Our estimates are up to three times higher than those of Fernández-Villaverde and Jones (2020), especially early in the sample. The coronavirus reproduction rate spiked at around seven by the end of February. We find that there must have been more than 600 infected individuals in the US by mid-February to justify the trajectory of COVID-19 fatalities observed through 30 September. We infer how many infections there must have been to justify the trajectory of COVID-19 fatalities observed in the data given the policies that were in place and historical mobility across states.įigure 1 shows the cumulative number of estimated infections and the estimated reproduction rate of the virus in the US. A key benefit of our approach is that it relies on death counts only. We develop a new multi-region epidemiological model and apply it to state-level COVID-19 data from the US between 12 February and 30 September 2020. Travel bans are the least effective policies according to our study. Our study highlights state and federal mask mandates as very effective tools to contain the virus. More than two-thirds of all US COVID-19 deaths could have been prevented if the federal government had required all states to adopt policies that mirrored those of the earliest-acting states. Our results show that while state protocols were largely effective, the lack of federal policies contributed to an accelerated spread of coronavirus nationwide. Using the US as a case study, we develop a novel model of COVID-19 transmission that incorporates state and federal policy decisions, as well as interstate mobility that enables the spread of the disease (Coven et al. We answer these questions in a new paper (Renne et al. How effective are policies implemented in one state when other states adopt none? And what could be gained from unified federal policies? However, state governments in many countries can independently implement policies while others, including the federal government, do not. A large amount of research has been dedicated to studying the impact of different policies on COVID-19 infections and fatalities (Chernozhukov et al. The coronavirus pandemic has pushed governments to implement drastic regulatory policies to contain the disease.
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