ShutdownsShutdowns Through Early April Prevented about 60 Million U.S. Coronavirus Infections, Study Says

Published 9 June 2020

If large-scale shutdown policies — such as ordering people to stay home and closing schools — were not implemented after the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States, there would be roughly 60 million more coronavirus infections across the nation, a new modeling study suggests. Jacqueline Howard writes for CNNthat the study, published Monday in the scientific journal Nature, involved a modeling technique typically used for estimating economic growth to measure the effect of shutdown policies across six countries: China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France and the United States. Overall, the study suggests that emergency Covid-19 policies prevented more than 500 million total coronavirus infections across all six countries.