Impact of Type and Timeliness of Public Health Policies on COVID-19 Epidemic Growth: Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) Member States, January – July 2020

Background: As of 21 September 2020, 31.1 million cases and more than 961.000 deaths from SARS-CoV-2 have been reported worldwide. In the absence of a treatment or vaccine and in the light of a possible second wave of infections, it is crucial to determine which policies are effective in controlling the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic. We estimated the effect of a comprehensive and systematic set of public health policies on the growth rate in the number of SARS-CoV-2 cases across the 37 member states of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for the period January 1 - July 1 2020.Methods: We conducted a longitudinal analysis using a multilevel growth model. The dependent variable was the average daily growth rate in weekly SARS-CoV-2 cases, the policy regressors were ordinal variables of the intensity of the following: school closing requirements, workplace closing requirements, public events cancelling requirements, restrictions on gatherings, public transport restrictions, stay at home requirements, restrictions on internal movement, international travel controls, public health information campaigns, mask wearing requirements, testing policy and contact tracing policy. We used both maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimation to fit the model.Findings: Restrictions on gatherings, mask wearing requirements, school closing requirements, work closing requirements and total number of tests per thousand population were, in that order, significant predictors of SARS-CoV-2 epidemic control.Interpretation: These findings provide evidence to support policy decision-making regarding which policies to maintain or (re-)initiate in order to control the current spread of the epidemic and any future surge of COVID-19.Funding Statement: None.Declaration of Interests: All of the co-authors of this paper declare that we have no competing interests.