A new study reveals that roughly 60 million Americans were saved from novel coronavirus infections as a result of the shutdown orders implemented throughout the United States during the pandemic. That means about 18% of the country’s population avoided a coronavirus infection as a result, likely reducing the death toll by six or seven figures. 

The report, which was published in the journal Nature, modeled infection and disease spread using well-established public health models. Researchers determined that, without public health–informed shutdown measures, early infection rates increased by 43 percent per day on average both in the United States and in five other countries including China, France, Iran, Italy and South Korea. (The authors noted that the average fell to 38 percent when Iran, which had an unusually high growth rate, was omitted from the […]