 Road to recovery: Managing an epidemicSimon Loertscher and Ellen V. Muir Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2021, vol. 93, issue C Abstract: Without widespread immunization, the road to recovery from the current COVID-19 lockdowns will optimally follow a path that finds the difficult balance between the social and economic benefits of liberty and the toll from the disease. We provide an approach that combines epidemiology and economic models, taking as given that the maximum capacity of the healthcare system imposes a constraint that must not be exceeded. Treating the transmission rate as a decreasing function of the severity of the lockdown, we first determine the minimal lockdown that satisfies this constraint using an epidemiology model with a homogeneous population to predict future demand for healthcare. Allowing for a heterogeneous population, we then derive the optimal lockdown policy under the assumption of homogeneous mixing and show that it is characterized by a bang–bang solution. Possibilities such as the capacity of the healthcare system increasing or a vaccine arriving at some point in the future do not substantively impact the dynamically optimal policy until such an event actually occurs. Keywords: COVID-19; SIR models; Capacity constraints; Managing an epidemic (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:mateco:v:93:y:2021:i:c:s0304406821000203 DOI: 10.1016/j.jmateco.2021.102482 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Mathematical Economics is currently edited by Atsushi (A.) Kajii More articles in Journal of Mathematical Economics from Elsevier |
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