COVID-19: The impact of social distancing policies, cross-country analysis
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COVID-19: The impact of social distancing policies, cross-country analysis Gonzalo Castex1 · Evgenia Dechter1
· Miguel Lorca1
Received: 14 July 2020 / Accepted: 29 August 2020 / © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic a large number of countries introduced a range of non-pharmaceutical interventions. Whereas the policies are similar across countries, country characteristics vary substantially. We examine the effectiveness of such policies using a cross-country variation in socio-economic, environmental and geographic, and health system dimensions. The effectiveness of policies that prescribe closures of schools and workplaces is declining with population density, country surface area, employment rate and proportion of elderly in the population; and increasing with GDP per capita and health expenditure. Cross-country human mobility data reinforce some of these results. We argue that the findings can be explained by behavioural response to risk perceptions and resource constraints. Voluntary practice of social distancing might be less prevalent in communities with lower perceived risk, associated with better access to health care and smaller proportion of elderly population. Higher population density, larger geographical area, and higher employment rate may require more resources to ensure compliance with lockdown policies. Keywords COVID-19 · Non-pharmaceutical interventions · Cross-country analysis
Introduction The outbreak of COVID-19 has caused major public health concerns around the world. Since the first cases in late 2019 in China, COVID-19 has spread exponentially around the world, indicating an endemic person-to-person transmission.
This article is part of the Topical Collection on Economics of COVID-19. Gonzalo Castex
[email protected] Evgenia Dechter [email protected] Miguel Lorca [email protected] 1
School of Economics, University of New South Wales, New South Wales, Australia
Economics of Disasters and Climate Change
In an attempt to flatten the transmission of the virus, governments in many countries implemented a range of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including closures of schools, workplaces, public transport, cancellations of public events, restrictions of internal movement, tracing infected persons contacts, enhanced testing, and more. Timelines of these policies vary across countries, but by mid-April 2020, due to the virus crisis around 70% of countries have enacted one or more of these measures.1 The effectiveness of each NPI may vary with a range of other actions taken by the government and communities at the time of the crisis. To assess these differences, we examine how the effectiveness of NPIs varies with country characteristics. Using a dynamic version of the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model, we examine how the impact of NPIs on transmission rate of COVID-19 varies with a range of country characteristics along economic, public health and environment dimensions. These characteristics are associate
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