The health and economic impacts of COVID-19 and policy responses: Updates
Principal Investigator
Bruce Weinberg
Eric Byron Fix-Monda Endowed Professor, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University
Co-Investigators
- Adibah Abdulhadi, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, The Ohio State University
- Meta Brown, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University
- Hanbat Jeong, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University
- Kurt Lavetti, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University
- Yanli Lin, PhD Candidate, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University
- Rebecca McKibbin, Lecturer, University of Sydney
- Guanting Yi, PhD Candidate, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University
Funded By
Extrapolations for Marginal Case Fatality Rate (MFCR)
Adibah Abdulhadi, Hanbat Jeong, Rebecca McKibbin, Kurt Lavetti, Bruce Weinberg
Weinberg and colleagues previously developed a new measure of mortality from infection. The MCFR accounts for both disease severity (mortality) and transmissibility by combining the strengths of case fatality rate (CFR) and reproduction number (Rt). Building on previous work, the current analysis extrapolates this measure to diseases with varying corresponding transmissibility and mortality. They consider two examples of diseases with opposite features: (1) Measles, which while highly transmissible, has a low mortality rate and (2) Ebola that while is less transmissible, has a high mortality rate.
Per their measure, as the CFR increases, the MCFR increases and as transmissibility increases, the MCFR increases rapidly. The insights provided by this measure regarding the ease with which diseases can spread provides great policy relevance.
Long COVID
Adibah Abdulhadi, Kurt Lavetti, Bruce Weinberg, Jonathan Holmes
This study examines Long COVID, a condition with varied symptoms and no clear diagnostic marker, by comparing the recovery paths of COVID-19 and acute respiratory infection (ARI) patients. This works highlights subtle but important variations in how Long COVID affects specific groups.
Economic Setback and Recovery
Meta Brown and Guanting Yi
The team in this study found that pandemic layoffs and recovery vary steeply with life stage and social connectedness. For example, the researchers found that pandemic-related job loss had stronger long-term effects on older workers, with a 15 percentage point employment decline for those in their 60s compared to 9 points for workers in their 20s. Social connectedness played a key role in recovery wherein young workers who moved in with their parents saw significantly better earnings recovery. Meanwhile, those in couples fared better than single displaced workers.
Medical Practice Closures
(R&R AJHE) Rebecca McKibbin & Xuechao Qian
Across the United States, COVID-realted clinic closures disrupted access to regular care. This study aimed to track how patients’ care utilization changed as a result of these closures as well as who was hit the hardest by the closures.
This team found that clinic closures lead patients to substitute office-based care for hospital-based care, increasing avoidable and emergent emergency department visits and inpatient admissions. These impacts are not evenly distributed: the largest increases occur in areas with above-average minority population shares and among adults aged 65 and older, indicating disproportionate effects along key dimensions of social and clinical disadvantage.
International COVID
Bob Breuning, Kyoung Hoon Lee, Laura Montenovo, and Jacquelyn Zhang (Conditionally Accepted, ILRR)
The research team in this study reveals a snapshot of the policies, employment retention strategies, losses, and market navigations that took place during COVID internationally. Of particular interest to the team were the considerable ways in which social support policies varied.
The team focused on job retention versus unemployment insurance metrics and found that which metric a country favored largely shaped how the labor markets responded— with the exception of Spain. Intuitively, the more a country relied on unemployment insurance the greater the increase in unemployment, while the more a country relied on job retention, the greater the increase in people who were absent from work.
Scatterplot titled “International COVID relationship between job retention/unemployment insurance and being absent from work” showing the relationship between “JR” (Job Retention) / “UI” (Unemployment Insurance) on the x-axis and “ΔUnemp / ΔAbsent” on the y-axis for various countries. Data points are labeled by country abbreviations: US, SK, ES, SE, AU, FR, IT, and DK. A fitted downward-sloping line is overlaid on the plot. US and SK are at the top left, ES is at bottom left, SE is mid-right, and DK is at the far-right bottom. AU, FR, and IT cluster in the lower right quadrant. The legend below indicates that dark blue circles represent the “Ratio” and a thin brown line represents the “Fitted line.”
Selected Publications & Presentations
Gupta, S., Montenovo, L., Nguyen, T., Lozano‐Rojas, F., Schmutte, I., Simon, K., Weinberg, B. A., & Wing, C. (2022). Effects of social distancing policy on labor market outcomes. Contemporary Economic Policy, coep.12582. https://doi.org/10.1111/coep.12582
Montenovo, L., Jiang, X., Lozano-Rojas, F., Schmutte, I., Simon, K., Weinberg, B. A., & Wing, C. (2022). Determinants of disparities in early COVID-19 job losses. Demography, 59(3), 827–855. https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-9961471