The Intergenerational Mortality Trade‐Off Of Covid‐19 Lockdown Policies

In lower‐income countries, the economic contractions that accompany lockdowns to contain COVID‐19 transmission can increase child mortality, counteracting the mortality reductions achieved by the lockdown. To formalize and quantify this effect, we build a macrosusceptible‐infected‐recovered model that features heterogeneous agents and a country‐group‐specific relationship between economic downturns and child mortality and calibrate it to data for 85 countries across all income levels. We find that in some low‐income countries, a lockdown can produce net increases in mortality. The optimal lockdown that maximizes the present value of aggregate social welfare is shorter and milder in poorer countries than in rich ones.