Analysis of the Tradeoff Between Health and Economic Impacts of the Covid-19 Epidemic.

Samson Lasaulce,Chao Zhang,Vineeth Varma,Irinel Constantin Morărescu

doi:10.3389/fpubh.2021.620770

Abstract

Various measures have been taken in different countries to mitigate the Covid-19 epidemic. But, throughout the world, many citizens don't understand well how these measures are taken and even question the decisions taken by their government. Should the measures be more (or less) restrictive? Are they taken for a too long (or too short) period of time? To provide some quantitative elements of response to these questions, we consider the well-known SEIR model for the Covid-19 epidemic propagation and propose a pragmatic model of the government decision-making operation. Although simple and obviously improvable, the proposed model allows us to study the tradeoff between health and economic aspects in a pragmatic and insightful way. Assuming a given number of phases for the epidemic (namely, 4 in this paper) and a desired tradeoff between health and economic aspects, it is then possible to determine the optimal duration of each phase and the optimal severity level (i.e., the target transmission rate) for each of them. The numerical analysis is performed for the case of France but the adopted approach can be applied to any country. One of the takeaway messages of this analysis is that being able to implement the optimal 4−phase epidemic management strategy in France would have led to 1.05 million of infected people and a GDP loss of 231 billions € instead of 6.88 millions of infected and a loss of 241 billions €. This indicates that, seen from the proposed model perspective, the effectively implemented epidemic management strategy is good economically, whereas substantial improvements might have been obtained in terms of health impact. Our analysis indicates that the lockdown/severe phase should have been more severe but shorter, and the adjustment phase occurred earlier. Due to the natural tendency of people to deviate from the official rules, updating measures every month over the whole epidemic episode seems to be more appropriate.

Highlights

One of the goals of this work is to provide a simple but exploitable model to measure the quality of the epidemic management strategy implemented by a government to mitigate the health and macro-economic impacts of the Covid-19 epidemic
In contrast with most studies conducted on the Covid-19 epidemic analysis where the primary goal is to refine the SEIR model [see e.g., [1,2,3,4,5]] or employ the SEIR model by accounting for local variations [by using a given SEIR model per geographical region—see e.g., [6]] or for the impact of class type [by age, sex, risk level—see e.g., [7]] our approach is to use the standard SEIR model for an entire country and choose a simple economic model to focus on the study of the tradeoff between health and economic aspects
We propose to model the behavior of a government as far as the epidemic control is concerned

Summary

Introduction

One of the goals of this work is to provide a simple but exploitable model to measure the quality of the epidemic management strategy implemented by a government to mitigate the health and macro-economic impacts of the Covid-19 epidemic. In contrast with most studies conducted on the Covid-19 epidemic analysis where the primary goal is to refine the SEIR model [see e.g., [1,2,3,4,5]] or employ the SEIR model by accounting for local variations [by using a given SEIR model per geographical region—see e.g., [6]] or for the impact of class type [by age, sex, risk level—see e.g., [7]] our approach is to use the standard SEIR model for an entire country and choose a simple economic model to focus on the study of the tradeoff between health and economic aspects. From the perspective of a government, implementing such policies is not practical since daily changes of the epidemic control measures are difficult to be implemented and to be followed by people

Objectives

Methods

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Conclusion