arXiv subjects

Daniel Gros

Publications and source records attributed to Daniel Gros.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

When to end a lock down? How fast must vaccination campaigns proceed in order to keep health costs in check?

We propose a simple rule of thumb for countries which have embarked on a vaccination campaign while still facing the need to keep non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) in place because of the ongoing spread of SARS-CoV-2. If the aim is to keep the death rate from increasing, NPIs can be loosened when it is possible to vaccinate more than twice the growth rate of new cases. If the aim is to keep the pressure on hospitals under control, the vaccination rate has to be about four times higher. These simple rules can be derived from the observation that the risk of death or a severe course requiring hospitalization from a COVID-19 infection increases exponentially with age and that the sizes of age cohorts decrease linearly at the top of the population pyramid. Protecting the over 60-year-olds, which constitute approximately one-quarter of the population in Europe (and most OECD countries), reduces the potential loss of life by 95 percent.

q-bio.PE↗

arXiv2021

Incentives for accelerating the production of Covid-19 vaccines in the presence of adjustment costs

Delays in the availability of vaccines are costly as the pandemic continues. However, in the presence of adjustment costs firms have an incentive to increase production capacity only gradually. The existing contracts specify only a fixed quantity to be supplied over a certain period and thus provide no incentive for an accelerated buildup in capacity. A high price does not change this. The optimal contract would specify a decreasing price schedule over time which can replicate the social optimum.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2020

The economics of stop-and-go epidemic control

We analyse 'stop-and-go' containment policies that produce infection cycles as periods of tight lockdowns are followed by periods of falling infection rates. The subsequent relaxation of containment measures allows cases to increase again until another lockdown is imposed and the cycle repeats. The policies followed by several European countries during the Covid-19 pandemic seem to fit this pattern. We show that 'stop-and-go' should lead to lower medical costs than keeping infections at the midpoint between the highs and lows produced by 'stop-and-go'. Increasing the upper and reducing the lower limits of a stop-and-go policy by the same amount would lower the average medical load. But increasing the upper and lowering the lower limit while keeping the geometric average constant would have the opposite effect. We also show that with economic costs proportional to containment, any path that brings infections back to the original level (technically a closed cycle) has the same overall economic cost.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2020

Containment efficiency and control strategies for the Corona pandemic costs

The rapid spread of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) confronts policy makers with the problem of measuring the effectiveness of containment strategies, balancing public health considerations with the economic costs of social distancing measures. We introduce a modified epidemic model that we name the controlled-SIR model, in which the disease reproduction rate evolves dynamically in response to political and societal reactions. An analytic solution is presented. The model reproduces official COVID-19 cases counts of a large number of regions and countries that surpassed the first peak of the outbreak. A single unbiased feedback parameter is extracted from field data and used to formulate an index that measures the efficiency of containment strategies (the CEI index). CEI values for a range of countries are given. For two variants of the controlled-SIR model, detailed estimates of the total medical and socio-economic costs are evaluated over the entire course of the epidemic. Costs comprise medical care cost, the economic cost of social distancing, as well as the economic value of lives saved. Under plausible parameters, strict measures fare better than a hands-off policy. Strategies based on current case numbers lead to substantially higher total costs than strategies based on the overall history of the epidemic.

physics.soc-ph↗