The trade-off between deaths by infection and socio-economic costs in
the emerging infectious disease
Abstract
COVID-19, caused by the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), is an emerging
infectious disease (EID) with a relatively high infectivity and
mortality rate. During the state of emergency announced by the Japanese
government in the spring of 2020, citizens were requested to stay home,
the number of infected people was drastically reduced without a
legally-binding lockdown. It is well-acknowledged that there is a
trade-off between maintaining economic activity and preventing the
spread of infectious diseases. We aimed to reduce the total loss caused
by the epidemic of an EID like COVID-19 in the present study. We focused
on early and late stages of the epidemic and proposed a framework to
reduce the total loss resulted from the damage by infection and the cost
for the countermeasure. Mathematical epidemic models were used to
estimate the effect of interventions on the number of deaths by
infection. The total loss was converted into the monetary base and
different policies were compared. In the early stage, we calculated the
damage by infection when behavioral restrictions were implemented. The
favorable intensity of the intervention depended on the basic
reproduction number, infection fatality rate, and the economic impact.
In the late stage, we calculated indicators and showed it depended on
the ratio of the cost to maintain the hospitalization system to the
monetary loss per deaths by infection which strategies should be
adopted.