WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - According to researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of California Los Angeles, social distancing along with vaccines saved the lives of 800,000 Americans during Covid-19.
The researchers looked into federal data to check the number of people who took vaccines between February 2020 and February 2024 and compared it with mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The numbers were compared to see if social distancing and vaccines played any part in preventing deaths from coronavirus.
The paper, published in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, found that around 68 percent of Americans were already vaccinated before they contracted the Covid-19 virus. Meanwhile, behavioral changes played a vital role in saving 60,000 lives every day.
'Without vaccines, behavior alone would have postponed infections, but in the end, nearly everyone would have been infected and subject to a high infection fatality rate from that first infection,' the researchers noted. 'Without a behavioral response, vaccines would have come too late to save lives.'
The findings further revealed that 1.98 million people would have died if they had not taken the vaccine or changed their behavior during the pandemic.
'Our work shows that behavior change can be a powerful force for slowing the spread of a dangerous and infectious respiratory disease for a long time,' study co-author Stephen Kissler, an assistant professor of computer science at CU Boulder, said.
Speaking about the past, the study's other co-authors, Andrew Atkeson and Kissler expressed their surprise about how Americans collectively maintained social distancing. However, they are worried whether this type of behavior change will happen again during the next pandemic.
'My concern is that the next pandemic will be deadlier, but people will ignore it because they will say, 'Oh, we overdid it during COVID,' said Atkeson, a professor of economics at UCLA.
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