Urgently Needed for Policy Guidance: An Operational Tool for Monitoring the COVID-19 Pandemic

Stéphane Luchini (), Miriam Teschl, Patrick Pintus, Mickael Degoulet (), C. Baunez () and Jean-Paul Moatti
Additional contact information
Stéphane Luchini: AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Miriam Teschl: AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Mickael Degoulet: INT - Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
C. Baunez: INT - Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Jean-Paul Moatti: IMéRA - Institute for Advanced Studies - Aix-Marseille University

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: The radical uncertainty around the current COVID19 pandemics requires that governments around the world should be able to track in real time not only how the virus spreads but, most importantly, what policies are effective in keeping the spread of the disease under check. To improve the quality of health decision-making, we argue that it is necessary to monitor and compare acceleration/deceleration of confirmed cases over health policy responses, across countries. To do so, we provide a simple mathematical tool to estimate the convexity/concavity of trends in epidemiological surveillance data. Had it been applied at the onset of the crisis, it would have offered more opportunities to measure the impact of the policies undertaken in different Asian countries, and to allow European and North-American governments to draw quicker lessons from these Asian experiences when making policy decisions. Our tool can be especially useful as the epidemic is currently extending to lower-income African and South American countries, some of which have weaker health systems.

Keywords: Acceleration; Convexity; COVID-19; Data Dashboard; Detection of Infectious Diseases; Public Health Policy; Sensitivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://amu.hal.science/hal-02526456
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://amu.hal.science/hal-02526456/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Urgently Needed for Policy Guidance: An Operational Tool for Monitoring the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020)
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:hal:wpaper:hal-02526456

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().