Table 1.

Design features of existing systematic reviews.

review	measures evaluated	study design	sources	inclusion criteria	exclusion criteria	quality assessment tools	dates of relevant articles
Grépin et al. [6]	symptomatic screening, travel restrictions, border closure and quarantine	rapid review	PubMed, BioRxiv/MedRxiv, WHO COVID-19 Research Database	COVID-19; domestic or international measures; modelled or observational; any outcome	news reports, review articles, commentaries or editorials	proprietary scoring system: low, medium and high	start of the pandemic to 1 June 2020
Burns et al. [4]	border closures, travel restrictions, screening and quarantine	Cochrane guidance for rapid reviews	MEDLINE, Embase and COVID-19-specific databases, including the WHO COVID-19 Research Database, the Cochrane COVID-19 Study Register and the CDC COVID-19 Research Database	COVID-19/SARS/MERS; international measures only; experimental, quasi-experimental, observational and modelling studies; must have quantitative impact	case reports, non-quantitative studies, diagnostic studies, non-empirical studies, systematic reviews and conference abstracts; subnational studies	ROBINS-I, QUADAS-2 and a proprietary tool for modelling studies	start of the pandemic to 26 June 2020
Bou-Karroum et al. [3]	screening, quarantine, travel restrictions and border closure	Cochrane	MEDLINE, PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Central Register, WHO COVID-19 Global Literature Database, Epistemonikos and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health's live map of COVID-19 evidence	COVID-19; international and subnational; randomized controlled trials, non-randomized studies, modelling studies, qualitative studies, research letters and abstracts	preprints, editorials, letters to the editors, commentaries and correspondence	GRADE and EVIDEM framework	start of the pandemic to end of December 2020
Burns et al. [5]	border closures, travel restrictions, screening (symptomatic and diagnostic), quarantine and combination of measures	Cochrane guidance for rapid reviews	MEDLINE, Embase, Cochrane COVID-19 study register, WHO COVID-19 Global Literature Database	COVID-19; international only; experimental and quasi-experimental studies, observational studies, modelling studies; must provide quantitative evidence	case reports, non-quantitative studies, diagnostic studies, non-empirical studies, systematic reviews and conference abstracts; subnational studies	ROBINS-I, QUADAS-2 and proprietary tool for modelling studies	start of the pandemic to 13 November 2020
Hohlfeld et al. [7]	air travel measures only, including quarantine, diagnostic screening or a combination of both types of measures	Cochrane	Scopus, PubMed, Cochrane COVID-19 database, WHO COVID-19 Global Literature Database, MedRXiv/BioRXiv	COVID-19; modelled and observational studies; epidemiological outcomes	case reports, case series, opinion papers, editorials, study protocols and trial registries; modelled studies were excluded in favour of observational and ecological studies	ROBINS-I and GRADE	1 November 2020 to 6 June 2022