COVID-19 and Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention.

• Author: Van Doren, Peter
• Position: Working Papers: A SUMMARY OF RECENT PAPERS THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST TO REGULATION'S READERS.

COVID-19 and Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention

* "Four Stylized Facts about COVID-19," by Andrew Atkeson, Karen Kopecky, and Tao Zha. August 2020. NBER #27719.

* "Epidemiological and Economic Effects of Lockdown," by Alexander Arnon, John Ricco, and Kent Smetters. September 2020. www. brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Arnon-et-al-conference-draft.pdf

The COVID-19 pandemic has induced people to reduce their interaction with others in order to reduce the risk of infection and has induced governments to enact policies that mandate reductions in interaction through the closure of businesses and large events. The economic recession resulting from reduced interaction has led to political dispute over the relative contributions of voluntary and mandated social distancing.

The first of these papers uses patterns in the fatality data to make inferences about the relative roles of voluntary behavior and policy. It examines the COVID-19 fatality data as of July 22, 2020 across the 23 countries and 25 U.S. states that have experienced at least 1,000 cumulative deaths. Across this diverse set of places (Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Turkey, and the United Kingdom), once the cumulative announced deaths reach 25, the growth rate of daily deaths from COVID-19 fell rapidly everywhere within 30 days and then remained at zero or below. The variance in the growth of deaths across countries and states fell within 20 days of cumulative deaths reaching 25 and has remained low relative to its initial level.

The authors claim that though the variance in policy across this diverse set of countries and states was large, the patterns in the fatality data were similar, and therefore peoples' voluntary reactions, rather than policy, largely must explain the evolution of the pandemic. Put differently, despite the large variation in policy around the world, the actual change in behavior across countries was quite similar, resulting in a pandemic that is neither exponentially growing nor extinguished.

The second paper examines daily counts of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States as well as mobile phone data to estimate population contact rates (that is, how often a person encounters another person closely enough and long enough for COVID infection to occur) and employment rates. Like the first paper, the...