A framework for estimating the socio-economic impacts of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19

Abstract Non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 and other infectious diseases seek good trade-offs between reducing the number of infections and their socioeconomic costs. We propose a framework that establishes these costs from data on interventions implemented in real life for each country taking into consideration its culture and economy. The study used data from 235 territories, and presents detailed results on 17 developed countries with high-quality data. We find that these countries selected substantially different cost-benefit trade-offs. They also differed significantly in how much unnecessary cost, which is the cost that could be avoided by better intervention policy without an increase in infections, that they incurred in doing so. We also analyzed the interplay between COVID-19 mortality, total and unnecessary costs, and the contribution of individual interventions to unnecessary costs. We concluded that the proposed framework for computational intervention planning could contribute to a more cost-effective pandemic management.