Deteriorated Covid19 control due to delayed lockdown resulting from strategic interactions between Governments and oppositions
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Abstract
Background
In many European countries and the US, the burden of Covid-19 epidemic could be much lower if Governments had been able to learn from the China and Lombardy stories and to declare full lockdown without delays.
Methods
We use a simple game-theoretic framework for the strategic interaction between the Government, political oppositions and lobbies, combined with a Covid-19 transmission model, to analyse the role of political factors delaying the lockdown declaration, depending on the degrees of “responsibility” of political actors.
Results
The lockdown can always be declared immediately (i.e., without delay) as sustained transmission arises, only if the government feels fully “responsible” towards all citizens. If this is not the case, epidemic growth will eventually dominate the agents’ payoffs, so that sooner or later the lockdown will always be declared i.e., both the government and the opposition will be forced by the epidemic to switch towards a higher degree of responsibility, but with a delay. There is a further nontrivial situation where the lockdown can be declared without delay, occurring when the political opposition is at least as responsible as the Government. This however requires the solution of a coordination issue, which cannot be taken for granted. Eventually, a vicious circle emerges, where the delayed lockdown requires a much longer lockdown period to achieve adequate control results, thereby causing the explosion of economic losses and so calling for unlocking long before it should.
Conclusions
Lockdown delays have dramatically worsened the impact of the current Covid-19 wave in a number of countries. Citizens should be made cogently aware of this to claim maximal responsibility from political actors and economic lobbies to avoid that such stories repeat in the future when further threats, due to Covid-19 itself or other pathogens, will re-appear.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.26.20112946: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The limitation of our approach, on which we are working, concerns three main areas: i) our model is essentially deterministic, and as such it does not consider sudden stochastic perturbations affecting political decisions (e.g. …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.26.20112946: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The limitation of our approach, on which we are working, concerns three main areas: i) our model is essentially deterministic, and as such it does not consider sudden stochastic perturbations affecting political decisions (e.g. announcement by EU); ii) our model is at single country scale, which we think it is an accurate modeling for this phase of the Covid-19 pandemics, but for a longer period of time a multi-state version of our models could be important; iii) we did not explore possible interplays between the epidemics time-scale and the disease time-scale It is worth to note that in the increasingly growing field of behavioural epidemiology of infectious diseases (BEID) (Funk et al 2011, d’Onofrio et al 2012, Manfredi and d’Onofrio 2013, Wang et al 2016) the government actions modulating the citizen behaviour during an epidemics are considered in an elementary way. Indeed, in BEID the emphasis was up to know given to the modeling of the citizens’s behaviour. Here, at the best of our knowledge, we introduce an explicit and ’disease dynamics-dependent’ modelling of the government behaviour via a game-theoretic approach. Under this light, we may say that our work uses theoretical arguments of BEID to suggest the harmful health impact that has potentially been caused by mean political behaviour during the pre-lockdown phase. This mean behaviour is apparent from the public political debate occurred in many European before epidemic events forced the lockdown. All this, despite...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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