Health and economic costs of early and delayed suppression and the unmitigated spread of COVID-19: The case of Australia
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
We compare the health and economic costs of early and delayed mandated suppression and the unmitigated spread of ‘first-wave’ COVID-19 infections in Australia in 2020. Using a fit-for-purpose SIQRM-compartment model for susceptible, infected, quarantined, recovered and mortalities on active cases, that we fitted from recorded data, a value of a statistical life year (VSLY) and an age-adjusted value of statistical life (A-VSL), we find that the economic costs of unmitigated suppression are multiples more than for early mandated suppression. We also find that using an equivalent VSLY welfare loss from fatalities to estimated GDP losses, drawn from survey data and our own estimates of the impact of suppression measures on the economy, means that for early suppression not to be the preferred strategy requires that Australia would have to incur more than 12,500–30,000 deaths, depending on the fatality rate with unmitigated spread, to the economy costs of early mandated suppression. We also find that early rather than delayed mandated suppression imposes much lower economy and health costs and conclude that in high-income countries, like Australia, a ‘go early, go hard’ strategy to suppress COVID-19 results in the lowest estimated public health and economy costs.
Article activity feed
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.21.20136549: (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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:We provide a number of caveats to our work. First, our VSLY measure underestimate the welfare losses associated with no suppression measures. This is because we only have limited information to benchmark on average life expectancy, noting that many of those who die of COVID-19 are older than 82.5 years. In our view, people in this older …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.21.20136549: (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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:We provide a number of caveats to our work. First, our VSLY measure underestimate the welfare losses associated with no suppression measures. This is because we only have limited information to benchmark on average life expectancy, noting that many of those who die of COVID-19 are older than 82.5 years. In our view, people in this older age bracket would have a both a willingness and ability to pay for additional life. Second, in the case of no suppression measures, we assume no constraints on hospital and ICU capacity noting that a capacity constraint would likely increase fatalities, and thus welfare losses, should such a constraint be exceeded. Third, for the no suppression scenario, we do not explicitly model the effects of voluntary physical distancing or a delayed lock-down that could occur with substantial community infections and deaths. Instead, we estimate the welfare losses (VSLY of fatalities) equivalent to the GDP costs of an 8-weeks lock-down (see Table 6). We find that VSLY welfare losses of fatalities, equivalent to GDP losses from an early 8-weeks lock-down, would have resulted in more than 12,500–30,000 Australian deaths depending on the fatality rate – fatalities comparable to countries (e.g., United Kingdom) that implemented a delayed lock-down. In other words, for early suppression not to be the preferred response to COVID-19, requires that Australians prefer more than 12,500-30,000 deaths from no suppression measures (actual Australian deaths are 102 as ...
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.
-
