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We estimate the causal effect of state-mandated business closures on economic and health outcomes in the context of the COVID-19 crisis in the US. We first show that business closures lead to a substantial drop in sales, earnings, and market values for affected firms. We then exploit sectoral variations in exposure to these restrictions across areas within the same state, and show that locking down 10% of the labor force is associated with a significant contraction in employment, but allows to reduce COVID-19 weekly infection and death rates by respectively 0.023 and 0.0015 percentage points. The findings translate into 24,000 saved lives for a cost of $115 billion. Finally, our empirical analysis suggests that the cost per life saved associated to business closures could have been significantly reduced if restrictions had targeted areas with intense workplace interactions

ABSTRACTThe virus neutralization test (VNT) is the reference for the assessment of the functional ability of neutralizing antibodies (NAb) to block SARS-CoV-2 entry into cells. New competitive immunoassays measuring antibodies preventing interaction between the spike protein and its cellular receptor are proposed as surrogate VNT (sVNT). We tested three commercial sVNT (a qualitative immunochromatographic test and two quantitative immunoassays named YHLO and TECO) together with a conventional anti-spike IgG assay (bioMérieux) in comparison with an in-house plaque reduction neutralization test (PRNT50) using the original 19A strain and different variants of concern (VOC), on a panel of 306 sera from naturally-infected or vaccinated patients. The qualitative test was rapidly discarded because of poor sensitivity and specificity. Areas under the curve of YHLO and TECO assays were, respectively, 85.83 and 84.07 (p-value >0.05) using a positivity threshold of 20 for PRNT50, and 95.63 and 90.35 (p-value =0.02) using a threshold of 80. However, the performances of YHLO and bioMérieux were very close for both thresholds, demonstrating the absence of added value of sVNT compared to a conventional assay for the evaluation of the presence of NAb in seropositive subjects. In addition, the PRNT50 assay showed a reduction of NAb titers towards different VOC in comparison to the 19A strain that could not be appreciated by the commercial tests. Despite the good correlation between the anti-spike antibody titer and the titer of NAb by PRNT50, our results highlight the difficulty to distinguish true NAb among the anti-RBD antibodies with commercial user-friendly immunoassays.

We show that the acceleration index, a novel indicator that measures acceleration and deceleration of viral spread (Baunez et al. 2020a,b), is essentially a test-controlled version of the reproduction number. As such it is a more accurate indicator to track the dynamics of an infectious disease outbreak in real time. We indicate a discrepancy between the acceleration index and the reproduction number, based on the infectivity and test rates and we provide a formal decomposition of this difference. When applied to French data for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, our decomposition shows that the reproduction number consistently underestimates the resurgence of the pandemic since the summer of 2020, compared to the acceleration index which accounts for the time-varying volume of tests. Because the acceleration index aggregates all the relevant information and captures in real time the sizeable time variation featured by viral circulation, it is a sufficient statistic to track the pandemic’s propagation.

The objective of this paper is to assess the mitigating role of remittances during the adverse COVID-19 employment shock on Nigeriai¯s food insecurity. Based on pre-COVID-19 and postCOVID-19 surveys, we use a difference-in-difference approach while controlling for the time and household fixed effects. Results indicate that remittances are mitigating the negative consequences of COVID-19 employment shocks, especially in the short run. We find that 100% of the deterioration in food insecurity, owing to the shock, is offset by the remittances received. While the adverse effects of the shock persist over time, the mitigation effect of remittances appears to be effective only at the early stages of the pandemic, however. Furthermore, the mitigation effect of remittances seems heterogeneous regarding the origin of remittances, residence area, and poverty status. The mitigation effect of remittances is higher for remittances from abroad than for Domestic ones. We also find a higher mitigating effect of remittances in the rural area and for non-poor households. Finally, our results shed light on the capital channel as a crucial mechanism explaining the mitigation effect of remittances. Notably, findings suggest that formal financial inclusion, capital ownership like livestock or rental earnings, amplifies the attenuating effect of remittances.

We develop a matching model that predicts the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on US unemployment, while accounting for the contrasted impacts across various job types. The model is calibrated on the subprime experience and is then used to identify the job-specific lockdown shocks, using observed worker flows by diploma. The model persistence-which is significantly larger than in the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model-is dampened by CARES act that facilitates the use of temporary separations. Counterfactual experiments show that time-varying risk, hiring cost externalities, and wage rigidity are needed to account for these crises.

COVID-19 outbreaks at nursing homes during the recent pandemic, which received ample media coverage, may have lasting negative impacts on individuals’ perceptions regarding ursing homes. We argue that this could have sizable and persistent implications for savings and long-term care policies. We first develop a theoretical model predicting that higher nurs- ing home aversion should induce higher savings and stronger support for policies subsidizing home care. We further document, based on a survey on Canadians in their 50s and 60s, that higher nursing home aversion is widespread: 72% of respondents are less inclined to enter a nursing home because of the pandemic. Consistent with our model, we find that the latter are much more likely to have higher intended savings for older age because of the pandemic. We also find that they are more likely to strongly support home care subsidies.

International audience; This paper presents the Multilingual COVID-19 Analysis Method (CMTA) for detecting and observing the spread of misinformation about this disease within texts. CMTA proposes a data science (DS) pipeline that applies machine learning models for processing, classifying (Dense-CNN) and analyzing (MBERT) multilingual (micro)-texts. DS pipeline data preparation tasks extract features from multilingual textual data and categorize it into specific information classes (i.e., 'false', 'partly false', 'misleading'). The CMTA pipeline has been experimented with multilingual micro-texts (tweets), showing misinformation spread across different languages. To assess the performance of CMTA and put it in perspective, we performed a comparative analysis of CMTA with eight monolingual models used for detecting misinformation. The comparison shows that CMTA has surpassed various monolingual models and suggests that it can be used as a general method for detecting misinformation in multilingual micro-texts. CMTA experimental results show misinformation trends about COVID-19 in different languages during the first pandemic months.

We investigate, for the first time, the empirical drivers of the COVID-19 cross-country mortality rates at a macroeconomic level. The intensity of the pandemic (number of infected people), the demographic structure (proportion of people age 65 or above) and the openness degree (number of tourists arrivals) seem to be significant predictors in addition to health infrastructures (number of hospital beds, physicians). We also find that the subprime crisis and the austerity policies conducted in certain countries, by reducing the public health expenditures in the last ten years and altering the adaptation capacity of the health system, have probably intensified the tragic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pollution seems to have only played a marginal role as well as control strategies (travel restrictions, testing policy). We do not find consistent effects against the COVID-19 virus due to past exposal to other types of epidemics like Malaria or Tuberculosis.

The recent emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 in China has raised the spectre of a novel, potentially catastrophic pandemic in both scientific and lay communities throughout the world. In this particular context, people have been accused of being excessively pessimistic regarding the future consequences of this emerging health threat. However, consistent with previous research in social psychology, a large survey conducted in Europe in the early stage of the COVID-19 epidemic shows that the majority of respondents was actually overly optimistic about the risk of infection. https://psyarxiv.com/364qj/