An Economist's Perspective on Behavior and the Dynamics of Epidemics

I use a model of private and public behavior to mitigate disease transmission during the COVID pandemic over the past year in the United States to address two questions: What dynamics of infections and deaths should we expect to see from a pandemic? and What are our options for mitigating the impact of a pandemic on public health? Economists posit that endogenous changes in behavior will drive the effective reproduction number of a disease towards one. For COVID, turns what would be a short and extremely sharp epidemic into a long, drawn out one. This assumption alters model implications for the purpose of public health interventions. For COVID, I calculate that, absent early eradication of the disease, non-pharmaceutical interventions alone suffer from rapidly diminishing returns in improving long-run health outcomes. In contrast, when these interventions are combined with a technological intervention such as vaccines, they can have a significant impact on public health outcomes. Many economists argued that, in both cases, more carefully targeted interventions could have attained similar health outcomes at significantly lower economic costs.