Effectiveness of Lockdown in Reducing the Spread of COVID-19

Abstract

At the end of 2019, a mysterious outbreak appeared, forming an atypical pneumonia suspected of originating
from an animal market in Wuhan China. The outbreak is a new type of coronavirus which is named as
COVID-19 disease (2019 – nCoV, Novel Coronavirus). COVID 19 disease is a viral infection caused by
SARS-CoV-2, namely the acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 which emerged in Wuhan, China.
Vaccines and antiviral drugs have not been found, meanwhile COVID-19 are prevented by using nonpharmacological
interventions, one of the actions taken by several countries is to create policy protocols
such as lockdowns.
The results of this study indicate that lockdown is effective in reducing the spread of COVID -19, it can be
seen from the significant decrease in R0 and Rt, <1 in several countries after lockdown such as UK 0.99
(0.96–1.02), Italy 0.89 (0.87–0.91), French 0.76 (0.72–0.82) and Spain 0.74 (0.71–0.78) which means that
someone who is infected cannot infect other people and the disease will die (disappear). The value of Rt also
shows a consistent decline Rt to <1 (0.88) after 2 weeks of lockdown in Italy.
The conclusion from this literature show that lockdowns can reduce the spread of COVID-19 which is
shown by the number of incidents before and after the lockdown which has decreased to zero cases in China.
The decline in cases also occurred in Europe although at the beginning of the lockdown it was not significant
but it was increasingly effective and continued to be significant after the lockdown was imposed.