Economic cascades, tipping points, and the costs of a business-as-usual approach to COVID-19

Frontiers in Physics

Physics

David Goodwin¹  Joseph Russack²  Peter D. Roopnarine²  Maricela Abarca² 

[1] Department of Geosciences, Denison University, Granville, OH, United States;Institute for Biodiversity Science and Sustainability, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA, United States;

关键词: COVID-19;    tipping point;    counterfactual;    socio-economics;    economic cascades;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fphy.2023.1074704

 received in 2022-10-19, accepted in 2023-02-24,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Decisions to shutdown economic activities to control the spread of COVID-19 early in the pandemic remain controversial, with negative impacts including high rates of unemployment. Here we present a counterfactual scenario for the state of California in which the economy remained open and active during the pandemic’s first year. The exercise provides a baseline against which to compare actual levels of job losses. We developed an economic-epidemiological mathematical model to simulate outbreaks of COVID-19 in ten large Californian socio-economic areas. Results show that job losses are an unavoidable consequence of the pandemic, because even in an open economy, debilitating illness and death among workers drive economic downturns. Although job losses in the counterfactual scenario were predicted to be less than those actually experienced, the cost would have been the additional death or disablement of tens of thousands of workers. Furthermore, whereas an open economy would have favoured populous, services-oriented coastal areas in terms of employment, the opposite would have been true of smaller inland areas and those with relatively larger agricultural sectors. Thus, in addition to the greater cost in lives, the benefits of maintaining economic activity would have been unequally distributed, exacerbating other realized social inequities of the disease’s impact.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Roopnarine, Abarca, Goodwin and Russack.