Everyone you talk to or hear from has an opinion about how lenient or stringent public restrictions should be in the time of COVID-19. The decisions governments make about restricting and punishing social activity are decisions like any other—and decisions come with tradeoffs.
What is a tradeoff?
A tradeoff is an exchange—giving up one thing to get something else. The suggestion from public officials in early 2020 was that tightening up social activity would prevent the deaths of lots of people.
What are the benefits of stringency?
Very restrictive stay-at-home orders prevent or reduce the spread of COVID-19. Lenient restrictions allow for the coronavirus to spread quickly.
Researchers at the University of Oxford have created an index estimating the stringency of the restrictions within each country. For 13 countries, the scatterplot below plots the average daily stringency in the months of February through April against the number of deaths caused by COVID-19 per million people in the months of May through August.
New Zealand provides an example of a country that shut down its economy fully and did so quickly, having an average stringency of 54 in the early months of the outbreak. Because New Zealand closed harshly and early, the country did not experience many deaths between May and August.
Sweden provides an opposite example. Sweden did not lock up very much or quickly. With an average stringency index of 22 in February through April, Sweden experienced 300 more deaths per million people than did New Zealand in the same time period.
Canada falls between New Zealand and Sweden. Canada’s initial reaction to the virus was less stringent than New Zealand’s reaction, but more stringent than Sweden’s. As a result, Canada experienced fewer COVID-19 deaths per million people than Sweden but more than New Zealand.
Considering the scatterplot, the relationship between the stringency of a country’s early response and the subsequent number of deaths per million suffered is not a direct relationship. Other factors, such as population density, quality of health care, and the age demographics of a country also contribute to the number of COVID-19 deaths a country suffered. But the negative relationship of the scatterplot illustrates a tradeoff. On average, countries with very strict early policies experience fewer deaths per million people than countries that took longer to respond.
The tradeoff is between social activity and preventing deaths. The benefit of giving up a significant amount of social activity is the many lives saved with the restrictive policies.
What are the costs of stringency?
Stringency restricts the amount of social activity we can enjoy. This restriction means seeing friends less often, not attending music concerts, forgoing sports events, and countless other forgone opportunities.
Two economists point out two more downsides to high stringency in this article. People, particularly those living in developed countries, suffer a mental health cost from significantly decreased time spent outside and with friends, putting many more at risk for suicide.
People living in developing countries face another potential risk. Because the global economy is incredibly interconnected, shutting down business operations in a developed country has negative repercussions on developing countries that cannot produce foods and certain essential goods for themselves.
What is the tradeoff?
Limiting the social activity in developed countries helped limit the spread of COVID-19, and thus reduced the number of lives lost to the virus. But the effects of limiting social interaction have adverse effects as well. While national governments are principally concerned with the health of their own citizens, the consequences of their decisions are far-reaching, and the novel coronavirus is entirely unconcerned with designated country borders.
Let’s look at the tradeoff between stringent social policies and deaths experienced per million people.
Now take a short quiz to check that you understand what you just read.
Multiple Choice Test: COVID tradeoff