 Did early diagnostic confirmation save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic? Evidence from ChinaSimiao Chen, Zhangfeng Jin, Till Bärnighausen and David E. Bloom China Economic Review, 2025, vol. 93, issue C Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of early diagnostic confirmation on the COVID-19 pandemic in a developing country. Using a dataset of the first laboratory-confirmed cases across Chinese cities and an instrumental variable strategy to address endogeneity, we show that reducing the time to publicly confirm the first case in a city by one day led to reductions of 9.4 % in COVID-19 prevalence and 12.7 % in mortality over the subsequent six months. The impact was more pronounced in cities farther from the COVID-19 epicenter, with lower migration exposure, more responsive public health systems, and lower health system capacity utilization. Enhanced social distancing and a less overstressed health system likely drove these effects. Our findings underscore the importance of allocating resources to improve diagnostic technologies; strengthening public health emergency response systems to test for, diagnose, and announce cases of infection; and acting swiftly when facing a potential outbreak. Keywords: Time to diagnostic confirmation; Information disclosure; Social distancing; COVID-19; China (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:93:y:2025:i:c:s1043951x25001452 DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2025.102487 Access Statistics for this article China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier |
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