ABSTRACT
This chapter turns attention towards the mitigating steps taken by governments around the world to bring the pandemic under control by implementing a range of non-pharmaceutical measures. These included personal and environmental hygiene measures, social or physical distancing protocols, quarantining of known cases, stay at home orders and workplace closures, school closures, border closures and travel restrictions. Evidence is reviewed for the specific impacts of these measures. While many were found to have had a positive impact on the control of rates of infection, it is important to have multivariate comparisons to establish the relative strength of impact of each intervention alongside the others, given that national “lockdowns” usually deployed many interventions simultaneously. What emerged was that, although many countries (around half) were well-prepared to handle the pandemic, many others (again around half) were not. These findings indicate that the need to take specific steps to combat new disease outbreaks like COVID-19 was not a global unknown. Some governments could therefore rightly be accused of negligent ignorance.
