Effect of European COVID-containment policies on epidemiological monitoring indicators

Abstract Since its initial appearance on the western world in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be a catastrophic event that has seriously endangered the world’s population. While governments have tried their best to respond appropriately to the changing rhythms of the pandemic, they have largely been unprepared to deal with a calamity of such proportion. This is in no small part due to the lack of sufficient or adequately fine-grained data necessary for forecasting the pandemic’s evolution. To remedy this gap, researchers from around the world have been collecting data about different aspects of COVID-19’s evolution and government responses to them so as to provide the foundation for informative models and tools that can be used to mitigate the current pandemic and possibly prevent the spread of future ones. Indeed, a number of research initiatives were launched in the early stages of the pandemic with this goal, including the PERISCOPE (Pan-European Response to the ImpactS of COVID-19 and future Pandemics and Epidemics) Project, funded by the European Commission. PERISCOPE aims to investigate the broad socio-economic and behavioral impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the goal of making Europe more resilient and prepared for future large-scale risks. The purpose of this paper, which is part of work carried on within the PERISCOPE project, is to provide a first analysis at the European level of the effect of policy actions on the spread of the virus. To do so, the relationship between a novel index, the Policy Intensity Index, and four epidemiological variables collected by the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention will be assessed. After a first exploratory correlational and causal analysis, a comprehensive Pan-European population model is proposed: based on Multilevel Vector Autoregression, the model aims at identifying effects that are common to all European countries while treating country-specific policies as covariates explaining the different evolution of the pandemic in 9 selected countries, tracked through four epidemiological monitoring indicators..

Medienart:	Preprint

Erscheinungsjahr:	2023
Erschienen:	2023

Enthalten in:	ResearchSquare.com - (2023) vom: 17. Okt. Zur Gesamtaufnahme - year:2023

Sprache:	Englisch

Beteiligte Personen:	Podrecca, Chiara [VerfasserIn] Parimbelli, Enea [VerfasserIn] Pala, Daniele [VerfasserIn] Cheng, Cindy [VerfasserIn] Messerschmidt, Luca [VerfasserIn] Büthe, Tim [VerfasserIn] Bellazzi, Riccardo [VerfasserIn]

Links:	Volltext [lizenzpflichtig] Volltext [kostenfrei]

Themen:	570 Biology

doi:	10.21203/rs.3.rs-2092483/v1

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PPN (Katalog-ID):	XRA037433083