Covid restrictions prevented dengue in hundreds of thousands of people in 2020.

A study published in The Lancet this month shows that public health measures to stop the spread of Covid-19 resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being prevented from getting the disease. There are clues in the research for new strategies to combat a dangerous tropical disease.

There was a marked decline in the number of infections from April 2020 across many regions where the disease is spread by mosquitoes, according to the research.

The senior author of the study said that they found unexpected net benefits from Covid restrictions that are going to help us fight it in the future.

More than 5 million people were affected by the disease, which causes joint and muscle pain, around the world in 2019.

As resources were diverted to Covid-19 and other disease control measures were interrupted, Dr. Brady and other infectious disease researchers feared disaster. They were surprised by the huge decline in the number of cases of the mosquito-borne disease. Environmental changes and declines in reporting on the disease were eliminated. He said that the disruption in the movement of people was a plausible explanation.

School closings appear to have been a key factor in cutting the number of cases of the mosquito-borne disease. The Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are daytime feeders. If it were a case that the house was the real reason for the control program, it would be different.

The researchers are not suggesting that stay-at- home orders should be stopped. According to Dr. Brady's findings, mosquito control should be concentrated in public places. When people got sick, they weren't going out where new mosquitoes could bite them and then pass the disease on to other people, so stay-at- home orders may have helped.

The study suggests that the findings of the mosquito-borne diseases may be relevant to other mosquito-borne diseases. Dr. Brady warned that if the control programs were disrupted, the infection rates could go back up to pre-covid levels or worse, if the data for 2021, which should be available soon, and for a post-pandemic period, is not available.