About 83% of coronavirus deaths in the US could have been avoided if lockdowns were imposed on March 1, researchers estimate

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• About 83% of US coronavirus deaths could have been avoided if nationwide lockdowns were imposed just two weeks earlier, on March 1, researchers at Columbia University found. The research has yet to be peer-reviewed.
• If lockdowns were imposed on March 8 — a week earlier than when the Trump administration imposed federal social distancing guidelines — the disease modelers at the university estimated that 36,000 fewer people would have died from COVID-19.
• However, on March 9, President Donald Trump continued to downplay the severity of the virus and consistently touted his ban on travel from China, but the virus had already made landfall and began its undetected spread throughout the US.
• "It's a big, big difference," epidemiologist Jeffrey Shaman, who led the Columbia research team, told The Times. "That small moment in time, catching it in that growth phase, is incredibly critical in reducing the number of deaths."
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Researchers estimate that if nationwide lockdowns were imposed just two weeks earlier, on March 1, a vast majority of coronavirus deaths in the United States — about 83% — could have been avoided, The New York Times reported.

State-wide lockdowns were imposed in mid- to late-March as cases began to rise in the US. At the start of March, there were around 20 confirmed COVID-19 deaths.

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See Also:

• A Singapore court sentenced a man to death over Zoom, marking the city-state's first remote capital punishment during the coronavirus pandemic
• In Mexico City, doctors cited coronavirus as a 'possible or probable' cause of death on 4,577 death certificates — 3 times as many as the official death count of 1,332
• Sweden recorded the most coronavirus deaths in Europe per capita over the past week, according to Oxford data

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