Business Shutdowns and COVID-19 Mortality

  1. Gabriele Ciminelli
  2. Sílvia Garcia-Mandicó

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Abstract

Governments around the world have adopted unprecedented policies to deal with COVID-19. This paper zooms in on business shutdowns and investigates their effectiveness in reducing mortality. We leverage upon highly granular death registry data for over 4,000 Italian municipalities in a diff-in-diff approach that allows us to credibly mitigate endogeneity concerns. Our results, which are robust to controlling for a host of co-factors, offer strong evidence that business shutdowns are very effective in reducing mortality. We calculate that the death toll from the first wave of COVID-19 in Italy would have been twice as high in their absence. Our findings also highlight that timeliness is key – by acting one week earlier, the government could have reduced the death toll by an additional 25%. Finally, our estimates suggest that shutdowns should be targeted: closing shops, bars and restaurants saves the most lives, while shutting down manufacturing and construction activities has only mild effects.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.06.20207910: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    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: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    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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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.10.06.20207910v1 on medRxiv