• Scand J Public Health · Feb 2021

    Lockdowns and the COVID-19 pandemic: What is the endgame?

    • Theodore Lytras and Sotirios Tsiodras.
    • National Public Health Organisation, Greece.
    • Scand J Public Health. 2021 Feb 1; 49 (1): 37-40.

    AbstractAn overall long-term strategy for managing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is presented. This strategy will need to be maintained until herd immunity is achieved, hopefully through vaccination rather than natural infection. We suggest that a pure test-trace-isolate strategy is likely not practicable in most countries, and a degree of social distancing, ranging up to full lockdown, is the main public-health tool to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Guided by reliable surveillance data, distancing should be continuously optimised down to the lowest sustainable level that guarantees a low and stable infection rate in order to balance its wide-ranging negative effects on public health. The qualitative mixture of social-distancing measures also needs to be carefully optimised in order to minimise social costs.

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