Countries with the fastest-spiraling outbreaks are reentering lockdowns.

Europe’s new Covid-19 wave, explained

https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(19)30409-7

BackgroundEconomic recession might worsen health in low-income and middle-income countries with precarious job markets and weak social protection systems. Between 2014–16, a major economic crisis occurred in Brazil. We aimed to assess the association between economic recession and adult mortality in Brazil and to ascertain whether health and social welfare programmes in the country had a protective effect against the negative impact of this recession.MethodsIn this longitudinal analysis, we obtained data from the Brazilian Ministry of Health, the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics, the Ministry of Social Development and Fight Against Hunger, and the Information System for the Public Budget in Health to assess changes in state unemployment level and mortality among adults (aged ≥15 years) in Brazil between 2012 and 2017. Outcomes were municipal all-cause and cause-specific mortality rates for all adults and across population subgroups stratified by age, sex, and race. We used fixed-effect panel regression models with quarterly timepoints to assess the association between recession and changes in mortality. Mortality and unemployment rates were detrended using Hodrick–Prescott filters to assess cyclical variation and control for underlying trends. We tested interactions between unemployment and terciles of municipal social protection and health-care expenditure to assess whether the relationship between unemployment and mortality varied.FindingsBetween 2012 and 2017, 7 069 242 deaths were recorded among adults (aged ≥15 years) in 5565 municipalities in Brazil. During this time period, the mean crude municipal adult mortality rate increased by 8·0% from 143·1 deaths per 100 000 in 2012 to 154·5 deaths per 100 000 in 2017. An increase in unemployment rate of 1 percentage-point was associated with a 0·50 increase per 100 000 population per rter (95% CI 0·09–0·91) in all-cause mortality, mainly due to cancer and cardiovascular disease. Between 2012 and 2017, higher unemployment accounted for 31 415 excess deaths (95% CI 29 698–33 132). All-cause mortality increased among black or mixed race (pardo) Brazilians (a 0·46 increase [95% CI 0·15–0·80]), men (0·67 [0·22–1·13]), and individuals aged 30–59 years (0·43 [0·16–0·69] per 1 percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate. No significant association was identified between unemployment and all-cause mortality for white Brazilian, women, adolescents (aged 15–29 years), or older and retired individuals (aged ≥60 years). In municipalities with high expenditure on health and social protection programmes, no significant increases in recession-related mortality were observed.InterpretationThe Brazilian recession contributed to increases in mortality. However, health and social protection expenditure seemed to mitigate detrimental health effects, especially among vulnerable populations. This evidence provides support for stronger health and social protection systems globally.

Effect of economic recession and impact of health and social protection expenditures on adult mortality: a longitudinal analysis of 5565 Brazilian municipalities

Science has two stark problems: replication and innovation. Many scientific findings aren’t reproducible. That is to say, you can’t be sure that another study or experiment on the same question would get similar results. At the same time, the pace of scientific innovation could be slowing down. Does attempting to solve one problem make the other worse? Many have argued that policies seeking to avoid reproducibility issues will create a constrictive atmosphere that inhibits innovation and discovery.

Escaping science’s paradox

More Hispanic workers were impacted by the coronavirus pandemic in food processing plants, manufacturing plants and agriculture workplaces in the US last spring than workers of other races or ethnicities, a team led by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday.

More Hispanic workers impacted by Covid-19 in food processing and agriculture workplaces, CDC study finds

10.31234/osf.io/dn957

How people respond to health threats can influence their own health and, when facing communal risks, even their community's health. We propose that people commonly respond to health threats by managing their emotions with cognitive strategies like reappraisal, which can reduce fear and protect mental health. However, because fear can also motivate health behaviors, reducing fear may also jeopardize health behaviors. In two diverse U.S. samples (N=1,241) tracked across three months, sequential and cross-lag panel mediation models indicated that reappraisal predicted lower fear about an ongoing health threat (COVID-19), and in turn, better mental health, but fewer recommended physical health behaviors. This trade-off was not inevitable, however: using reappraisal to increase socially-oriented positive emotions predicted better mental health without jeopardizing physical health behaviors. Examining the costs and benefits of how people cope with health threats is essential for promoting better health outcomes for individuals and communities.

Coping with Health Threats: The costs and benefits of managing emotions.

