IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/halshs-03153539.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Are epidemiological indicators misleading under uncertainty? An evaluation and a remedy from an economic perspective

Author

Listed:
  • Christelle Baunez

    (INT - Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Mickaël Degoulet

    (INT - Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Stéphane Luchini

    (AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Patrick A. Pintus

    (AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Miriam Teschl

    (AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Even though much has been learned about the new pathogen SARS-CoV-2 since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of uncertainty remains. In this paper we argue that what is important to know under uncertainty is whether harm accelerates and whether health policies achieve deceleration of harm. For this, we need to see cases in relation to diagnostic effort and not to look at indicators based on cases only, such as a number of widely used epidemiological indicators, including the reproduction number, do. To do so overlooks a crucial dimension, namely the fact that the best we can know about cases will depend on some welldefined strategy of diagnostic effort, such as testing in the case of COVID-19. We will present a newly developed indicator to observe harm, the acceleration index, which is essentially an elasticity of cases in relation to tests. We will discuss what efficiency of testing means and propose that the corresponding health policy goal should be to find ever fewer cases with an ever-greater diagnostic effort. Easy and low-threshold testing will also be a means to give back people's sovereignty to lead their life in an "open" as opposed to "locked-down" society.

Suggested Citation

  • Christelle Baunez & Mickaël Degoulet & Stéphane Luchini & Patrick A. Pintus & Miriam Teschl, 2021. "Are epidemiological indicators misleading under uncertainty? An evaluation and a remedy from an economic perspective," Working Papers halshs-03153539, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-03153539
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03153539
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03153539/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    uncertainty; acceleration index; anti-fragility; reproduction factor; test strategy; sovereignty;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-03153539. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.