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Comment on Flaxman et al. (2020): The illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe

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posted on 2020-06-17, 18:04 authored by Stefan Homburg, Christof KuhbandnerChristof Kuhbandner
Flaxman et al. (Nature, 8 June 2020, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2405-7, 2020) infer that non-pharmaceutical interventions conducted by several European countries considerably reduced effective reproduction numbers and saved millions of lives. We show that their method is ill-conceived and that the alleged effects are artefacts. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom?s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.

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Declaration of conflicts of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Corresponding author email

christof.kuhbandner@ur.de

Lead author country

  • Germany

Lead author job role

  • Independent researcher

Lead author institution

Leibniz University Hannover

Human Participants

  • No

Ethics statement

Only previously published and freely available data was used (see references).

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