U.S. Shut Down Came At Hefty Cost But Has Saved Lives

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Public Health Policies Have Prevented Hundreds of Millions of Coronavirus Infections

NIH Director’s Blog

The alarming spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) last winter presented a profound threat to nations around the world. Many government leaders responded by shutting down all non-essential activities, implementing policies that public health officials were hopeful could slow the highly infectious SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

But the shutdown has come at a heavy cost for the U.S. and global economies. It’s also taken a heavy personal toll on many of us, disrupting our daily routines—getting children off to school, commuting to the office or lab, getting together with friends and family, meeting face to face to plan projects, eating out, going to the gym—and causing lots of uncertainty and frustration.



As difficult as the shutdowns have been, new research shows that without these public health measures, things would have been much, much worse. According to a study published recently in Nature [1], the implementation of containment and mitigation strategies across the globe prevented or delayed about 530 million coronavirus infections across six countries—China, South Korea, Iran, Italy, France, and the United States. Take a moment to absorb that number—530 million. Right now, there are 8.8 million cases documented across the globe.

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