The Success of Public Health Measures in Europe during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Kaja Primc and Renata Slabe-Erker
Additional contact information
Kaja Primc: Institute for Economic Research, Kardeljeva ploscad 17, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Renata Slabe-Erker: Institute for Economic Research, Kardeljeva ploscad 17, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 10, 1-13

Abstract: SARS-CoV-2, a serious threat to sustainable development prospects, is spreading within countries at varying speeds, among other things depending on their population density, behavioural responses, cultural factors, personal hygiene practices and habits. This has led to significant variation in countries’ policy responses aimed at stemming the proliferation of the virus. Using crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis, we conducted a comparative study at the European level to study the performance of different combinations of COVID-19 containment measures along with the response speeds. A set of configurations for two different scenarios (above- and below-median death rates) helps to illustrate how specific containment measures in each examined European country are related to the number of deaths. The main observation arising from the analysis is that the speed of response along with the decision to suspend international flights might determine the epidemic outbreak’s impact on fatality. The results also imply that several different combinations of containment measures are associated with death rates across Europe. The outcome of this analysis can assist in identifying which set of containment measures in the event of an epidemic outbreak is beneficial/detrimental.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; coronavirus; SARS-CoV-2; qualitative comparative analysis; containment measures; public health measures; prevention measures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/10/4321/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/10/4321/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:10:p:4321-:d:362715

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().