Non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic: a rapid review

Abstract

Infectious diseases and human behavior are intertwined. On one side, our movements and interactions are the engines of transmission. On the other, the unfolding of viruses might induce changes to our daily activities. While intuitive, our understanding of such feedback loop is still limited. Before COVID-19 the literature on the subject was mainly theoretical and largely missed validation. The main issue was the lack of empirical data capturing behavioral change induced by diseases. Things have dramatically changed in 2020. Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have been the key weapon against the SARS-CoV-2 virus and affected virtually any societal process. Travels bans, events cancellation, social distancing, curfews, and lockdowns have become unfortunately very familiar. The scale of the emergency, the ease of survey as well as crowdsourcing deployment guaranteed by the latest technology, several Data for Good programs developed by tech giants, major mobile phone providers, and other companies have allowed unprecedented access to data describing behavioral changes induced by the pandemic. Here, I aim to review some of the vast literature written on the subject of NPIs during the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, I analyze 347 articles written by more than 2518 of authors in the last $12$ months. While the large majority of the sample was obtained by querying PubMed, it includes also a hand-curated list. Considering the focus, and methodology I have classified the sample into seven main categories: epidemic models, surveys, comments/perspectives, papers aiming to quantify the effects of NPIs, reviews, articles using data proxies to measure NPIs, and publicly available datasets describing NPIs. I summarize the methodology, data used, findings of the articles in each category and provide an outlook highlighting future challenges as well as opportunities

References in corpus (5)

• COVID-ABS: An Agent-Based Model of COVID-19 Epidemic to Simulate Health and Economic Effects of Social Distancing Interventions
• Seasonal transmission potential and activity peaks of the new influenza A(H1N1): a Monte Carlo likelihood analysis based on human mobility
• Towards a characterization of behavior-disease models
• Key Questions for Modelling COVID-19 Exit Strategies
• Lessons from being challenged by COVID-19

Cited by in corpus (27)

• Social physics
• Game-theoretic modeling of collective decision-making during epidemics
• Adaptive and optimized COVID-19 vaccination strategies across geographical regions and age groups
• Simplicially driven simple contagion
• Evaluating the Impact of State-Level Public Masking Mandates on New COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in the United States: A Demonstration of the Causal Roadmap
• Self-initiated behavioural change and disease resurgence on activity-driven networks
• Epidemic Spreading and Digital Contact Tracing: Effects of Heterogeneous Mixing and Quarantine Failures
• Highly coordinated nationwide massive travel restrictions are central to effective mitigation and control of COVID-19 outbreaks in China
• A computational framework for modelling infectious disease policy based on age and household structure with applications to the COVID-19 pandemic
• Statistical modelling of COVID-19 data: Putting Generalised Additive Models to work
• Dynamics-informed deconvolutional neural networks for super-resolution identification of regime changes in epidemiological time series
• Collapse transition in epidemic spreading subject to detection with limited resources
• Exploring the foundation of social diversity and coherence with a novel attraction-repulsion model framework
• Endemic infectious states below the epidemic threshold and beyond herd immunity
• Coupled dynamics of endemic disease transmission and gradual awareness diffusion in multiplex networks
• Temporal clustering of social interactions trades-off disease spreading and knowledge diffusion
• Effectiveness of probabilistic contact tracing in epidemic containment: the role of super-spreaders and transmission path reconstruction
• Modeling the interplay between epidemics and regional socio-economics
• A high-frequency mobility big-data reveals how COVID-19 spread across professions, locations and age groups
• Strength and weakness of disease-induced herd immunity in networks
• When to Boost: How Dose Timing Determines the Epidemic Threshold
• SIR model with social gatherings
• Eco-evolutionary constraints for the endemicity of rapidly evolving viruses
• Modelling SARS-CoV-2 epidemics via compartmental and cellular automaton SEIRS model with temporal immunity and vaccination
• Multiplex mobility network and metapopulation epidemic simulations of Italy based on Open Data
• The advantage of self-protecting interventions in mitigating epidemic circulation at the community level
• Predicting the effects of waning vaccine immunity against COVID-19 through high-resolution agent-based modeling