Working Paper: NBER ID: w15752
Authors: Byungkwang Yoo; Megumi Kasajima; Jay Bhattacharya
Abstract: In June 2009, the World Health Organization declared that novel influenza A (nH1N1) had reached pandemic status worldwide. The response to the spread of this virus by the public and by the public health community was immediate and widespread. Among the responses included voluntary avoidance of public spaces, closure of schools, the ubiquitous placement of hand sanitizer, and the use of face masks in public places. Existing forecasting models of the epidemic spread of nH1N1, used by public health officials to aid in making many decisions including vaccination policy, ignore avoidance responses in the formal modeling. In this paper, we build a forecasting model of the nH1N1 epidemic that explicitly accounts for avoidance behavior. We use data from the U.S. summer and the Australian winter nH1N1 epidemic of 2009 to estimate the parameters of our model and forecast the course of the epidemic in the U.S. in 2010. We find that accounting for avoidance responses results in a better fitting forecasting model. We also find that in models with avoidance, the marginal return in terms of saved lives and reduced infection rates of an early vaccination campaign are higher.
Keywords: H1N1; Influenza; Epidemiology; Public Health; Vaccination
JEL Codes: I10; I18
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Incorporation of avoidance responses (D91) | predictions regarding the H1N1 epidemic's path (F17) |
| Avoidance responses (D91) | attack rate of the H1N1 virus (I12) |
| Avoidance behavior (D91) | reduced infection rates from early vaccination campaigns (I14) |
| Models accounting for avoidance (C59) | better-fitting results (C52) |