ArticleBMC public health2021
COVID-19 pandemic spread against countries' non-pharmaceutical interventions responses: a data-mining driven comparative study.
Article in BMC public health, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- Machine Learning Used in Communicable Disease Control: A Scoping Review.Public health reviews · 2026Pooled it
- Article
- Assessment of the efficiency and effectiveness of health care systems in European Union countries before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 incidence and deaths: cross-national natural experiment in 32 European countries.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Knowledge, attitudes, practices, and perception of COVID-19 preventive measures among adult residents of Matadi (Democratic Republic of the Congo) after the third epidemic wave.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Identification of an Optimal COVID-19 Booster Allocation Strategy to Minimize Hospital Bed-Days with a Fixed Healthcare Budget.Vaccines · 2023Article
- A machine learning algorithm to analyse the effects of vaccination on COVID-19 mortality.Epidemiology and infection · 2022Article
- Impact of layered non-pharmacological interventions on COVID-19 transmission dynamics in Yucatan, Mexico.Preventive medicine reports · 2022Article
- The COVID-19 pandemic in the African continent.BMC medicine · 2022Article
- The Impact of COVID-19 on Mortality in Italy: Retrospective Analysis of Epidemiological Trends.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2022Article
- Use of COVID-19 Test Positivity Rate, Epidemiological, and Clinical Tools for Guiding Targeted Public Health Interventions.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
- The impact of declaring the state of emergency on human mobility during COVID-19 pandemic in Japan.Clinical epidemiology and global healthArticle
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe first half of 2020 has been marked as the era of COVID-19 pandemic which affected the world globally in almost every aspect of the daily life from societal to economical. To prevent the spread of COVID-19, countries have implemented diverse policies regarding Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention (NPI) measures. This is because in the first stage countries had limited knowledge about the virus and its contagiousness. Also, there was no effective medication or vaccines. This paper studies the effectiveness of the implemented policies and measures against the deaths attributed to the virus between January and May 2020.
methodsData from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control regarding the identified cases and deaths of COVID-19 from 48 countries have been used. Additionally, data concerning the NPI measures related policies implemented by the 48 countries and the capacity of their health care systems was collected manually from their national gazettes and official institutes. Data mining, time series analysis, pattern detection, machine learning, clustering methods and visual analytics techniques have been applied to analyze the collected data and discover possible relationships between the implemented NPIs and COVID-19 spread and mortality. Further, we recorded and analyzed the responses of the countries against COVID-19 pandemic, mainly in urban areas which are over-populated and accordingly COVID-19 has the potential to spread easier among humans.
resultsThe data mining and clustering analysis of the collected data showed that the implementation of the NPI measures before the first death case seems to be very effective in controlling the spread of the disease. In other words, delaying the implementation of the NPI measures to after the first death case has practically little effect on limiting the spread of the disease. The success of implementing the NPI measures further depends on the way each government monitored their application. Countries with stricter policing of the measures seems to be more effective in controlling the transmission of the disease.
conclusionsThe conducted comparative data mining study provides insights regarding the correlation between the early implementation of the NPI measures and controlling COVID-19 contagiousness and mortality. We reported a number of useful observations that could be very helpful to the decision makers or epidemiologists regarding the rapid implementation and monitoring of the NPI measures in case of a future wave of COVID-19 or to deal with other unknown infectious pandemics. Regardless, after the first wave of COVID-19, most countries have decided to lift the restrictions and return to normal. This has resulted in a severe second wave in some countries, a situation which requires re-evaluating the whole process and inspiring lessons for the future.
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