Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy.
Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2023 Jul 19;13(1):11631. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-37751-4.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catastrophic event that has seriously endangered the world's population. Governments have largely been unprepared to deal with such an unprecedented calamity, partially due to the lack of sufficient or adequately fine-grained data necessary for forecasting the pandemic's evolution. To fill this gap, researchers worldwide have been collecting data about different aspects of COVID-19's evolution and government responses to them so as to provide the foundation for informative models and tools that can be used to mitigate the current pandemic and possibly prevent future ones. Indeed, since the early stages of the pandemic, a number of research initiatives were launched with this goal, including the PERISCOPE (Pan-European Response to the ImpactS of COVID-19 and future Pandemics and Epidemics) Project, funded by the European Commission. PERISCOPE aims to investigate the broad socio-economic and behavioral impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the goal of making Europe more resilient and prepared for future large-scale risks. The purpose of this study, carried out as part of the PERISCOPE project, is to provide a first European-level analysis of the effect of government policies on the spread of the virus. To do so, we assessed the relationship between a novel index, the Policy Intensity Index, and four epidemiological variables collected by the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and then applied a comprehensive Pan-European population model based on Multilevel Vector Autoregression. This model aims at identifying effects that are common to some European countries while treating country-specific policies as covariates, explaining the different evolution of the pandemic in nine selected countries due to data availability: Spain, France, Netherlands, Latvia, Slovenia, Greece, Ireland, Cyprus, Estonia. Results show that specific policies' effectiveness tend to vary consistently within the different countries, although in general policies related to Health Monitoring and Health Resources are the most effective for all countries.
COVID-19 大流行是一场灾难性事件，严重威胁着世界人口。各国政府在很大程度上对这种前所未有的灾难准备不足，部分原因是缺乏预测大流行演变所需的足够或足够精细的数据。为了填补这一空白，世界各地的研究人员一直在收集有关 COVID-19 演变及其政府应对措施的不同方面的数据，以为提供信息丰富的模型和工具奠定基础，从而减轻当前大流行并可能预防未来的大流行。事实上，自大流行早期以来，许多研究倡议就以这一目标启动，包括欧洲委员会资助的 PERISCOPE（泛欧应对 COVID-19 及其未来大流行和流行病的影响）项目。PERISCOPE 的目标是研究 COVID-19 大流行的广泛社会经济和行为影响，以使欧洲更具弹性并为未来的大规模风险做好准备。作为 PERISCOPE 项目的一部分进行的这项研究旨在提供对政府政策对病毒传播影响的首次欧洲层面分析。为此，我们评估了新的政策强度指数与欧洲疾病预防控制中心收集的四个流行病学变量之间的关系，然后应用了基于多层次向量自回归的综合泛欧人口模型。该模型旨在确定一些欧洲国家共有的影响，同时将国家特定政策作为协变量进行处理，解释由于数据可用性，九个选定国家中大流行的不同演变：西班牙、法国、荷兰、拉脱维亚、斯洛文尼亚、希腊、爱尔兰、塞浦路斯、爱沙尼亚。结果表明，尽管与卫生监测和卫生资源相关的政策对所有国家最有效，但特定政策的有效性往往在不同国家内一致变化。
