Optimal Lockdown Strategy in a Pandemic: An Exploratory Analysis for Covid-19

TL;DR

This paper models the trade-offs between health outcomes and economic impacts of lockdown strategies during Covid-19, finding that a soft lockdown is optimal under certain conditions.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated SIRD-macroeconomic model to compare hard and soft lockdown policies and identifies conditions favoring soft lockdown as optimal.

Findings

Soft lockdown is optimal under specific parameters.

Health facility constraints influence treatment probabilities.

Policy recommendations depend on model assumptions.

Abstract

The paper addresses the question of lives versus livelihood in an SIRD model augmented with a macroeconomic structure. The constraints on the availability of health facilities - both infrastructure and health workers determine the probability of receiving treatment which is found to be higher for the patients with severe infection than the patients with mild infection for the specific parametric configuration of the paper. Distinguishing between two types of direct intervention policy - hard lockdown and soft lockdown, the study derives alternative policy options available to the government. The study further indicates that the soft lockdown policy is optimal from a public policy perspective under the specific parametric configuration considered in this paper.