Debunking the False Claim That COVID Death Counts Are Inflated

President Trump, a congressman and conspiracy fantasists have repeated the myth. But three kinds of evidence point to more than 218,000 U.S. deaths

Outdoor dining has been a summer savior in these COVID times, keeping restaurants and the people they employ afloat while bringing sidewalks and streets once hushed by stay-at-home orders back to life.But with Labor Day now behind us, many city leaders and residents alike are asking, “What’s next?” “What becomes of the vibrant ‘streateries’ once winter comes rolling in?”

Winter is coming. Can cities use innovation to save ‘streateries’?

10.31234/osf.io/rbucq

The current study assessed the effect of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic on subjective well-being (SWB) and psychological well-being (PWB) and whether the pandemic moderated the effect of personality on well-being. Measures of Big Five personality, SWB (life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect) and PWB (positive relations, autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, purpose in life, self-acceptance) were obtained from a sample (n = 1470) of young adults in Melbourne, Australia (13 July to 11 August, 2020) during a second wave of viral transmission and lockdown, and an identically recruited Pre-COVID sample (n = 547). Well-being was lower in the COVID sample and differences were largest for positive affect (d = -0.41) and negative affect (d = 0.64). While the effect of personality on well-being was robust, the effect of personality on well-being was slightly reduced and the effect of extraversion on positive affect was particularly attenuated during the pandemic.

Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Big Five Personality on Subjective and Psychological Well-Being

A question for us as most countries are now immersed in the complexities of living and working amidst the pandemic. Every decision comes with trade-offs, whether it is to ‘close pubs so schools can open’ or weigh up the risks to children from missing school vs. catching the virus.There are many conversations to be had about these complex dilemmas. We are interested in what behavioural science tells us about how people respond to problems with trade-offs, or compromises.

Behavioural Policy challenge: How well do people understand trade-offs and accept them?

A leading epidemiologist has warned the country is at a "critical moment" in the coronavirus pandemic, as students prepare to return to universities

Coronavirus: 'Critical moment' as students return to university

Together with colleagues on The Disinformation Project, Kate Hannah has been studying the vectors and volume of false stories that wrap around the Covid crisis in New Zealand. Here she explains what they’ve learned, and what we might do to tackle it.

Counting and Countering the infodemic: a deep dive into Covid-19 disinformation

Four times as many adolescents are physically abused compared with younger children in England, analysis of police-recorded offences shows, with incidents against 11- to 18-year-olds soaring during the coronavirus lockdown.The numbers and rates of recorded physical abuse offences against older children in England and Wales have increased since 2014-15, the NSPCC said in a report.

Physical abuse of older children soared in lockdown, says NSPCC

Younger teenagers in the South West of England felt less anxious and more connected to school when they were away from it during the COVID-19 global pandemic public lockdown, a first-of-its-kind study has found.

Report reveals young people felt less anxious and more connected to school in lockdown

The second wave of the coronavirus in Australia appears to be finally subsiding, but the country isn’t out of the woods yet.

Australia looks to be finally beating its second wave of coronavirus

10.1038/s41598-020-70350-1

The Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithm based on trust has been the main method used to solve the cold start problem in Recommendation Systems (RSs) for the past few years. Nevertheless, the current trust-based CF algorithm ignores the implicit influence contained in the ratings and trust data. In this paper, we propose a new rating prediction model named the Rating-Trust-based Recommendation Model (RTRM) to explore the influence of internal factors among the users. The proposed user internal factors include the user reliability and popularity. The internal factors derived from the explicit behavior data (ratings and trust), which can help us understand the user better and model the user more accurately. In addition, we incorporate the proposed internal factors into the Singular Value Decomposition Plus Plus (SVD + +) model to perform the rating prediction task. Experimental studies on two common datasets show that utilizing ratings and trust data simultaneously to mine the factors that influence the relationships among different users can improve the accuracy of rating prediction and effectively relieve the cold start problem.

Extracting user influence from ratings and trust for rating prediction in recommendations

2008.05203

Online discussion threads are important means for individual decision-making and for aggregating collective judgments, e.g. the `wisdom of crowds'. Empirical investigations of the wisdom of crowds are currently ambivalent about the role played by social information. While some findings suggest that social information undermines crowd accuracy due to correlated judgment errors, others show that accuracy improves. We investigate experimentally the accuracy of threads in which participants make magnitude estimates of varying difficulty while seeing a varying number of previous estimates. We demonstrate that, for difficult tasks, seeing preceding estimates aids the wisdom of crowds. If, however, participants only see extreme estimates, wisdom quickly turns into folly. Using a Gaussian Mixture Model, we assign a persuadability score to each participant and show that persuadability increases with task difficulty and with the amount of social information provided. In filtered threads, we see an increasing gap between highly persuadable participants and skeptics.

