Pareto-based evaluation of national responses to COVID-19 pandemic shows that saving lives and protecting economy are non-trade-off objectives

Abstract

Countries worldwide have adopted various strategies to minimize the socio-economic impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Stringency of imposed measures universally reflects the standpoint from which protecting public health and avoiding damage to economy are seen as contradictory objectives. Based on epidemic trajectories of 25 highly developed countries and 10 US states in the (mobility reduction)–(reproduction number) plane we showed that delay in imposition of nation-wide quarantine elevates the number of infections and deaths, surge of which inevitably has to be suppressed by stringent and sustained lockdown. As a consequence, cumulative mobility reduction and population-normalized cumulative number of COVID-19-associated deaths are significantly correlated and this correlation increases with time. Overall, we demonstrated that, as long as epidemic suppression is the aim, the trade-off between the death toll and economic loss is illusory: high death toll correlates with deep and long-lasting lockdown causing a severe economic downturn.

Deciphering the COVID-19 Health Economic Dilemma (HED): A Scoping Review

“…Substantial amounts of literature acknowledge the detrimental and vast impact of the outbreak on economic activities [33,34,44,45,[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65]. While it is well accepted that the economic perils of a pandemic are not trivial, less agreement in the literature exists with regard to whether the consequences of various NPIs, such as social distancing, are appropriate.…”

“…While the optimal policy is still unclear and it is not yet understood whether certain governments overreacted or underreacted as compared to others, several papers suggest that clear health and economic advantages exist for approaches which aimed to eliminate the virus quickly while rapidly reopening the economy. This approach was best highlighted by New Zealand [59,78].…”

“…If either domain goes unchecked, the pandemic will quickly overwhelm any health system and fatality rates would surge, while the economy would suffer major ruptures to the complex network of economic linkages that allow for the economy to operate [33]. For this purpose, several studies in the literature present developed models to simulate the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of epidemiological and macroeconomic effects (e.g., [43,59,80]). Silva et al (2020) [43] propose one such model which assesses the impact of various social distancing interventions and other control measures on the number of infected, fatalities and economic losses.…”

“…Their conclusions indicate that governments that chose to preserve the economy by not using severe isolation policies, reached a situation with a high cost in human lives and still took on economic losses as the social costs ended up negatively impacting the economy [43]. A Pareto front-based model evaluation was used to assess and stratify various national responses to COVID-19, while considering both epidemic trajectories and economic losses [59]. Such a model assumes no a priori objective preference; hence, it exposes the tradeoffs between economic and health performances.…”

“…Such a model assumes no a priori objective preference; hence, it exposes the tradeoffs between economic and health performances. Kochańczyk and Lipniacki (2020) [59] conclude from this model that protecting the economy and saving lives are non-trade-off objectives and can be optimized using a "hit hard, hit fast" strategy. Lastly, a case study by Agarwal et al (2020) [80] analogously used a synthetic interventions method and evaluated different interventions that were used to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic.…”