Working Paper: NBER ID: w28434
Authors: Andrew Atkeson
Abstract: I present a behavioral epidemiological model of the evolution of the COVID epidemic in the United States and the United Kingdom over the past 12 months. The model includes the introduction of a new, more contagious variant in the UK in early fall and the US in mid December. The model is behavioral in that activity, and thus transmission, responds endogenously to the daily death rate. I show that with only seasonal variation in the transmission rate and pandemic fatigue modeled as a one-time reduction in the semi-elasticity of the transmission rate to the daily death rate late in the year, the model can reproduce the evolution of daily and cumulative COVID deaths in the both countries from Feb 15, 2020 to the present remarkably well. I find that most of the end-of-year surge in deaths in both the US and the UK was generated by pandemic fatigue and not the new variant of the virus. I then generate fore- casts for the evolution of the epidemic over the next two years with continuing seasonality, pandemic fatigue, and spread of the new variant.
Keywords: COVID-19; Behavioral Economics; Epidemiology; SEIR Model
JEL Codes: C0; I0
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| pandemic fatigue (E71) | daily deaths (J11) |
| new variant introduction (Y20) | daily deaths (J11) |
| pandemic fatigue + new variant introduction (F44) | daily deaths (J11) |
| pandemic fatigue (E71) | oscillatory dynamics in epidemic's progression (C69) |
| model without pandemic fatigue shock (E17) | increase in deaths (I12) |