The COVID-19 pandemic has caused over 6.4 million registered deaths to date and has had a profound impact on economic activity. Here, we study the interaction of transmission, mortality, and the economy during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic from January 2020 to December 2022 across 25 European countries. We adopt a Bayesian Mixed Effects model with auto-regressive terms. We find that increases in disease transmission intensity decreases Gross domestic product (GDP) and increases daily excess deaths, with a longer lasting impact on excess deaths in comparison to GDP, which recovers more rapidly. Broadly, our results reinforce the intuitive phenomenon that significant economic activity arises from diverse person-to-person interactions. We report on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on transmission intensity, excess deaths, and changes in GDP, and resulting implications for policy makers. Our results highlight a complex cost-benefit trade off from individual NPIs. For example, banning international travel increases GDP and reduces excess deaths. We consider country random effects and their associations with excess changes in GDP and excess deaths. For example, more developed countries in Europe typically had more cautious approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic, prioritising healthcare, and excess deaths over economic performance. Long term economic impairments are not fully captured by our model, as well as long term disease effects (Long Covid). Our results highlight that the impact of disease on a country is complex and multifaceted, and simple heuristic conclusions to extract the best outcome from the economy and disease burden are challenging.
翻译:迄今为止,COVID-19大流行已造成超过640万登记死亡,并对经济活动产生了深远影响。在这里,我们研究了2020年1月至2022年12月25日欧洲25国SARS-COV-2大流行期间传播、死亡率和经济的相互作用。我们采用了一种具有自动递减条件的巴伊西亚混合效应模式。我们发现疾病传播强度的增加降低了国内生产总值(GDP),增加了每日超额死亡,与GDP相比,对超额死亡的影响更为持久,而GDP恢复得更快。广而言之,我们的结果强化了一种直观现象,即重大经济活动产生于不同的人与人之间的相互作用。我们报告非制药干预在传播强度、超额死亡和GDP变化方面的有效性,从而对决策者产生影响。我们发现疾病传播强度的增加会降低国内生产总值(GDP),并增加了每日超额死亡,例如禁止国际旅行增加了GDP,减少了超额死亡。我们考虑到国家随机效应及其与GDP和超额死亡的关联。例如,较发达的欧洲国家通常对CVI-19大宗流行病的超额后果采取更为谨慎的方法,而长期的CVI-19大流行病影响也是我们长期的复杂的结果。