Open AccessLockdowns and the COVID-19 pandemic: What is the endgame?
Author(s) -
Theodore Lytras,
Sotirios Tsiodras
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of public health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.953
H-Index - 82
eISSN - 1651-1905
pISSN - 1403-4948
DOI - 10.1177/1403494820961293
Subject(s) - social distance , pandemic , herd immunity , public health , covid-19 , environmental health , business , vaccination , public economics , medicine , virology , disease , economics , infectious disease (medical specialty) , nursing , pathology
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.