What containment strategy leads us through the pandemic crisis? An empirical analysis of the measures against the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Since January 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak has been progressing at a rapid pace. To keep the pandemic at bay, countries have implemented various measures to interrupt the transmission of the virus from person to person and prevent an overload of their health systems. We analyze the impact of these measures implemented against the COVID-19 pandemic by using a sample of 68 countries, Puerto Rico and the 50 federal states of the United States of America, four federal states of Australia, and eight federal states of Canada, involving 6,941 daily observations. We show that measures are essential for containing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. After controlling for daily COVID-19 tests, we find evidence to suggest that school closures, shut-downs of non-essential business, mass gathering bans, travel restrictions in and out of risk areas, national border closures and/or complete entry bans, and nationwide curfews decrease the growth rate of the coronavirus and thus the peak of daily confirmed cases. We also find evidence to suggest that combinations of these measures decrease the daily growth rate at a level outweighing that of individual measures. Consequently, and despite extensive vaccinations, we contend that the implemented measures help contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and ease the overstressed capacity of the healthcare systems.