Global Burden of Covid-19 Restrictions: National, Regional and Global Estimates

  1. Günther Fink
  2. Fabrizio Tediosi
  3. Stefan Felder

Reviewed by

Read the full article See related articles

Listed in

Log in to save this article

Abstract

A large literature has documented the high global mortality and mental health burden associated with the current Covid-19 pandemic. In this paper, we combine newly collected data on subjective reductions in the quality of life with the latest data on Covid-19 restrictions to quantify the total number of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) lost due to government imposed restrictions globally. Our estimates suggest a total loss of 2980 (95% 2764, 3198) million QALYs as of September 6 th 2021, with the highest burden absolute burden in lower and upper middle income countries. QALY losses appear to be particularly large for closures of schools and daycares as well as restaurants and bars, and seem relatively small for wearing masks in public and closure of fitness facilities.

Article activity feed

  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.09.21.21263825: (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

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Crude mortality rates by country were taken from the World Development Indicators database (https://data.worldbank.org/).
    https://data.worldbank.org/
    suggested: (Data World Bank, RRID:SCR_012767)

    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:
    Even though this study is to our knowledge the first attempt to quantify the societal impact of Covid-19 restrictions at both the national and global level, several limitations are worth highlighting. First, we were only able to collect survey data in five countries. Even though we found only relatively small differences in the stated utility weights across these somewhat diverse countries, it is possible that larger differences in the subjective valuation of measures would be found in a larger or more diverse sets of countries. Second, while we used census-based sampling weights to create nationally representative samples, it is also possible that respondents may not be fully representative of their respective age, gender, educational attainment stratum. Empirically, the differences across age, gender and educational attainment groups seem relatively small on average, which suggests that minor changes in sample composition will likely only have very small effects on the overall QALY losses estimated. The third limitation of the study is that there are currently no internationally validated questionnaires to estimate QALY utilities for states that are only indirectly health related such as Covid-19 restrictions. We piloted several version of the questions, and then formally tested Covid-19 vs. non Covid-18 framing in our surveys. Conceptually, framing restrictions as related to Covid-19 may lead to subjects justifying these measures as necessary and assigning lower disutility...

    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.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.09.21.21263825v1 on medRxiv