Effect of mitigation measures on the spreading of COVID-19 in hard-hit states in the U.S

PLoS One. 2020 Nov 3;15(11):e0240877. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0240877. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

State government-mandated social distancing measures have helped to slow the growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Many of the current predictive models of the development of COVID-19, especially after mitigation efforts, partially rely on extrapolations from data collected in other countries. Since most states enacted stay-at-home orders towards the end of March, the resulting effects of social distancing should be reflected in the death and infection counts by the end of April. Using the data available through April 25th, we investigate the change in the infection rate due to the mitigation efforts and project death and infection counts through September 2020 for some of the most heavily impacted states: New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Louisiana. We find that with the current mitigation efforts, five of those six states have reduced their base reproduction number to a value less than one, stopping the exponential growth of the pandemic. We also project different scenarios after the mitigation is relaxed.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Basic Reproduction Number / prevention & control
  • Betacoronavirus / pathogenicity
  • COVID-19
  • Coronavirus Infections / epidemiology*
  • Coronavirus Infections / transmission*
  • Humans
  • Pandemics*
  • Pneumonia, Viral / epidemiology*
  • Pneumonia, Viral / transmission*
  • Psychological Distance
  • SARS-CoV-2
  • United States / epidemiology

Grants and funding

This work is funded by the National Science Foundation EPSCoR CIMM project under award OIA-1541079. This work used the high performance computational resources provided by the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative and HPC@LSU computing. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.