The methodologies to assess the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions during COVID-19: a systematic review
Nicolas Banholzer (1*‡), Adrian Lison (2*‡), Dennis Özcelik (3), Tanja Stadler (2), Stefan Feuerriegel (1,4), and Werner Vach (5,6)
(1) ETH Zurich, Department of Management, Technology, and Economics, Zurich, Switzerland
(2) ETH Zurich, Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, Zurich, Switzerland
(3) ETH Zurich, Chemistry | Biology | Pharmacy Information Center, Zurich, Switzerland
(4) LMU Munich, LMU Munich School of Management, Munich, Germany
(5) Basel Academy for Quality and Research in Medicine, Basel, Switzerland
(6) University of Basel, Department of Environmental Sciences, Basel, Switzerland
(*) Corresponding authors: nbanholzer@ethz.ch, adrian.lison@bsse.ethz.ch
(‡) These authors contributed equally to this work.
Non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as school closures and stay-at-home orders, have been implemented around the world to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Their effects on health-related outcomes have been the subject of numerous empirical studies. However, these studies show fairly large variation among methodologies in use, reflecting the absence of an established methodological framework. On the one hand, variation in methodologies may be desirable to assess the robustness of results; on the other hand, a lack of common standards can impede comparability among studies. To establish a comprehensive overview over the methodologies in use, we conducted a systematic review of studies assessing the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on health-related outcomes between January 1, 2020 and January 12, 2021 (n=248). We identified substantial variation in methodologies with respect to study setting, outcome, intervention, methodological approach, and effect assessment. On this basis, we point to shortcomings of existing studies and make recommendations for the design of future studies.
This repository contains the detailed data extraction report of our systematic methodology review in machine-readable format. It covers 305 analyses (285 main analyses + 20 analyses with mobility as exposure), extracted from 248 studies.
The data is available
If using this data in your work, please consider citing the corresponding paper:
Banholzer N, Lison A, Özcelik D, Stadler T, Feuerriegel S, Vach W.
The methodologies to assess the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions
during COVID-19: a systematic review. Eur J Epidemiol 37, 1003–1024 (2022).
DOI: 10.1007/s10654-022-00908-y