They are currently not officers, directors, or board members of any organization with an interest in this paper. Maryland, Virginia, Arizona and Tennessee became. The goal is to keep reproduction, or R, below one (R<1) with each case infecting fewer than one other person. The authors did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this paper. About three out of four Americans are now, or about to be, under some form of lockdown, as more states tighten measures to fight the coronavirus. The purpose of a lockdown, explains a new study from the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team, is to reduce reproduction in other words, to reduce the number of people each confirmed case infects. ” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall, 61-108. Action has been ramped up in recent weeks after New York. “ Epidemiological and Economic Effects of Lockdown. Mr Trump began advising citizens at the end of last month to stay home, and by the end of March, 32 out of 50 states had locked down. “We hope that our analysis serves as a key part of helping to make that determination.”ĭavid Skidmore authored the summary language for this paper.Īrnon, Alex ander D., John Ricco, and Kent A. One of the paper’s objectives, the authors write, is “to provide useful insights to policymakers managing the current and any future infectious disease outbreaks.” But, they caution, “no analysis … can answer the question of whether the economic costs of a particular intervention are worth it” without explicitly considering the value of the years of life saved and other potential health benefits gained. “If you impose a stay-at-home order at the first sign of an occurrence … the tradeoff will probably be better than if you wait until things get worse and then … close everything all at once,” Arnon said. The paper also suggests that jurisdictions that imposed stay-at-home orders swiftly, as the virus was first spreading, were better able to avoid harsher business shutdowns later. “People took it much more seriously because there was a policy.”Īt the same time, the authors estimate that non-pharmaceutical interventions reduced employment by about three million, nearly 15 percent of the total decline from the start of the pandemic through the end of May. “It appears policy played a role in changing people’s behavior,” Smetters said in an interview with Brookings. virus deaths at that point totaled nearly 115,000). But, importantly, they estimate that the modest additional reduction in social contacts achieved by government interventions prevented about 33,000 deaths through May 31 (U.S. Voluntary social distancing explains most of the reduction. The authors also find that state and local government interventions explain only nine percent of the reduction in social contacts through the second week of April. School closures fell between stay-at-home orders and business closures in terms of the tradeoff between job losses and social distancing gains, they write.
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Interventions “that target individual behavior (such as stay-at-home orders) were more effective at reducing transmission at lower economic cost than those that target businesses (shutdowns),” the authors conclude in Epidemiological and economic effects of lockdown.