Abstract
We use an individual based model and national level epidemic simulations to estimate the medical costs of keeping the US economy open during COVID-19 pandemic under different counterfactual scenarios. We model an unmitigated scenario and 12 mitigation scenarios which differ in compliance behavior to social distancing strategies and in the duration of the stay-home order. Under each scenario we estimate the number of people who are likely to get infected and require medical attention, hospitalization, and ventilators. Given the per capita medical cost for each of these health states, we compute the total medical costs for each scenario and show the tradeoffs between deaths, costs, infections, compliance and the duration of stay-home order. We also consider the hospital bed capacity of each Hospital Referral Region (HRR) in the US to estimate the deficit in beds each HRR will likely encounter given the demand for hospital beds. We consider a case where HRRs share hospital beds among the neighboring HRRs during a surge in demand beyond the available beds and the impact it has in controlling additional deaths.
Highlights
As states push to end social distancing and reopen businesses, it is important to understand the cost of opening in terms of lives lost and medical costs incurred
The following observations can be made from Fig. 2: [1] a higher Stay home (SH) duration lowers the peak of the epidemic curve; [2] in all cases, a longer SH duration either delays the peak and/or flattens it; [3] a large second wave hits in Fall 2020 unless Voluntary home isolation (VHI) and SH compliance rates are at least 80% and SH duration is at least 45 days
This study estimates the medical costs of COVID-19 in the US under different mitigation scenarios and helps understand the tradeoffs between deaths, costs, infections, compliance to social-distancing and the duration of stay-home order
Summary
As states push to end social distancing and reopen businesses, it is important to understand the cost of opening in terms of lives lost and medical costs incurred. We use an agent-based model and simulation framework to estimate the immediate medical cost of COVID-19 under different mitigation scenarios. We consider cases where neighboring HRRs share or do not share hospital beds during a surge in demand This information is used to calculate additional deaths and medical costs for each of the mitigation scenarios. Our goal is to use this knowledge to provide guidance to public health officials and policy makers on the trade-offs between the length of lockdown, compliance to social distancing, infections, deaths and the medical costs. Authors in1 consider potential health care costs and resource usage under different attack rates which vary from 20 to 80% It does not consider any interventions or mitigation strategies.
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