An evaluation of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic 16 days after the end of social confinement in Hungary
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EDITORIAL
An evaluation of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic 16 days after the end of social confinement in Hungary Veronica Galvan & Jorge Quarleri
Received: 15 July 2020 / Accepted: 17 July 2020 # American Aging Association 2020
More than 11 million confirmed Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases have been documented, and the pandemic had claimed nearly 500,000 lives worldwide by the beginning of July 2020 (Dong et al. 2020). The epidemiological situation is continuously and diversely evolving worldwide, where some countries appear to have surpassed their epidemic peak, but the incidence of infections in others it is still rising. SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne virus transmissible via inhalation through close contact with a COVID-19infected person (Tang et al. 2020). To slow down the spread of infection (“flatten the epidemiological curve”), different preventive measures including strict lockdown, social distancing, and individual protection
V. Galvan Department of Cellular and Integrative Physiology, Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, and Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases, University of Texas Health San Antonio, San Antonio TX USA e-mail: [email protected] V. Galvan e-mail: [email protected] V. Galvan Department of Veterans Affairs South Texas Veterans Health Care System (STVHCS), San Antonio TX USA J. Quarleri (*) Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas en Retrovirus y Sida (INBIRS), Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Buenos Aires Argentina e-mail: [email protected]
measures were adopted in several countries considering that effective therapeutic interventions such as a vaccine or antiviral therapy are still unavailable (Chinazzi et al. 2020; Guan et al. 2020). More than 6 months into the pandemic, it is imperative to assess the effectiveness of these interventions from the standpoint of disease, with the goal of preventing epidemic growth as well as avoiding a recurring epidemic wave of SARS-CoV-2 cases after societal measures are relaxed or removed. Based on a stochastic model that allows to simulate both the degree of population confinement and the effectiveness of different post-confinement strategies, a gradual relaxing of restrictions accompanied by the temporal extension of restrictions for more susceptible groups seems to be optimal, resulting in a significant reduction in death counts (Lopez and Rodo 2020). Differences in the rigor of confinement policies between countries and the speed with which they have relaxed these measures affect both the public health of COVID-19 and the social and economic impacts of different policies (Wells et al. 2020). In this regard, a rigorous analysis reported recently by Vokó and Pitter (Voko and Pitter 2020) based on data from 28 European Union member states and the European Free Trade Association countries found an association between the degree of “flattening” of the epidemic curve and the social distance index (where a higher score indica
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