Caulkins, J. P., Grass, D., Feichtinger, G., Hartl, R., Kort, P. M., Fürnkranz-Prskawetz, A., Seidl, A., & Wrzaczek, S. (2021). COVID-19 and Optimal Lockdown Strategies: The Effect of New and More Virulent Strains. In M. del C. Boado-Penas, J. Eisenberg, & S. Şahin (Eds.), Springer Actuarial (pp. 163–190). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78334-1_9
Most nations have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by locking
down parts of their economies starting in early 2020 to reduce the infectious spread.
The optimal timing of the beginning and end of the lockdown, together with its
intensity, is determined by the tradeoff between economic losses and improved health
outcomes. These choices can be modelledwithin the framework of an optimal control
model that recognises the nonlinear dynamics of epidemic spread and the increased
risks when infection rates surge beyond the healthcare system´s capacity. Past work
has shown that within such a framework very different strategies may be optimal ranging from short to long and even multiple lockdowns, and small changes in the
valuation on preventing a premature death may lead to quite different strategies
becoming optimal. There even exist parameter constellations for which two or more
very different strategies can be optimal. Here we revisit those crucial questions with
revised parameters reflecting the greater infectivity of variants such as the "UK
variant" of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and describe how the new variant may affect
levels of mortality and other outcomes.
