Saving lives during the COVID-19 pandemic: The benefits of the first Swiss lockdown

The implementation of a lockdown to control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a strong economic and political debate in several countries. This makes it crucial to shed light on the actual benefits of such kind of policy. To this purpose, we focus on the Swiss lockdown during the first...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft und Statistik 2021-08, Vol.157 (1), p.1-21, Article 4
Main Authors: Gatti, Nicolò, Retali, Beatrice
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age differences
Behavioral responses
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Economics
Economics and Finance
Endogenous
Fatalities
Health care
Lockdown
Original
Original Article
Pandemics
Saved lives
SIR model
SIRDC model
SJES Special Focus on Covid-19
Statistics
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The implementation of a lockdown to control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a strong economic and political debate in several countries. This makes it crucial to shed light on the actual benefits of such kind of policy. To this purpose, we focus on the Swiss lockdown during the first wave of COVID-19 infections and estimate the number of potentially saved lives. To predict the number of deaths in the absence of any restrictive measure, we develop a novel age-structured SIRDC model which accounts for age-specific endogenous behavioral responses and for seasonal patterns in the spread of the virus. Including the additional fatalities which would have materialized because of the shortage of healthcare resources, our estimates suggest that the lockdown prevented more than 11,200 deaths between March and the beginning of September 2020.
ISSN:2235-6282
2235-6282
DOI:10.1186/s41937-021-00072-2