Urgently Needed for Policy Guidance: An Operational Tool for Monitoring the COVID-19 Pandemic

Stéphane Luchini, Miriam Teschl (), Patrick Pintus and Mickael Degoulet ()
Additional contact information
Miriam Teschl: Aix-Marseille Univ, CNRS, EHESS, Ecole Centrale, AMSE, https://www.amse-aixmarseille.fr/fr/membres/teschl
Mickael Degoulet: INT, Aix-Marseille University, CNRS

No 2009, AMSE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France

Abstract: The radical uncertainty around the current COVID19 pandemics requires that governments around the world should be able to track in real time not only how the virus spreads but, most importantly, what policies are effective in keeping the spread of the disease under check. To improve the quality of health decision-making, we argue that it is necessary to monitor and compare acceleration/deceleration of confirmed cases over health policy responses, across countries. To do so, we provide a simple mathematical tool to estimate the convexity/concavity of trends in epidemiological surveillance data. Had it been applied at the onset of the crisis, it would have offered more opportunities to measure the impact of the policies undertaken in different Asian countries, and to allow European and North-American governments to draw quicker lessons from these Asian experiences when making policy decisions. Our tool can be especially useful as the epidemic is currently extending to lower-income African and South American countries, some of which have weaker health systems.

Keywords: acceleration; convexity; covid-19; data dashboard; detection of infectious diseases; public health policy; sensitivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-sea
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Working Paper: Urgently Needed for Policy Guidance: An Operational Tool for Monitoring the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aim:wpaimx:2009

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