This corona measure is the most effective of all

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New study
This corona measure is the most effective of all

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Which measure will help most in fighting the pandemic? Researchers have evaluated the various rules.

School and restaurant closings, curfews and contact restrictions, mouth and nose protection and disinfectants – a lot is tried out to contain the corona pandemic.

So far, unfortunately, with moderate success. The numbers are increasing, and it is still partly unclear where exactly people are infected and which measures are effective. In more and more “model regions” such as Tübingen, the aim is to find out whether or not it is safe to relax with intensive testing. Nobody knows at the moment whether this will work out.

So the news comes at the right time that scientists from Oxford University, together with other European researchers, have found out which measures are most effective in slowing the spread of the virus. As reported by stern.de, citing the dpa, in 114 regions of Europe they examined which measures are most effective in reducing the R-value – this “reproduction number” indicates how many people an infected person infects. If the value is above 1, the number of new infections increases, so the disease continues to spread. If it is less than 1, there will be fewer and fewer new infections until the pandemic finally ends.

These corona measures are the most effective

  1. Contact bans are most effective. The following applies: the stricter they are designed, the more effective they are. Limiting meetings to a maximum of two people therefore has the greatest effect and reduces the R-value by around 26 percent. With less strict contact restrictions, the effect quickly diminishes.
  2. Night curfews are also quite effective, according to the researchers. You can lower the R-value by around 13 percent.
  3. The Closure of the gastronomy is in a similar range with a twelve percent reduction.

In order to be able to calculate these values, the scientists analyzed both the number of corona cases and the measures imposed from August 2020 to January 2021 in several European countries and broken them down into the individual measures. During this period, however, the highly infectious British variant B.1.1.7 was not yet the predominant virus variant. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a specialist journal.

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