ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - A study says the decisions at the beginning of the pandemic by local leaders to institute mask mandates, close bars and restaurants, and ban large gatherings "likely saved thousands of lives" in the St. Louis region. It says if they had waited just two weeks later, the city and county would have seen nearly seven times the number of COVID-related deaths.
The new research led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis looked at spread of COVID-19 and public health orders back in March 2020.
“We heard a lot about the dire situations in cities such as New York and Boston in the early part of the pandemic, where thousands of people died and hospitals were completely overwhelmed, but whether a similar situation would have happened in St. Louis is not obvious,” said lead author Elvin H. Geng, MD, a professor of medicine. “Some may argue that because the same thing didn’t happen here, it could never have happened here and that, therefore, early social-distancing policies were an overreaction. But our data suggest that a large number of deaths due to the pandemic was indeed possible in St. Louis, and therefore, the early implementation of public health orders helped prevent the number of deaths that cities such as New York and other places experienced.”
On March 7, the first COVID-19 case in the state of Missouri was reported of a St. Louis County resident. By March 13, the city and county had banned large gatherings. Four days later, they closed bars and restaurants, and the next day, March 18, they ordered all public schools to close their doors. On March 23, the city and county issued shelter-in-place orders.
With these public health measures, area hospitals experienced a total of 2,246 COVID-19 hospitalizations and 482 deaths attributed to COVID-19 by June 15, 2020.
Had the orders been delayed two weeks, the researchers’ modeling indicates that the city and county likely would have seen 3,292 deaths and 19,600 hospitalizations by June 15.
The study also says that citizens simply staying home even before the shelter-in-place orders were put into action slowed the spread of the virus.
The researchers estimated that before March 15, each person in the city or county with COVID-19 infected almost four other people, on average. For a pandemic to be curbed, each person must infect fewer than one other person, on average. For St. Louis and St. Louis County, the model estimated that the average number of people each person with COVID-19 infected dropped from almost four to 0.93 after the stay-at-home policies went into effect.
You can see the full study, here.
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