The report, written by researchers at the Princeton Medical Center and other institutions, was posted on the health science manuscript-sharing site medRxiv on Wednesday and has yet to be peer-reviewed. The report notes that several US states started issuing stay-at-home orders (SAHO) in late March. Meanwhile, health officials began recommending the use of face masks in early April. However, had those measures been implemented earlier, the daily death toll would have been lower.
“The number of the proportion of US residents under SAHO increased between March 19 and April … the trend in COVID-19 daily caes reduced after March 23 and further reduced on April 3, which was associated with implementation of SAHO by 10 states on March 23, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation of face-masking, respectively. Similar turning points were identified in the trends of daily deaths with a lag time,” the report concluded.
The study found that the growth rate for infections and deaths started decreasing on March 23 and had plateaued by April 4. Had the face mask and lockdown measures been introduced just four days earlier than they were, the number of new daily infections in April would have decreased by around two-thirds to 10,000, with fewer than 1,000 daily deaths.
Furthermore, had the measures been implemented a week earlier than they were, the number of new daily infections in April would have decreased to 3,000, with about 300 deaths per day, the study said.
In addition, the study explained that lifting lockdown measures could increase the daily death toll to more than 3,000.
"These findings may inform policymaking," the researchers said, the South China Morning Post reported.
Last month, Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the top doctors assigned to the White House Coronavirus Task Force, also admitted that implementing lockdown measures would have painted a different story.
"Obviously, if we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different," he said in a television interview with CNN on April 12, the New York Post reported. "But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”
Currently, more than 1.3 million cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed in the US, and almost 78,000 people have died as a result.
