A First Literature Review: Lockdowns Only Had a Small Effect on COVID-19

Herby, Jonas

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3764553

Cited by 15 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Third, this study is related to the body of theoretical and empirical literature on voluntary avoidance behavior (Perra et al, 2011;Funk et al, 2010;Rubin et al, 2009;Bayham et al, 2015). For example, several recent studies have found that people's voluntary response plays an important role in what decisions they make in terms of mobility, social distancing, and mask-wearing during the pandemic (Gupta et al, 2020;Yan et al, 2021;Chudik et al, 2020;Farboodi et al, 2020;Allcott et al, 2020;Herby, 2021). We contribute to this stream of the literature by quantifying the voluntary avoidance of healthcare utilization during and after the pandemic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Measuring Voluntary Responses in Healthcare Utilization During and After COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Taiwan

Tsai

Tzu-Ting

2021

Preprint

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Healthcare has been one of the most affected sectors during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The utilization of related services for non-COVID-19 diseases fell dramatically following the point at which the virus broke out; however, little is known about whether this observed decline in healthcare use was due to voluntary behaviors or enforced measures. This paper quantifies the spontaneous change in healthcare utilization during and after the pandemic. We utilize a county-by-week-level dataset from Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) record, covering the entire Taiwanese population, and a difference-in-differences design. Our results indicate that even if there were no human mobility restrictions or supply-side constraints, people voluntarily reduced their demand for healthcare, due to fears of contagion, or COVID-related precautionary behaviors. We find that the number of outpatient visits (inpatient admissions) decreased by 21% (11%) during the pandemic period (February to May 2020). Furthermore, the demand response of healthcare for infectious diseases (e.g., flu) was much greater and more persistent than for non-infectious diseases, thereby suggesting that the substantial decline in accessing healthcare was induced by positive public health externality of prevention measures for COVID-19. Finally, we find that the demand for healthcare services did not get back to the pre-pandemic baseline, even when there were no local coronavirus cases for 253 consecutive days (mid-April to December 2020) in Taiwan.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Measuring Voluntary Responses in Healthcare Utilization During and After COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Taiwan

Tsai

Tzu-Ting

2021

Preprint

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“…Also, there are examples of evidence that the 'signal (inducing voluntary behavior changes) is important in contrast to the actual regulation (mandated behavior changes)'. 3 In general though, the economic literature, as well as legal research, suggest that restricting one human activity often leads to substitution by others, as humans seek alternatives. And there is a strictness level beyond which extra measures can actually backfire.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Covid-19: Early evening curfews are not effective and may backfire

Georganas

Velias

Vandoros

2021

Preprint

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Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, some countries have introduced early evening curfews. Several studies try measure the effectiveness of such measures across different countries, but clear identification of effects is elusive. Objective: We examined the impact of an early evening curfew on mobility by studying a shift in curfews from 9pm to 6pm in Greece. Data and Methods: We took advantage of a natural experiment in Greece, where curfews shifted from 9pm to 6pm in one Region, but not in another. We followed a difference-in-difference econometric approach, where we compared trends in mobility in groceries and pharmacies as well as residential spaces before and after the introduction of the 6pm curfew, in the two regions. Results: The relative difference in the time spent in groceries and pharmacies between the two regions before and after the intervention, is statistically insignificant [coeff: -9.95; 95%CI -44.358 to 24.458]. The relative increase in time spent in groceries and pharmacies after the 6pm curfew was only 4.625 percentage points [coeff: 4.625; 95%CI 1.412 to 7.838]. Conclusions: We found that the 6pm instead of 9pm curfew in Athens led to a 4.63 percentage point relative increase in time spent at home and had no effect on time spent in groceries and pharmacies. Considering that this was a result of a 18.75% reduction in hours where people were allowed to leave home, it seems that the early evening curfew led to more crowding in indoor spaces; which may facilitate the spread of disease. Lockdowns and other measures are necessary to tackle Covid-19, but it is important to avoid substitution by activities that contribute further to spreading the virus. Interventions should therefore be based on a thorough analysis of human behaviour.

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“…There are recent research papers that examine the impacts of public policies on health outcomes such as lockdown (see Acemoglu et al (2020), Bjørnskov (2020), Born et al (2021) and Cho (2020). Allen (2021) and Herby (2021) provide extensive literature review), and mandatory mask wearing (see Chernozhukov et al (2021) and Karaivanov et al (2021)). We first estimate time-series models of new infections for 8 selected leading countries (Canada, Israel, the US, the UK, Chile, Uruguay, UAE and Bahrain).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vaccination strategies and transmission of COVID-19: evidence across leading countries

Kim¹

2021

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Vaccination has been perceived as a key to reaching "herd immunity" in the current COVID-19 pandemic. This paper examines effectiveness of different vaccination strategies. We investigate the effects of two key elements in mass vaccination, which are allocations and timing of first and second doses and types of vaccines, on the spread of COVID-19. Amid limited supply of approved vaccines and constrained medical resources, the choice of a vaccination strategy is fundamentally an economic problem. We employ standard time-series and panel data models commonly used in economic research with real world data to estimate the effects of progress in vaccination and types of vaccines on health outcomes. Potential confounders such as government responses and people's behavioral changes are also taken into account. Our findings suggest that the share of people vaccinated with at least one dose is significantly negatively associated with new infections and deaths. Conditioning on first dose progress, full vaccination offers no further reductions in new cases and deaths. For vaccines from China, however, we find weaker effects of vaccination progress on health outcomes. Our results support the extending interval between first and second dose policy adopted by Canada and the UK among others for mRNA-based vaccines. As vaccination progressed, people's mobility increased and it offset the direct effects of vaccination. Therefore, public health measures are still important to contain the transmission by refraining people from being more mobile after vaccinated.

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A First Literature Review: Lockdowns Only Had a Small Effect on COVID-19

Cited by 15 publications

References 33 publications

Measuring Voluntary Responses in Healthcare Utilization During and After COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Taiwan

Measuring Voluntary Responses in Healthcare Utilization During and After COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Taiwan

Covid-19: Early evening curfews are not effective and may backfire

Vaccination strategies and transmission of COVID-19: evidence across leading countries

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