THEMIS: A Framework for Cost-Benefit Analysis of COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions

  1. Dimitris Bertsimas
  2. Michael Lingzhi Li
  3. Saksham Soni

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Abstract

Since December 2019, the world has been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 150 million confirmed cases and 3 million confirmed deaths worldwide. To combat the spread of COVID-19, governments have issued unprecedented non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), ranging from mass gathering restrictions to complete lockdowns. Despite their proven effectiveness in reducing virus transmission, the policies often carry significant economic and humanitarian cost, ranging from unemployment to depression, PTSD, and anxiety. In this paper, we create a data-driven system dynamics framework, THEMIS, that allows us to compare the costs and benefits of a large class of NPIs in any geographical region across different cost dimensions. As a demonstration, we analyzed thousands of alternative policies across 5 countries (United States, Germany, Brazil, Singapore, Spain) and compared with the actual implemented policy.

Our results show that moderate NPIs (such as restrictions on mass gatherings) usually produce the worst results, incurring significant cost while unable to sufficiently slow down the pandemic to prevent the virus from becoming endemic. Short but severe restrictions (complete lockdown for 4-5 weeks) generally produced the best results for developed countries, but only if the speed of reopening is slow enough to prevent a resurgence. Developing countries exhibited very different trade-off profiles from developed countries, and suggests that severe NPIs such as lockdowns might not be as suitable for developing countries in general.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.04.09.22273656: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Ethicsnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.

    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.

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

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2022.04.09.22273656v1 on medRxiv