“Abstract
A recent mathematical model has suggested that staying at home did not play a dominant role in reducing COVID-19 transmission. The second wave of cases in Europe, in regions that were considered as COVID-19 controlled, may raise some concerns. Our objective was to assess the association between staying at home (%) and the reduction/increase in the number of deaths due to COVID-19 in several regions in the world. In this ecological study, data from www.google.com/covid19/mobility/, ourworldindata.org and covid.saude.gov.br were combined... After preprocessing the data, 87 regions around the world were included, yielding 3741 pairwise comparisons for linear regression analysis. Only 63 (1.6%) comparisons were significant. With our results, we were not able to explain if COVID-19 mortality is reduced by staying at home in ~98% of the comparisons after epidemiological weeks 9 to 34...
Discussion
We were not able to explain the variation of deaths/million in different regions in the world by social isolation, herein analyzed as differences in staying at home, compared to baseline… These findings are in accordance with those found by Klein et al… Likewise, Chaudry et al. made a country-level exploratory analysis, using a variety of socioeconomic and health-related characteristics, similar to what we have done here, and reported that full lockdowns and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people.”
This article was retracted on December 14, 2021. (source)
"R.S. Savaris, G. Pumi, J. Dalzochio and R. Kunst do not agree with this retraction."
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