You recently analyzed the policies put in place to fight the global pandemic. What were your key findings?
We looked at the effectiveness of 11 policies that have been implemented at various levels in 40 countries since the pandemic’s onset. My co-authors — INSEAD professors Phebo Wibbens and Wesley Wu-Yi Koo — and I found that a suite of widely implemented core policies did in fact reduce the spread of virus — but not by enough to contain it fully, except in a few highly compliant jurisdictions.
The 11 core policies we looked at included the cancellation of public events, the restriction of gatherings to fewer than 100 people, stay-at-home recommendations and the implementation of a partial international travel ban. For the average jurisdiction, these policies reduced the growth rate in new infections from an estimated 270 per cent per week to approximately 49 per cent per week. While that is an impressive reduction, it has not been enough to prevent ongoing transmission throughout the population. True virus containment only occurs when you reduce infection growth to below zero.
To achieve that, most jurisdictions would have had to implement three additional ‘difficult-to-tolerate’ policies, each of which had the potential to further reduce the weekly growth rate by 10 percentage points or more: targeted or full workplace closings for all but essential workers;
