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Rapid response to:

Analysis

Elimination could be the optimal response strategy for covid-19 and other emerging pandemic diseases

BMJ 2020; 371 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m4907 (Published 22 December 2020) Cite this as: BMJ 2020;371:m4907

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Rapid Response:

More Evidence that Elimination is the Best COVID-19 Control Strategy for Health and the Economy

Dear Editor

Of relevance to this topic is a new Report from a European think tank that aimed to identify an optimal COVID-19 response strategy (https://www.institutmolinari.org/2021/04/03/the-zero-covid-strategy-prot...). It considers more recent mortality data, GDP impacts, and mobility data, and suggests that COVID-19 elimination appears to be superior to mitigation/suppression strategies in health and economic terms.

This Report is a useful contribution to the knowledge-base, but it also has a number of limitations as we discussed in a scholarly blog (https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/pubhealthexpert/more-evidence-that-elimination...). Indeed, more data and a longer-term perspective are needed, before we can be really certain about the relative benefits and costs of different COVID-19 control strategies.

Competing interests: No competing interests

12 April 2021
Nick Wilson
Professor of Public Health
University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand