Adaptive Policies to Balance Health Benefits and Economic Costs of Physical Distancing Interventions during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Reza Yaesoubi, Joshua Havumaki, Melanie H. Chitwood, Nicolas A. Menzies, Gregg Gonsalves, Joshua A. Salomon, A. David Paltiel and Ted Cohen
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Reza Yaesoubi: Department of Health Policy and Management, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT, USA
Joshua Havumaki: Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT, USA
Melanie H. Chitwood: Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT, USA
Nicolas A. Menzies: Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA
Gregg Gonsalves: Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT, USA
Joshua A. Salomon: Department of Medicine, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA
A. David Paltiel: Department of Health Policy and Management, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT, USA
Ted Cohen: Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT, USA

Medical Decision Making, 2021, vol. 41, issue 4, 386-392

Abstract: Policy makers need decision tools to determine when to use physical distancing interventions to maximize the control of COVID-19 while minimizing the economic and social costs of these interventions. We describe a pragmatic decision tool to characterize adaptive policies that combine real-time surveillance data with clear decision rules to guide when to trigger, continue, or stop physical distancing interventions during the current pandemic. In model-based experiments, we find that adaptive policies characterized by our proposed approach prevent more deaths and require a shorter overall duration of physical distancing than alternative physical distancing policies. Our proposed approach can readily be extended to more complex models and interventions.

Keywords: adaptive decision making; COVID-19; net monetary benefit; physical distancing; stochastic approximation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:medema:v:41:y:2021:i:4:p:386-392

DOI: 10.1177/0272989X21990371

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