Interesting article with stats based on how different countries attacked the problem (total lockdown; partial lockdown, late installed lockdowns, no lockdowns). Their conclusion is that it didn't matter at all. Just an interesting read and an excerpt to the article
Thanks for posting this Tom.
Analysis
Given the data, it is imperative to elaborate on what caused the decline in the number of new infections.
Some may claim that the decline in the number of additional patients every day is a result of the tight lockdown imposed by the government and health authorities. Examining the data of different countries around the world casts a heavy question mark on the above statement.
It turns out that a similar pattern – rapid increase in infections that reaches a peak in the sixth week and declines from the eighth week – is common to all countries in which the disease was discovered, regardless of their response policies: some imposed a severe and immediate lockdown that included not only “social distancing” and banning crowding, but also
shutout of economy (like Israel); some “ignored” the infection and continued almost a normal life (such as Taiwan, Korea or Sweden), and some initially adopted a lenient policy but soon reversed to a complete lockdown (such as Italy or the State of New York). Nonetheless, the data
shows similar time constants amongst all these countries in regard to the initial rapid growth and the decline of the disease.
For example, our calculations show that the pattern of the daily new infections as a percentage of accumulated number of infections (weekly averaged), is common to every country around the globe. Typically, in the first phase of the spread, this percentage amounted around 30%, decreased to a level of less than 10% after 6 weeks, and ultimately reached a level of less than 5% a week later.
