Flatten the curve: Empirical evidence on how non-pharmaceutical interventions substituted pharmaceutical treatments during COVID-19 pandemic

PLoS One. 2021 Oct 11;16(10):e0258379. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0258379. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Non-Pharmaceutical and Pharmaceutical treatments were alternative strategies for governments to intervene. Though many of these intervention methods proved to be effective to stop the spread of COVID-19, i.e., lockdown and curfew, they also posed risk to the economy; in such a scenario, an analysis on how to strike a balance becomes urgent. Our research leverages the mobility big data from the University of Maryland COVID-19 Impact Analysis Platform and employs the Generalized Additive Model (GAM), to understand how the social demographic variables, NPTs (Non-Pharmaceutical Treatments) and PTs (Pharmaceutical Treatments) affect the New Death Rate (NDR) at county-level. We also portray the mutual and interactive effects of NPTs and PTs on NDR. Our results show that there exists a specific usage rate of PTs where its marginal effect starts to suppress the NDR growth, and this specific rate can be reduced through implementing the NPTs.

MeSH terms

  • Age Factors
  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Antiviral Agents / therapeutic use
  • COVID-19 / epidemiology*
  • COVID-19 / prevention & control*
  • COVID-19 / virology
  • COVID-19 Drug Treatment
  • Communicable Disease Control / methods*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Linear Models
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Models, Statistical*
  • Pandemics / economics
  • Pandemics / prevention & control*
  • SARS-CoV-2*
  • Treatment Outcome
  • United States / epidemiology

Substances

  • Antiviral Agents

Grants and funding

The authors received no specific funding for this work.