The effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 cases, deaths and demand for hospital services in the UK: a modelling study

Nicholas G Davies; Adam J Kucharski; Rosalind M Eggo; Amy Gimma; W. John Edmunds

Non-pharmaceutical interventions against previous epidemics-particularly school closures in response to pandemic influenza or SARS-have typically been put in place for periods of one week to three months [18] . Accordingly, we first evaluated a number of scenarios under which non-pharmaceutical interventions would be deployed for 12 weeks. The interventions we analysed were school closures; social distancing; shielding of the elderly; self-isolation of symptomatic individuals; and combinations of these policies ( Table 2 ). These mitigation measures decreased the total number of cases by 70-75% and delayed the peak of the epidemic by 3-8 weeks on average ( Fig. 2a, b ). While social distancing was predicted to have the greatest impact on the total number of cases, elderly shielding was predicted to have the greatest impact on the number of deaths ( Table 4 ). 8 . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.