The Intergenerational Mortality Tradeoff of COVID-19 Lockdown Policies

In lower-income countries, the economic contractions that accompany lockdowns to containthe spread of COVID-19 can increase child mortality, counteracting the mortality reductions achieved by thelockdown. To formalize and quantify this effect, this paper builds a macro-susceptible-infected-recovered model thatfeatures 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. The findings show that in low-income countries, alockdown can potentially lead to 1.76 children's lives lost due to the economic contraction per COVID-19 fatalityaverted. The ratio stands at 0.59 and 0.06 in lower-middle and upper-middle income countries, respectively. As aresult, in some countries lockdowns can actually produce net increases in mortality. In contrast, the optimal lockdownthat maximizes the present value of aggregate social welfare is shorter and milder in poorer countries than in rich ones,and never produces a net mortality increase.