Coronavirus: China got it right by locking down Wuhan, German study says
- In the weeks after the city closed its borders on January 23, ‘the number of [Covid-19] cases grew steadily slower and then flattened out’, Berlin researchers say
- Similar restrictions had shown to be effective in other countries, like Italy, but behavioural changes were still needed elsewhere in the world, they say
According to the research by academics from the Humboldt University of Berlin, the number of confirmed infections grew rapidly in China in the final two weeks of January but then slowed in early February. The city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first identified was placed under total lockdown on January 23.
Physicist Dirk Brockmann and doctoral student Benjamin Maier developed a diffusion model to look at the effects of social distancing and other containment measures. Their findings were published last week in the online edition of journal Science.
Brockmann said that when an infectious disease spread unhindered, an “exponential growth in case numbers can generally be expected”.
“For example, one infected person infects three people, these three people in turn infect three people each – and after a very short time, there are many people who have become ill,” he said.
But that growth pattern was not seen in China after the lockdowns in Wuhan and other cities across Hubei province, where the peak in infections was reached on February 7, the study said.