 The economics of stop-and-go epidemic controlClaudius Gros and Daniel Gros Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 2022, vol. 81, issue C Abstract: We analyse ‘stop-and-go’ containment policies that produce infection cycles as periods of tight lockdowns are followed by periods of falling infection rates. The subsequent relaxation of containment measures allows cases to increase again until another lockdown is imposed and the cycle repeats. The policies followed by several European countries during the Covid-19 pandemic seem to fit this pattern. We show that ’stop-and-go’ should lead to lower medical costs than keeping infections at the midpoint between the highs and lows produced by ’stop-and-go’. Increasing the upper and reducing the lower limits of a stop-and-go policy by the same amount would lower the average medical load. But increasing the upper and lowering the lower limit while keeping the geometric average constant would have the opposite effect. We also show that with economic costs proportional to containment, any path that brings infections back to the original level (technically a closed cycle) has the same overall economic cost. Keywords: COVID-19; Epidemic control; Socio-economic costs; SIR model; Infection cycles; Medical costs; Traffic light system; Lockdown; Non-pharmacological interventions (NPI) (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:soceps:v:81:y:2022:i:c:s0038012121001889 DOI: 10.1016/j.seps.2021.101196 Access Statistics for this article Socio-Economic Planning Sciences is currently edited by Barnett R. Parker More articles in Socio-Economic Planning Sciences from Elsevier |
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