It’s really hard to determine which policies control COVID efficiently

Enlarge / In response to a surge in cases, Germany ordered restaurants to switch to delivery/takeout only. (credit: Picture Alliance/Getty Images)

Nobody wants to go back under heavy social restrictions. But the surging case numbers are causing many countries to put in place targeted lockdowns and other limits to try to get the pandemic back under control-a move that has sparked a backlash in a lot of places. So, it seems like it's worth asking what the optimal combination of restrictions might be. How do you get the most pandemic control for the least restrictive social environment?

That's precisely what an international team of researchers attempted to find out, as described in a paper published today. And, while the researchers come up with some potential answers, their paper ends up with an additional message: this is a really hard question to answer. So, to an extent, many countries are going to have to act with imperfect information and hope for the best.

How do you answer that?

In an ideal world, we'd have some sense of the impact of each possible social restriction: closing restaurants, starting contact tracing, shutting schools, and so on. Given that information, we could look at the rate of infections and the virus's trajectory, then figure out the smallest possible set of restriction that could cause the infection rate to drop. But the real world is very far from this idealized situation at the moment, which is what motivated the researchers to try to provide a bit more certainty regarding the effectiveness of different restrictions.

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