Lockdown design: which features of lockdowns are most important to COVID-19 experts?

Countries around the world, including New Zealand, have used lockdowns to slow the transmission of COVID-19. Reducing transmission depends crucially on people's compliance with lockdowns, which depends on, among other things, their design. We report on a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) completed by 16 COVID-19 experts to discover how they feel about the relative importance (weight) of possible lockdown features in terms of how the features are experienced, independently of their effectiveness at controlling the pandemic. DCEs are widely used to understand people's preferences with respect to the relative importance of the features of, in the present context, lockdowns. The lockdown features, in decreasing order of importance as determined by the DCE in terms of their inconvenience or unpleasantness, are (mean weights in parentheses): 'travel restrictions' (24.6%), 'total cost of a vaccination (out-of-pocket or from taxes)' (22.1%), 'school closures' (19.4%), 'work from home' (17.9%), 'required to stay at home' (9.6%) and 'required to wear masks in public' (6.5%). These results could be used by policy-makers to design lockdowns that are both effective in public health terms most likely to be complied with. A larger-scale study involving the general population could be conducted in the future.