The Wisdom and Persuadability of Threads

Across Britain, parks have offered millions of people respite from the coronavirus crisis – a breathing space amid infection anxieties, crowded flats, home-schooling and job insecurities. With other venues closed, people turned to the nation’s 27,000 urban green spaces, from manicured landscapes to patchy neighbourhood parks and playing fields

Sanctuary in the city: how urban parks saved our summer

Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, has opened up public outdoor spaces to cafés and bars to boost the local economy, but the move has created conflicts as well as benefits.

The city that became an open-air café

Public Health England has changed its definition of deaths. The new definition is now death in a person with a laboratory-confirmed positive COVID-19 test and died within (equal to or less than) 28 days of the first positive specimen date will now be reported

Public Health England has changed its definition of deaths: here’s what it means

Hailed as “heroes” at the onset of the pandemic, supermarket employees now say they are overworked, overwhelmed and feeling expendable again.

Grocery workers say morale is at an all-time low: ‘They don’t even treat us like humans anymore’

The coronavirus pandemic has had a catastrophic effect on the nutritional health of the UK’s poorest citizens with as many as one in 10 forced to use food banks, and vast numbers skipping meals and going hungry, according to the government’s food safety watchdog. Food insecurity has shot up even further since lockdown as people’s income reduced, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) said, heightening the risk both of malnutrition and obesity as struggling families adopted highly restrictive “basic sustenance” diets that largely cut out healthy foods.

UK's poorest 'skip meals and go hungry' during coronavirus crisis

On Friday, a group of behavioural scientists penned an open letter to the U.K. government questioning the decision to not enact strict social distancing policies. Social distancing measures, like closing restaurants and pubs, cancelling school and events, and working from home are being enforced across Europe. The U.K. government, however, has taken a decidedly different approach. At the time of publishing, around 1,400 cases of the virus had been detected in the U.K., up 1,000 from the week before. The open letter raises questions about the behavioural science evidence that may have been used to justify this decision—though a lack of transparency from the government has made it hard to discern what the official policy is. The letter has been signed by nearly 600 behavioural scientists from around the United Kingdom (at the time of publishing). In this op-ed, the authors of the letter explain why they are calling on the government to explain the scientific rationale behind their policy decisions thus far.

Why a Group of Behavioural Scientists Penned an Open Letter to the U.K. Government Questioning Its Coronavirus Response

COVID-19 has affected the livelihoods of an estimated 1.3 billion workers who represent nearly half of the world’s workforce, amplifying economic and social inequalities. In this session titled Redesigning Social Contracts in Crisis, the latest in the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset series, speakers from a range of locations and sectors respond to calls for stronger, more sustainable and more inclusive social contract.

'Normal wasn't working' - John Kerry, Phillip Atiba Goff and others on the new social contract post-COVID

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We study the effects of the temporary federal paid sick leave mandate that became effective April 1st, 2020 on ‘social distancing,’ as proxied by physical mobility behavior gleaned from cellular devices. The national paid leave policy was implemented in response to the COVID-19 outbreak and provided many private and many public employees, including individuals employed in the gig economy, with up to two weeks of paid leave. We study the early impact of the federal paid sick leave policy using interrupted time series analyses and difference-in-differences methods leveraging pre-FFCRA county-level differences in mobility. Our proxies for the ability to social distance are the share of cellular devices that are located in the workplace eight or more hours per day (‘full-time work’) and leave the home for less than one hour per day (‘at home’) in each county. Our findings suggest that the federal mandate decreased our full-time work proxy and increased our at home proxy. In particular, we find an initial decrease in working full-time of 17.7% and increase in staying home of 7.5%, with effects dissipating within three weeks. Given that up to 47% of employees are covered by the federal mandate, our effect sizes are arguably non-trivial

Effect of a Federal Paid Sick Leave Mandate on Working and Staying at Home: Evidence from Cellular Device Data

10.3386/w27623

The Targeting and Impact of Paycheck Protection Program Loans to Small Businesses

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) aimed to quickly deliver hundreds of billions of dollars of loans to small businesses, with the loans administered via private banks. In this paper, we use firm-level data to document the demand and supply of PPP funds. Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that PPP loans led to a 14 to 30 percentage point increase in a business’s expected survival, and a positive but imprecise effect on employment. Moreover, the effects on survival were heterogeneous and highlight an important tradeoff faced by policymakers: while administering the loans via private banks allowed for rapid delivery of funds, it also limited the government’s ability to target the funding - instead allowing pre-existing connections between businesses and banks to determine which firms would benefit from the program.

