and ~250,000 GB deaths.

• What does this paper tell us about the background and/or diagnostics/therapeutics for COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2? Provides a forecast of the progression of the epidemic in the US and GB with and without various public health policies.

• Do you have any concerns about methodology or the interpretation of these results beyond this analysis?

  • I couldn't find the source code for the model anywhere online.
  • They didn't provide sensitivity analysis beyond showing some simulation outputs for two values of R0 (2.2 and 2.4)

Any comments or notes?

This seems to have been an influential paper for public policy and there are probably a lot of discussions about this paper on twitter and elsewhere. Here's something just from a quick google search: https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-mrc-centre-for-global-infectious-disease-analysis-report-9-impact-of-non-pharmaceutical-interventions-npis-to-reduce-covid-19-mortality-and-healthcare-demand/