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Chasing the ghost of infection past: identifying thresholds of change during the COVID-19 infection in Spain
One of the largest nationwide bursts of the first COVID-19 outbreak occurred in Spain, where infection expanded in densely populated areas through March 2020. We analyse the cumulative growth curves of reported cases and deaths in all Spain and two highly populated regions, Madrid and Catalonia, ide...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Cambridge University Press
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7729171/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33183397 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0950268820002782 |
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author | Santamaría, Luis Hortal, Joaquín |
author_facet | Santamaría, Luis Hortal, Joaquín |
author_sort | Santamaría, Luis |
collection | PubMed |
description | One of the largest nationwide bursts of the first COVID-19 outbreak occurred in Spain, where infection expanded in densely populated areas through March 2020. We analyse the cumulative growth curves of reported cases and deaths in all Spain and two highly populated regions, Madrid and Catalonia, identifying changes and sudden shifts in their exponential growth rate through segmented Poisson regressions. We associate these breakpoints with a timeline of key events and containment measures, and data on policy stringency and citizen mobility. Results were largely consistent for infections and deaths in all territories, showing four major shifts involving 19–71% reductions in growth rates originating from infections before 3 March and on 5–8, 10–12 and 14–18 March, but no identifiable effect of the strengthened lockdown of 29–30 March. Changes in stringency and mobility were only associated to the latter two shifts, evidencing an early deceleration in COVID-19 spread associated to personal hygiene and social distancing recommendations, followed by a stronger decrease when lockdown was enforced, leading to the contention of the outbreak by mid-April. This highlights the importance of combining public health communication strategies and hard confinement measures to contain epidemics. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7729171 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Cambridge University Press |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-77291712020-12-11 Chasing the ghost of infection past: identifying thresholds of change during the COVID-19 infection in Spain Santamaría, Luis Hortal, Joaquín Epidemiol Infect Original Paper One of the largest nationwide bursts of the first COVID-19 outbreak occurred in Spain, where infection expanded in densely populated areas through March 2020. We analyse the cumulative growth curves of reported cases and deaths in all Spain and two highly populated regions, Madrid and Catalonia, identifying changes and sudden shifts in their exponential growth rate through segmented Poisson regressions. We associate these breakpoints with a timeline of key events and containment measures, and data on policy stringency and citizen mobility. Results were largely consistent for infections and deaths in all territories, showing four major shifts involving 19–71% reductions in growth rates originating from infections before 3 March and on 5–8, 10–12 and 14–18 March, but no identifiable effect of the strengthened lockdown of 29–30 March. Changes in stringency and mobility were only associated to the latter two shifts, evidencing an early deceleration in COVID-19 spread associated to personal hygiene and social distancing recommendations, followed by a stronger decrease when lockdown was enforced, leading to the contention of the outbreak by mid-April. This highlights the importance of combining public health communication strategies and hard confinement measures to contain epidemics. Cambridge University Press 2020-11-13 /pmc/articles/PMC7729171/ /pubmed/33183397 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0950268820002782 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Original Paper Santamaría, Luis Hortal, Joaquín Chasing the ghost of infection past: identifying thresholds of change during the COVID-19 infection in Spain |
title | Chasing the ghost of infection past: identifying thresholds of change during the COVID-19 infection in Spain |
title_full | Chasing the ghost of infection past: identifying thresholds of change during the COVID-19 infection in Spain |
title_fullStr | Chasing the ghost of infection past: identifying thresholds of change during the COVID-19 infection in Spain |
title_full_unstemmed | Chasing the ghost of infection past: identifying thresholds of change during the COVID-19 infection in Spain |
title_short | Chasing the ghost of infection past: identifying thresholds of change during the COVID-19 infection in Spain |
title_sort | chasing the ghost of infection past: identifying thresholds of change during the covid-19 infection in spain |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7729171/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33183397 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0950268820002782 |
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