Did the Indian lockdown avert deaths?

Suvrat Raju

No 5y9r7, indiarxiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Within the context of SEIR models, we consider a lockdown that is both imposed and lifted at an early stage of an epidemic. We show that, in these models, although such a lockdown may delay deaths, it eventually does not avert a significant number of fatalities. Therefore, in these models, the efficacy of a lockdown cannot be gauged by simply comparing figures for the deaths at the end of the lockdown with the projected figure for deaths by the same date without the lockdown. We provide a simple but robust heuristic argument to explain why this conclusion should generalize to more elaborate compartmental models. We qualitatively discuss some important effects of a lockdown, which go beyond the scope of simple models, but could cause it to increase or decrease an epidemic's final toll. Given the significance of these effects in India, and the limitations of currently available data, we conclude that simple epidemiological models cannot be used to reliably quantify the impact of the Indian lockdown on fatalities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Date: 2020-06-18
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5eec1bdf76ebd800a8cd9f81/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:indiar:5y9r7

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/5y9r7

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in indiarxiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().