Maria Polyakova, an economist at Stanford University, studied the effects of the pandemic on the U.S. economy. “In general, she expects, the pandemic will slow down mechanically because it reduces the number of interactions between people,” she said.
“The compromise is that the reduction in economic activity particularly harms many workers and their families in the large service sector of the economy,” she added. Is the evening clock worth the price?
She has no reason to understand the logic. “Assuming nightclubs and the like are already closed anyway, it probably won’t diminish the interaction of banning people from walking in the block with their family at night,” said Dr. Polyakova said.
In addition, the virus thrives indoors, and clusters of infection are common in families and households. So one frightening question is whether people should force longer periods in these institutions – or whether it should be accelerated.
“You might think so,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. ‘How many transmission events occur during the period in question? And how will the evening clock stop them? ”
One study, recently published in Science, analyzed data from Hunan Province in China at the beginning of the outbreak. Eventually, the exclusion period and closure measures come to a paradoxical effect: these restrictions have reduced the spread in the community but increased the risk of infection in households, reports Kaiyuan Sun, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, and his colleagues.
Dr. Longini and his colleagues incorporated closures and evening clocks into the models of the pandemic in the United States and concluded that this could be an effective way to reduce transmission.