10.3386/w27384

Using a large-scale survey of U.S. households during the Covid-19 pandemic, we study how new information about fiscal and monetary policy responses to the crisis affects households’ expectations. We provide random subsets of participants in the Nielsen Homescan panel with different combinations of information about the severity of the pandemic, recent actions by the Federal Reserve, stimulus measures, as well as recommendations from health officials. This experiment allows us to assess to what extent these policy announcements alter the beliefs and spending plans of households. In short, they do not, contrary to the powerful effects they have in standard macroeconomic models.

Does Policy Communication During Covid Work?

10.3386/w27439

The largest economic cost of the COVID-19 pandemic could arise from changes in behavior long after the immediate health crisis is resolved. A potential source of such a long-lived change is scarring of beliefs, a persistent change in the perceived probability of an extreme, negative shock in the future. We show how to quantify the extent of such belief changes and determine their impact on future economic outcomes. We find that the long-run costs for the U.S. economy from this channel is many times higher than the estimates of the short-run losses in output. This suggests that, even if a vaccine cures everyone in a year, the Covid-19 crisis will leave its mark on the US economy for many years to come.

Scarring Body and Mind: The Long-Term Belief-Scarring Effects of COVID-19

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South Korea publicly disclosed detailed location information of individuals that tested positive for COVID-19. We quantify the effect of public disclosure on the transmission of the virus and economic losses in Seoul. The change in commuting patterns due to public disclosure lowers the number of cases by 200 thousand and the number of deaths by 7.7 thousand in Seoul over two years. Compared to a city-wide lock-down that results in the same number of cases over two years as the disclosure scenario, the economic cost of such a lockdown is almost four times higher.

The Cost of Privacy: Welfare Effects of the Disclosure of COVID-19 Cases

10.3386/w26989

In addition to its impact on public health, COVID-19 has had a major impact on the economy. To shed light on how COVID-19 is affecting small businesses – and on the likely impact of the recent stimulus bill, we conducted a survey of more than 5,800 small businesses. Several main themes emerge from the results. First, mass layoffs and closures have already occurred. In our sample, 43 percent of businesses are temporarily closed, and businesses have – on average – reduced their employee counts by 40 percent relative to January. Second, consistent with previous literature, we find that many small businesses are financially fragile. For example, the median business has more than $10,000 in monthly expenses and less than one month of cash on hand. Third, businesses have widely varying beliefs about the likely duration of COVID related disruptions. Fourth, the majority of businesses planned to seek funding through the CARES act. However, many anticipated problems with accessing the aid, such as bureaucratic hassles and difficulties establishing eligibility.

How Are Small Businesses Adjusting to COVID-19? Early Evidence from a Survey

10.3386/w27549

Inequality and the Coronavirus: Socioeconomic Covariates of Behavioral Responses and Viral Outcomes Across US Counties

Not much is obvious about how socioeconomic inequalities impact the spread of infectious diseases once one considers behavioral responses, correlations among multiple covariates and the likely non-linearities and dynamics involved. Social distancing responses to the threat of catching COVID-19 and outcomes for infections and deaths are modelled across US counties, augmenting epidemiological and health covariates with within-county median incomes, poverty and income inequality, and age and racial composition. Systematic socioeconomic effects on social distancing and infections emerge, and most effects do not fade as the virus spreads. Deaths, once infected, are less responsive to socioeconomic covariates. Richer counties tend to see greater gains in social distancing and lower infection rates, controlling for more standard epidemiological factors. Income poverty and inequality tend to increase the infection rate, but these effects are largely accountable to their correlation with racial composition. A more elderly population increases deaths conditional on infections, but has an offsetting effect on the infection rate, consistent with the behavioral responses we find through social distancing.

This note is intended to introduce economists to a simple SIR model of the progression of COVID-19 in the United States over the next 12-18 months. An SIR model is a Markov model of the spread of an epidemic in a population in which the total population is divided into categories of being susceptible to the disease (S), actively infected with the disease (I), and recovered (or dead) and no longer contagious (R). How an epidemic plays out over time is determined by the transition rates between these three states. This model allows for quantitative statements regarding the tradeoff between the severity and timing of suppression of the disease through social distancing and the progression of the disease in the population. Example applications of the model are provided. Special attention is given to the question of if and when the fraction of active infections in the population exceeds 1% (at which point the health system is forecast to be severely challenged) and 10% (which may result in severe staffing shortages for key financial and economic infrastructure) as well as the cumulative burden of the disease over an 18 month horizon.

