Roughly 4,000 lives were saved and about 40,000 hospitalizations were avoided in the Charlotte area as a result of state-home orders, according to estimates from the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC).
Nationally, the coalition estimates stay-at-home actions prevented 2.1 million hospitalizations and saved 200,000 lives.
“Ordering people to shelter in their homes was unprecedented and difficult. Everyone’s collective action has dramatically slowed the spread of COVID-19,” said Dr. Sara Cody, health officer for the County of Santa Clara and chair of the Big Cities Health Coalition said in a news release. “These measures have prevented many infections, hospitalizations and deaths. It’s tempting to let up, but we need to massively scale up two essential guardrails–testing and contact tracing–to protect the progress we’ve made, as well as the most vulnerable among us.”
The coalition based the estimates on numbers calculated by the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health using a model published by The New York Times, according to a news release