Facemask and social distancing, pillars of opening up economies

Ali Najmi, Sahar Nazari, Farshid Safarighouzhdi, C Raina MacIntyre, Eric J Miller and Taha H. Rashidi

PLOS ONE, 2021, vol. 16, issue 4, 1-13

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe health and economic impacts globally. Strategies to safely reopen economies, travel and trade are a high priority. Until a reliable vaccine is available, non-pharmaceutical techniques are the only available means of disease control. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the extent to which social distancing (SD) and facemask (FM) use can mitigate the transmission of COVID-19 when restrictions are lifted. We used a microsimulation activity-based model for Sydney Greater Metropolitan Area, to evaluate the power of SD and FM in controlling the pandemic under numerous scenarios. The hypothetical scenarios are designed to picture feasible futures under different assumptions. Assuming that the isolation of infected cases and the quarantining of close contacts are in place, different numerical tests are conducted and a full factorial two-way MANOVA test is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the FM and SD control strategies. The main and interactive effects of the containment strategies are evaluated by the total number of infections, percentage of infections reduction, the time it takes to get the pandemic under control, and the intensity of active cases.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249677 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 49677&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0249677

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249677

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().