10.3386/w26867

What Will Be the Economic Impact of COVID-19 in the US? Rough Estimates of Disease Scenarios

Firms with greater financial flexibility should be better able to fund a revenue shortfall resulting from the COVID-19 shock and benefit less from policy responses. We find that firms with high financial flexibility experience a stock price drop lower by 26% or 9.7 percentage points than those with low financial flexibility accounting for a firm’s industry. This differential return persists as stock prices rebound. Similar results hold for CDS spreads. The stock price of a firm with an average payout over assets ratio would have dropped 2 percentage points less with no payouts for the last three years.

10.3386/w27106

How Valuable is Financial Flexibility when Revenue Stops? Evidence from the COVID-19 Crisis

10.3386/w27141

We study how the differential timing of local lockdowns due to COVID-19 causally affects households’ spending and macroeconomic expectations at the local level using several waves of a customized survey with more than 10,000 respondents. About 50% of survey participants report income and wealth losses due to the corona virus, with the average losses being $5,293 and $33,482 respectively. Aggregate consumer spending dropped by 31 log percentage points with the largest drops in travel and clothing. We find that households living in counties that went into lockdown earlier expect the unemployment rate over the next twelve months to be 13 percentage points higher and continue to expect higher unemployment at horizons of three to five years. They also expect lower future inflation, report higher uncertainty, expect lower mortgage rates for up to 10 years, and have moved out of foreign stocks into liquid forms of savings. The imposition of lockdowns can account for much of the decline in employment in recent months as well as declines in consumer spending. While lockdowns have pronounced effects on local economic conditions and households’ expectations, they have little impact on approval ratings of Congress, the Fed, or the Treasury but lead to declines in the approval of the President.

The Cost of the Covid-19 Crisis: Lockdowns, Macroeconomic Expectations, and Consumer Spending

In March of 2020, banks faced the largest increase in liquidity demands ever observed. Firms drew funds on a massive scale from pre-existing credit lines and loan commitments in anticipation of cash flow disruptions from the economic shutdown designed to contain the COVID-19 crisis. The increase in liquidity demands was concentrated at the largest banks, who serve the largest firms. Pre-crisis financial condition did not limit banks’ liquidity supply. Coincident inflows of funds to banks from both the Federal Reserve’s liquidity injection programs and from depositors, along with strong pre-shock bank capital, explain why banks were able to accommodate these liquidity demands.

10.3386/w27256

Banks as Lenders of First Resort: Evidence from the COVID-19 Crisis

10.3386/w26946

We study partisan differences in Americans’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Political leaders and media outlets on the right and left have sent divergent messages about the severity of the crisis, which could impact the extent to which Republicans and Democrats engage in social distancing and other efforts to reduce disease transmission. We develop a simple model of a pandemic response with heterogeneous agents that clarifies the causes and consequences of heterogeneous responses. We use location data from a large sample of smartphones to show that areas with more Republicans engaged in less social distancing, controlling for other factors including public policies, population density, and local COVID cases and deaths. We then present new survey evidence of significant gaps at the individual level between Republicans and Democrats in self-reported social distancing, beliefs about personal COVID risk, and beliefs about the future severity of the pandemic.

Polarization and Public Health: Partisan Differences in Social Distancing during the Coronavirus Pandemic

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The U.S. health care system has experienced great pressure since early March 2020 as it pivoted to providing necessary care for COVID-19 patients. But there are signs that non-COVID-19 care use declined during this time period. We examine near real time data from a nationwide electronic healthcare records system that covers over 35 million patients to provide new evidence of how non-COVID-19 acute care and preventive/primary care have been affected during the epidemic. Using event study and difference-in-difference models we find that state closure policies (stay-at-home or non-essential business closures) are associated with large declines in ambulatory visits, with effects differing by type of care. State closure policies reduced overall outpatient visits by about 15-16 percent within two weeks. Outpatient visits for health check-ups and well care experience very large declines during the epidemic, with substantial effects from state closure policies. In contrast, mental health outpatient visits declined less than other care, and appear less affected by state closure policies. We find substitution to telehealth modalities may have played an important role in mitigating the decline in mental health care utilization. Aggregate trends in outpatient visits show a 40% decline after the first week of March 2020, only a portion of which is attributed to state policy. A rebound starts around mid April that does not appear to be explained by state reopening policy. Despite this rebound, care visits still remain below the pre-epidemic levels in most cases.

Effects of State COVID-19 Closure Policy on NON-COVID-19 Health Care Utilization

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