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Excerpts:
Credit: Washington University in St. Louis
by Brandie Jefferson, Washington University in St. Louis
COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-Cov-2 virus, was officially declared a pandemic on March 11 by the World Health Organization. Nearly two months later, many municipalities and states around the country have decided to relax some of the limitations put in place to prevent the disease from spreading at a pace that threatened to overwhelm the health care system.
New interdisciplinary research from Washington University in St. Louis—carried out by an electrical and systems engineer and a biomedical engineer from the McKelvey School of Engineering and a health care economist from the Olin Business School—outlines the effects on the economy and health outcomes of three distinct quarantine scenarios.
Their model indicates that, of the scenarios they consider, keeping a strict self-quarantine policy for seniors until the number of new infections is drastically reduced, while gradually loosening the policy for the rest of the population, will lead to the best economic and health outcomes.
One key result is the model’s prediction of the way in which different scenarios affect the number of people hospitalized. In two scenarios, the maximum number of simultaneous hospitalizations is about 189,000. In one, however, about 4.4 million people would need to be hospitalized at once.
Their work is published on MedRxiv and is currently under review.
In general, the team sought to answer the question: “What is the most effective way to handle a country-wide quarantine for 76 weeks?” by which time the model assumes a vaccine is available. “The goal is to quantify and mitigate the impact of the current pandemic,” according to Arye Nehorai, the Eugene and Martha Lohman Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering.
For more:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-economic-health-repercussions-quarantine-covid-.html
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