Related papers: Did lockdowns serve their purpose?

Economic growth in Sweden during the early 20th Century was largely driven by industry. A significant contributor to this growth was the installation of different kinds of engines used to power factories. We use newly digitized data on…

Different ways of calculating mortality ratios during epidemics have yielded very different results, particularly during the current COVID-19 pandemic. We formulate both a survival probability model and an associated infection…

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic has led many countries to impose unprecedented lockdown measures in order to slow down the outbreak. Questions on whether governments have acted promptly enough, and whether lockdown…

The years 2020 and 2021 were characterized by the COVID-19 pandemic. The true impact of the pandemic on populations' health and life still has to be fully discerned. The main objective of this work is to discern the true impact of COVID-19…

As Europe is facing the second wave of the CoViD-19 pandemic, each country should carefully review how it dealt with the first wave of outbreak. Lessons from the first experience should be useful to avoid indiscriminate closures and, above…

We study the dynamics of cause--specific mortality rates among countries by considering them as compositions of functions. We develop a novel framework for such data structure, with particular attention to functional PCA. The application of…

The traditional long-term solutions for epidemic control involve eradication or population immunity. Here, we analytically derive the existence of a third viable solution: a stable equilibrium at low case numbers, where…

Quantifying the number of deaths caused by the COVID-19 crisis has been an ongoing challenge for scientists, and no golden standard to do so has yet been established. We propose a principled approach to calculate age-adjusted yearly excess…

Given limited supply of approved vaccines and constrained medical resources, design of a vaccination strategy to control a pandemic is an economic problem. We use time-series and panel methods with real-world country-level data to estimate…

We study the increases of infections and deaths in Sweden caused by COVID-19 with several different models: Firstly an analytical susceptible-infected (SI) model and the standard susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model. Then within the…

We show that the COVID-19 pandemic under social distancing exhibits universal dynamics. The cumulative numbers of both infections and deaths quickly cross over from exponential growth at early times to a longer period of power law growth,…

The spread of COVID-19 has been thwarted in most countries through non-pharmaceutical interventions. In particular, the most effective measures in this direction have been the stay-at-home and closure strategies of businesses and schools.…

We analysed publicly available data on place of occurrence of COVID-19 deaths from national statistical agencies in the UK between March 9 2020 and February 28 2021. We introduce a modified Weibull model that describes the deaths due to…

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic many countries implemented containment measures to reduce disease transmission. Studies using digital data sources show that the mobility of individuals was effectively reduced in multiple countries.…

The recent Covid-19 epidemic has lead to comparisons of the countries suffering from it. These are based on the number of excess deaths attributed either directly or indirectly to the epidemic. Unfortunately the data on which such…

This paper aims to study the economic impact of COVID-19. To do that, in the first step, I showed that the adjusted SEQIER model, which is a generalization form of SEIR model, is a good fit to the real COVID-induced daily death data in a…

As the COVID-19 outbreak is developing the two most frequently reported statistics seem to be the raw confirmed case and case fatalities counts. Focusing on Italy, one of the hardest hit countries, we look at how these two values could be…

The global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, in conjunction with the economic consequences and the collapse of health systems, has raised serious concerns in Europe, which is the most affected continent by the pandemic since it…

The debate on the role of school closures as a mitigation strategy against the spread of Covid-19 is gaining relevance due to emerging variants in Europe. According to WHO, decisions on schools "should be guided by a risk-based approach".…

Lately, concepts such as lockdown, quarantine, and social distancing have become very relevant since they have been associated with essential measures in the prevention and mitigation of COVID-19. While some conclusions about the…