ArticleRoyal Society open science2021
Optimal shutdown strategies for COVID-19 with economic and mortality costs: British Columbia as a case study.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Predictive models for health outcomes due to SARS-CoV-2, including the effect of vaccination: a systematic review.Systematic reviews · 2024Pooled it
- On optimal control at the onset of a new viral outbreak.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2024Article
- Is SARS-CoV-2 elimination or mitigation best? Regional and disease characteristics determine the recommended strategy.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Effective pandemic policy design through feedback does not need accurate predictions.PLOS global public health · 2023Article
- When and how do business shutdowns work? Evidence from Italy's first COVID-19 wave.Health economics · 2022Article
- Modeling optimal reopening strategies for COVID-19 and its variants by keeping infections low and fixing testing capacity.PloS one · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Decision makers with the responsibility of managing policy for the COVID-19 epidemic have faced difficult choices in balancing the competing claims of saving lives and the high economic cost of shutdowns. In this paper, we formulate a model with both epidemiological and economic content to assist this decision-making process. We consider two ways to handle the balance between economic costs and deaths. First, we use the statistical value of life, which in Canada is about C$7 million, to optimize over a single variable, which is the sum of the economic cost and the value of lives lost. Our second method is to calculate the Pareto optimal front when we look at the two variables-deaths and economic costs. In both cases we find that, for most parameter values, the optimal policy is to adopt an initial shutdown level which reduces the reproduction number of the epidemic to close to 1. This level is then reduced once a vaccination programme is underway. Our model also indicates that an oscillating policy of strict and mild shutdowns is less effective than a policy which maintains a moderate shutdown level.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.