ArticleBMC medicine2025
Evaluating the COVID-19 responses of Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, February-June 2020: a counterfactual modeling study.
Article in BMC medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Contextualizing life expectancy losses during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil-authors' reply.Lancet regional health. Americas · 2026Article
- Estimating the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 transmission in the Netherlands.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundDifferences in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic among Northwestern European countries have generated extensive discussion. We explore how the impact of the first pandemic wave might have differed, had Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK adopted responses as implemented in the other countries, or had it delayed its own response.
methodsThe time-varying reproduction number R
resultsThe cumulative number of COVID-19 deaths for any of the six countries would have differed substantially, had the response of another country been adopted on the respective calendar date. The order, from the lowest to the highest expected mortality rate, was obtained with the responses of the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, the UK, Germany, and Sweden, with a seven- to 12-fold difference between the lowest and highest outcome. Delaying its response by 3 days resulted in approximately doubling the cumulative COVID-19 mortality rate.
conclusionsDuring the fast-growing first COVID-19 wave, small differences in initial epidemiological situations between countries, together with small differences in the timing and effectiveness of adopting COVID-19 response from neighboring countries, result in large variations in mortality rates.
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