Background: Faced with the global outbreak and spread of COVID-19 pandemic, the government of each country has adopted different emergency measures, but the effectiveness assessment of these emergency measures is still lacked. This paper aimed to study the effectiveness of emergency measures for emergent infectious diseases to look for key measures and effective combinations.
Methods: We took COVID 19 pandemic management and control measures in China as an example, and selected five high frequency emergency measures including controlling population mobility, patient admission, appropriation of pandemic prevention funds, legal regulations and resumption of production from the perspective of Epidemiology. Using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we conducted necessary condition analysis and configuration analysis on these measures using official statistical data. And robustness test was performed by changing consistency threshold.
Results: We found that: (1) The consistency of the five emergency measures was less than 0.9, indicating that none of these measures can be used separately as a necessary condition for the strong pandemic prevention and control effects. (2) There were three combinations of emergency measures to achieve strong pandemic prevention and control effects, with solution consistency of 0.92 and solution coverage of 0.6: when all patients are admitted to hospitals, the government provides sufficient pandemic prevention funds, and severely crack down on criminal cases; when resume production under the measures of strictly controlling population mobility and severely cracking down on criminal cases; when strictly control population mobility and all patients are admitted to hospitals without resumption production.
Conclusions: These findings suggest that fsQCA model can be applied to comprehensive effectiveness assessment of infectious diseases emergency measures. The results of our study not only help various countries prevent and control COVID-19 pandemic and its resurgence, but also have important reference significance for the emergency management of other emergent infectious diseases in the world.