Chasing the ghost of infection past: identifying thresholds of change during the COVID-19 infection in Spain

Luis Santamaria; Joaquin Hortal

The results also indicate, however, that these measures were not enough to contain the spread of the virus -and the issuing of the first soft social-distancing measures by the regional governments had little impact upon it. The next breaking point, resulting in the strongest reduction if the growth rate of the number of cases, took place closely after the onset of the stronger measures of national lockdown and border closure. As in the previous phase, the population's response was swift and started already with the partial confinement measures, one week before (e.g. Google 2020) -surpassing broadly the expectations of 69 experts who predicted a collapse of the health system on March 25 (Catanzaro 2020; Arenas et al. 2020; Mitjà et al. 2020) . These stronger isolation policies were probably instrumental in flattening the curve of infections, though not sufficient to date to bring it to a complete halt. Unfortunately, the data available to date does not allow assessing the effect of the further strengthening of the lockdown (i.e. closure of non-essential economic activities) enforced on 30-31 March, as compared with the previous measures.