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National lockdowns in England: The same restrictions for all, but do the impacts on COVID-19 mortality risks vary geographically?
Quantifying the impact of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality risks is an important priority in the public health fight against the virus, but almost all of the existing research has only conducted macro country-wide assessments or limited multi-country comparisons. In contrast, the extent of within-cou...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9719849/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36707192 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sste.2022.100559 |
Sumario: | Quantifying the impact of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality risks is an important priority in the public health fight against the virus, but almost all of the existing research has only conducted macro country-wide assessments or limited multi-country comparisons. In contrast, the extent of within-country variation in the impacts of a nation-wide lockdown is yet to be thoroughly investigated, which is the gap in the knowledge base that this paper fills. Our study focuses on England, which was subject to 3 national lockdowns between March 2020 and March 2021. We model weekly COVID-19 mortality counts for the 312 Local Authority Districts in mainland England, and our aim is to understand the impact that lockdowns had at both a national and a regional level. Specifically, we aim to quantify how long after the implementation of a lockdown do mortality risks reduce at a national level, the extent to which these impacts vary regionally within a country, and which parts of England exhibit similar impacts. As the spatially aggregated weekly COVID-19 mortality counts are small in size we estimate the spatio-temporal trends in mortality risks with a Poisson log-linear smoothing model that borrows strength in the estimation between neighbouring data points. Inference is based in a Bayesian paradigm, using Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation. Our main findings are that mortality risks typically begin to reduce between 3 and 4 weeks after lockdown, and that there appears to be an urban–rural divide in lockdown impacts. |
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