ArticleEnvironmental & resource economics2020
Cross-Country Comparisons of Covid-19: Policy, Politics and the Price of Life.
Article in Environmental & resource economics, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 papers.
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Who cites it
82 citing papers in PubMed.
- Optimizing infectious disease mitigation under dynamic conditions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Mechanics of pandemics.EClinicalMedicine · 2026Review
- Social connection before and after the COVID-19 pandemic: results of the Belgian Health Interview Survey.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Comparative efficiency of Asian surgical systems in COVID-19 response: a multi-level longitudinal benchmarking study.BMJ public health · 2026Article
- Exploring the association of respiratory infection aetiology with mental well-being scores: a longitudinal study.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Public perceptions of health and economic impacts during COVID-19: Findings from a repeated cross-national survey in the US, UK and Germany (2020-2022).BMJ public health · 2025Article
- Early Mortality Prediction in Intensive Care Unit Patients Based on Serum Metabolomic Fingerprint.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- A novel, scenario-based approach to comparing non-pharmaceutical intervention strategies across nations.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- A data-driven analysis on the mediation effect of compartment models between control measures and COVID-19 epidemics.Heliyon · 2024Article
- How much does government's short-term response matter for explaining cross-country variation in COVID-19 infection outcomes? A regression-based relative importance analysis of 84 countries.BMJ public health · 2024Article
- Big data-driven spatio-temporal heterogeneity analysis of Beijing's catering service industry during the COVID-19 pandemic.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Spatio-temporal heterogeneity in the international trade resilience during COVID-19.Applied geography (Sevenoaks, England) · 2023Article
- SARS-CoV-2-Related Adaptation Mechanisms of Rehabilitation Clinics Affecting Patient-Centered Care: Qualitative Study of Online Patient Reports.JMIR rehabilitation and assistive technologies · 2023Article
- Understanding individual-level travel behavior changes due to COVID-19: Trip frequency, trip regularity, and trip distance.Cities (London, England) · 2023Article
- Bioinformatic modelling of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic with a focus on country-specific dynamics.BMC public health · 2023Article
- How has the sustainability of countries changed after COVID-19? Evidence from the pandemics' first year.The Science of the total environment · 2023Article
- Predictive relationship between COVID-19 anxiety and psychological distress in adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Article
- Quality of life of a healthy polish population due to sociodemographic factors during the COVID-19 pandemic - a cross-sectional study.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
22 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Coronavirus has claimed the lives of over half a million people world-wide and this death toll continues to rise rapidly each day. In the absence of a vaccine, non-clinical preventative measures have been implemented as the principal means of limiting deaths. However, these measures have caused unprecedented disruption to daily lives and economic activity. Given this developing crisis, the potential for a second wave of infections and the near certainty of future pandemics, lessons need to be rapidly gleaned from the available data. We address the challenges of cross-country comparisons by allowing for differences in reporting and variation in underlying socio-economic conditions between countries. Our analyses show that, to date, differences in policy interventions have out-weighed socio-economic variation in explaining the range of death rates observed in the data. Our epidemiological models show that across 8 countries a further week long delay in imposing lockdown would likely have cost more than half a million lives. Furthermore, those countries which acted more promptly saved substantially more lives than those that delayed. Linking decisions over the timing of lockdown and consequent deaths to economic data, we reveal the costs that national governments were implicitly prepared to pay to protect their citizens as reflected in the economic activity foregone to save lives. These 'price of life' estimates vary enormously between countries, ranging from as low as around $100,000 (e.g. the UK, US and Italy) to in excess of $1million (e.g. Denmark, Germany, New Zealand and Korea). The lowest estimates are further reduced once we correct for under-reporting of Covid-19 deaths.
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