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Coronavirus US
ChinaPeople & Culture

Flattening the curve won’t lead to coronavirus turning point, study finds

  • Projections by Chinese-US team indicate South Korea and New Zealand are among the best in the global crisis at balancing economics with disease controls
  • China has been effective in suppressing the epidemic quickly but the strategy comes at too high a cost, researchers say

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China’s containment efforts were effective but came at too high an economic cost, a study has found. Photo: AP
Stephen Chen
Attempts by authorities around the world to “flatten the curve” could be the worst way to fight the pandemic coronavirus, according to new projections by an international team of researchers.

The approach, which has been adopted by many countries in the hope that warmer weather and a future vaccine will help rein in the virus, could destroy economies while having little effect on cutting infections, the researchers led by Peking University Professor Liu Yu said.

“The turning point will never come, the peak value of case numbers will remain the same as if there are no such measures,” the team, which included scientists from Harvard University in the United States, said in a non-peer-reviewed paper released on preprint platform arXiv.org last week.

“We strongly suggest they reconsider [the approach].”

“Flattening the curve” involves using a range of pandemic-response measures, including shutting public venues, closing non-essential business and issuing stay-at-home orders, to stabilise the number of new infections and deaths so hospitals can cope with patients. The idea is not to eliminate new infections but to avoid a spike in new cases so that the health system is not overwhelmed. When the number of daily new cases and deaths plateaus, the curve is said to have flattened.

In their study, the researchers looked at daily infections, geographical spread of disease, economic output and public transport to assess the effectiveness of various containment policies, particularly the trade-off between epidemic control and economic development.

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