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What non-pharmaceutical policy tools do governments have to combat the COVID-19 public health and economic crisis?
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#EconTwitter
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#EconTwitter
Mask mandates are a low-hanging fruit (yet to be adopted in all US states). A great example: one person infected 27 customers at a Starbucks. How many employees were infected? None. They were all wearing masks.
https://twitter.com/samkimasia/status/1297116978964905984?s=20
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https://twitter.com/samkimasia/status/1297116978964905984?s=20
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Social distancing measures. One person infected 12 out of 17 business class passengers (including all adjacent passengers) on a 10-hour flight in March, when masks were not common. Only 2 other passengers in all the other cabins were infected.
https://twitter.com/sewonhur/status/1333902814356107266?s=20
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https://twitter.com/sewonhur/status/1333902814356107266?s=20
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Contact tracing, testing, quarantine measures. South Korea has kept the virus under control without strict lockdowns or travel restrictions. Cases are rising now though, and they are stepping up contact tracing efforts.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/16/asia/south-korea-japan-coronavirus-intl-hnk/index.html
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https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/16/asia/south-korea-japan-coronavirus-intl-hnk/index.html
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Stay-at-home subsidies are effective at saving lives and increasing output, as I show in recent work ( https://doi.org/10.24149/gwp400r1). Subsidies for unemployment (PUA/PUC) and firms (PPP) are a step in the right direction.
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Infectious diseases have externalities. How do economists deal with externalities? For COVID-19, a Pigouvian tax on consumption and/or labor can be effective at mitigating the spread (and also fund the stay-at-home subsidies)
https://doi.org/10.24149/gwp400r1
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https://doi.org/10.24149/gwp400r1
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Lockdowns can save lives, but are more costly and less effective than subsidies/taxes, as shown in the figure below.
https://doi.org/10.24149/gwp400r1
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https://doi.org/10.24149/gwp400r1
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Finally, the arrival of a vaccine warrants stronger, not weaker, mitigation efforts, as shown by @andyecon @DirkKrueger7 @Jonheathcote , and Rios-Rull ( http://doi.org/10.3386/w27046 ), + many others.
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