Why the study?
To assess the effectiveness of voluntary event cancellation and school closure implemented to control the COVID-19 outbreak in Japan based on predicted outcomes.
Does voluntary event cancellation and school closure reduce the reproduction number of COVID-19 in Japan?
Does voluntary event cancellation and school closure reduce the reproduction number of COVID-19 in Japan?
Voluntary event cancellation and school closure reduced the COVID-19 reproduction number to near 1.0, but it rebounded significantly after the measures ended.
BACKGROUND: To control the COVID-19 outbreak in Japan, sports and entertainment events were canceled and schools were closed throughout Japan from February 26 through March 19. That policy has been designated as voluntary event cancellation and school closure (VECSC). OBJECT: This study assesses VECSC effectiveness based on predicted outcomes. METHODS: A simple susceptible-infected-recovered model was applied to data of patients with symptoms in Japan during January 14 through March 26. The respective reproduction numbers for periods before VECSC (R0), during VECSC (Re), and after VECSC (Ra) were estimated. RESULTS: Results suggest R0 before VECSC as 2.534 [2.449, 2.598], Re during VECSC as 1.077 [0.948, 1.228], and Ra after VECSC as 4.455 [3.615, 5.255]. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Results demonstrated that VECSC can reduce COVID-19 infectiousness considerably, but after VECSC, the value of the reproduction number rose to exceed 4.0.
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Sugishita et al. (2020) studied this question.
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