Assessing the Impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions on COVID-19: A Combined CCE and Quantile Regression Approach

This paper presents supposedly the first empirical evidence on the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on deaths and infections due to COVID-19 in India. I use the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT), a database of daily government responses from Jan 28th, 2020, till December 31st, 2022. Here, government responses are captured in the form of stringency measures, containment measures, economic support measures, and the overall government support. I quantify the average relation and causality to understand the impacts of NPIs with COVID-19 incidence using the CS-ARDL, IV(CS-ARDL) method and panel quantile regression. Short-term analysis reveals significant negative associations between various NPIs and COVID-19 deaths. Stringency measures, containment actions, and economic support show negative coefficients, indicating the role of NPIs in effectively reducing deaths in the short term. The overall government support, which aggregates all three NPIs, also demonstrates a significant adverse effect on fatalities, highlighting the importance of stringent and immediate measures in controlling the death toll during the pandemic. Long-term coefficients for infection rates and various NPIs are consistently significant and negative, indicating that sustained interventions significantly reduce infections of COVID-19. Further, causality analysis confirms that the relationship between government interventions and COVID-19 incidences was bi-directional, meaning more deaths (or infections) lead to stricter interventions that, in turn, further reduce deaths. Results from the quantile regression confirm the robustness of CS-ARDL estimates and demonstrate that at lower quantiles of deaths and infections, NPIs were ineffective, while post 0.2 quantiles of the dependent variables, NPIs have proven effective in restricting the death and infection in COVID-19 in India. JEL : C23, C54, I18, I38