2020/06/16 by Serena Bradde, Bradde, Serena, Benedetta Cerruti +3
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Mathematics · #Agricultural risk and resilience #COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts #COVID-19 epidemiological studies #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2006.09829
openalex publication_date 2020/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We show that the dynamics of the number of deaths due to Covid in different countries is to a large extent universal once the origin of time is chosen to be the start of the lockdown, and the number of death is rescaled by the total number of deaths after the lockdown, itself a proxy of the number of infections at the start of the lockdown. Such a curve collapse is much less convincing when normalizing by the total population. Sweden, with its no-lockdown, light-touch approach, is the only outlier that deviates considerably from the average behavior. We argue that these model-free findings provide strong support for the effectiveness of the lockdowns in mitigating the lethality of the virus.